Culturally Shallow

I finally made it here to SXSW Interactive 2009! I wanted to do a quick post before running back for the SXSW Opening Remarks by Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com I was just in Secrets of Javascript Library talk , where John Resig is one of the panelists. John Resig, you know, the creator of jQuery. There were very good overview information there for YUI3, ARIA and meta language framework presented respectively by Nate Koechley, Becky Gibson and Andrew Dupont respectively, but I personally found John Resig’s talk most inspiring. One of the things John presented was the the solution he had to ensure that the code that they check in would be backwards compatible with all the list of browsers jQuery support. With 6 test suites for each browsers, there would be 66 tests that they had to run for each commit statement that the team makes, making it not feasible to do so all the time. Resign used what he called Distributed Manual Testing to test backward compatibility. The site would enlist volunteer testers to do testing on all browsers, and would in turn reward the top testers with t-shirts, mugs and so forth.

I find this solution extremely brilliant. I am a Yelp elite member and I would submit my reviews for Yelp, I admit, for nothing other than the “Elite” badge on my profile page and the occasional get-togethers they have for the elite squad. That and I want to give shout out’s to the mom and pop shops in my neighborhood. I am sure that the front end community would love Resig’s idea of letting them help out. It’s a mix of wikipedia/open source testing/Yelp paradigm all in one.

The site is TestSwarm.com and will be available at the end of the month.

All packed for SXSW with my Leica, my Kindle and my favorite scarf du jour!

SXSW Interactive 2009 conference starts tomorrow, and I’m ready to go. Don’t forget to check out A Conversation with Col Needham on Monday, March 16th at 3:30pm and Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable on Tuesday, March 17th at 10am. Meanwhile, you can catch me tomorrow at How to Rawk SXSW at 3:30pm and then later at The Tech Set Meet the Rat Pack at The Belmont Lounge. Feel free to come up and say hi. I’d love to meet you. See you there!

 

I take pictures of everything everywhere I go.  I take pictures of pups on the streets when I stop at a stoplight.  I take pictures of gatherings of me and my friends and of interesting sights I notice.  I am notorious for asking all my friends to hold their forks and spoons (or chopsticks and fingers) before attacking our food so I can take pictures of what we are about to indulge in.  Evidence follow: this is when we went to The Foundry to try out  for which the chef Eric Greenspan won one of the categories in the Grilled Cheese Invitational Challenge.  No one could touch it it until Winnie had finished taking her pictures:



 
I don’t always upload all my pictures to my flickr account, although I should, because I take too damn many of them.  If you are like me and you have way more pictures to upload than you have time, this little gadget that I just heard about from David Pogue may help you: The Eye-Fi Explore SD memory card.  It works just like any SD memory card but it has special software built in on it.  Every time you enter your home wifi network, it will automatically upload the content to your home network, and then on to flickr or other photo sharing sites.  How neat is that!  In addition, it automatically geotags all your photos for you with a latitude and longitude from where you take them.   How does it do that?  Well, SkyHook has a massive database of MAC addresses of all the WiFi hotspots associated with physical addresses.  The SkyHook software on the Eye-Fi card can determine where you are standing when you take the pictures by sensing the distance from these overlapping signals.  It is not real GPS, it just mimics the functionality of it.  For the heavily populated area, this will do the trick.  The Eye-Fi Explore SD card retails for $129 and has 2GB in memory, with other models with lesser functions and thus lesser prices offered as well. 

Has anyone tried this out?  I’m very intrigued and maybe try this out very soon.