Friday, September 22, 2006
Labels:
Funny
That's about all I wanted to say. Rory Blyth is an totally funny.
I've enjoyed his blog for about a while now and his excellent development info for Windows Mobile devices, but his podcast is totally freaking hilarious! Check it out here: http://thesmartestman.com/default.aspx.
The first post is completely off the wall funny! I had a hard time not busting up at work. Good luck finding a job, by the way. If only we had a helipad... I'm sure you would've been welcomed here..
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Labels:
Idea
,
Rant
I would really like an online phone book that didn't suck. It is sometimes impossible to find local companies online. Why is that? I would really like to be able to use the local phone book company's website, since the books themselves are very useful. But their site really sucks. Have you seen http://www.dexonline.com/? It's horrible to browse for businesses.
The only good thing about it is that I can store a list of places I frequently look for in a personal online address book.
For instance, I'm looking for a local bookkeeper. I can find the section online, but the site doesn't provide anything but the business name and contact information (usually). I can't see their advertisements or any features that each company offers over the other. And, there aren't any links to the business's websites either. That's lame!
What is really annoying too is that the site shows the "featured results" that are probably the people who spent the money to advertise in the book, but there still isn't anything provided that would help people decide them over anyone else. I bet that is even more annoying to the businesses who paid a LOT of money to do advertisements in the book and aren't given anything on the web for it.
Eventually, the local phone book companies are going to go out of business I think. They just aren't going to have enough business to make it cost effective or worthwhile for even the phone company.
And, it's sad just how easy it would be to create a website that would mimic how the pages of the book look and behave. Then you'd have an extremely useful web application that people would actually use. It would only take me a few hours to create the UI. Maybe the phone book companies should take notes!? Or, at least give me a call for some consulting work.. 
I've been doing a lot JavaScript lately for my new job. We're creating a dashboard for our web-site that is totally cool! One of several things that I have licensed to my new employer is my JavaScript-based XML parser. We're using this on the user-agent to load the widgets without having to talk to our server. Eventually, we will even allow using other companies widgets or gadgets or whatever they are called at the time.
I think that'd be a great feature for one of the big boys (i.e.: Google, MSN, Yahoo, PageFlakes, etc.) to support the others' widgets as well.
But, in the real world there is a problem with that though. Just like when an operating system supports applications from another, there comes a time when the developers wonder why they should create anything for OS A when all of OS B's applications will work on A.. (Just refer to OS/2 for more details..)
Anyway.. I put a basic page up recently for my parser at http://www.wasatchwizard.com/dev/JavaScript/XmlParser/Default.aspx.
I'll add some examples and basically a bunch of test-cases for it soon.
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