Die Vereinigten Staaten sind ja nicht ganz unwichtig für den Rest der Welt – und trotzdem verstehen wir Europäer die Amerikaner nicht immer und nicht wirklich. Zum Glück gibt es einen sehr lesenswerten Blog names “USA Erklärt” in welchem Scot W. Stevenson auf unterhaltsame Weise über Amerika aufklärt. Das klingt dann ungefähr so:

Auf die Frage an die beste Freundin, wie einem ein Kleid steht, wird eine Deutsche vielleicht das Gesicht verziehen und “Du, nicht wirklich” sagen oder “Ich weiß nicht, ob es dir so gut steht”, eine Amerikanerin aber eher etwas wie “Würde blau nicht besser zu deinen Augen passen?”. Für eine Amerikanerin heißt das, du siehst aus wie eine magersüchtige Vogelscheuche mit einem Heroin-Problem, während eine Deutsche das Gefühl hat, man redet aneinander vorbei. Augen? Was faselt die von meinen Augen? Ich will wissen, ob mein Arsch fett aussieht!

Sehr lesenswert das ganze, und da es schon einige Einträge gibt fangt man am Besten mit der Top-5-Liste an.

(Bild von flickr)

A great conference is over! The Ajax Experience took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2008 in Boston and was packed with great talks – sometimes four of them in parallel! So it was very hard to decide between learning about security (beyond XSS and SQL injection!), the newest Ajax frameworks (i.e. Cappuccino – check out 280Slides, it’s worth it!) or performance improvements (Steve Souders had great stuff again!).

So it’s really hard to give a recap of what happened – so much things have been going on. One item I take for me as programmer is about how to improve my designs – it’s all about CRAP.

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A lot of different effects can be achieved by just focusing on these four items and that’s one of the reasons why this Website is now a bit lighter than it was before the conference

Another interesting session has been “Top 10 browser issues” with quirksmode.org creator ppk. On stage with him the persons behind the four major JavaScript frameworks Prototype (Andrew Dupont), Dojo, YUI and jQuery (John Resig).
This session was a pretty good overview about where the projects will be heading and what you can expect from them in the future – because in the end it depends on a single person…

Regarding performance improvements I want to highlight SmushIT.com, a new Web application (and a Firefox plugin) that automatically optimizes images for Web sites. Great, simple and just working. It’s good to see new tools coming up that simplify tasks which had to be performed manually a year ago – another great sample is Hammerhead. Also note that Yahoo added 20 additional rules to their existing 14 “golden” performance rules.

Finally I wanna restate the sentence from the beginning of this post – “A great conference is over!“. It gave a great overview about what is happening in the Web 2.0 world and fostered networking with other developers outside of the own company!

The jQuery Conference is going to take place on September 28, 2008, in Boston. Finally the Conference Agenda was posted – containing a beginner and an advanced track, great speakers and interesting topics. To be able to choose tracks at the event just import this iCal agenda file and synchronize it to your mobile device. I’ll update the file as updates are released.

End of September is going to be great – first of all there will be the Ajax Experience 2008 in Boston; on the day before the jQuery Camp is held, hopefully at the same place.
Both events feature a lot of interesting speakers, a lot of sessions and information useful for everyone working with Web technologies in the Web 2.0 world. Not easy to decide which of the up to four tracks to visit… cloning would be a great technology and very useful these days… So Tracie provided an iCal file of the conference agenda which can easily be imported into iCal or any other application which can read ics files. Not that it helps deciding which session to visit, but at least I know what’s going on and up to decide!

Enjoy!

In den USA werden Flugreisende wie Vieh behandelt. Jetzt soll ein neuartiger Sicherheitscheck die Stimmung verbessern – damit nervöse Attentäter leichter auffallen.

Na hoffentlich wird das bald flächendeckend eingeführt – weil von allen Security-Checks sind die in den USA die absolut nervigsten.

Der ganze Artikel auf Spiegel Online.