On my way down to Illinois today, I listened to a podcast giving an overview of American history before 1870.  In it, Dr. Reilly talks about the industrial revolution.  I was enthralled as I contemplated the changes that the revolution brought about and the similarities to the changes taking place in web development.

A week ago, Dr. Frens spoke about continuations in Ruby at the Michigan Ruby Users Group. It was very interesting as it brought back my college days when I learned Scheme and functional programming concepts. I always enjoyed functional programming because it presents such a different way of thinking through problems.

It’s really great that video is becoming more prevalent on the web. We can now ditch our TVs and watch video online. We can watch presentations given at conferences that we missed or couldn’t attend.

One thing that made me uneasy about Rails’ ActiveRecord was how it handles associations. For instance, say I have a table of products in the database and another table listing comments about the products. So, for each product we have many comments.

I was viewing the source of the Facebook iPhone webapp to see how they did their fancy transitions between pages, when I found some very strange HTML:

I just updated my food blog by encoding all of the restaurants’ contact information in microformats. It’s basically a way to encode vCard/vCal data using HTML. It’s part of the latest movement to bring semantics (meaningful data that can be interpreted by computer programs) to web content. For instance, with this technology you could easily write a program to find all the phone numbers and addresses listed on the internet and generate a worldwide phone book. Or you could track who has lived in a given house over the past X years. Or you could generate statistics on how many CEOs live next to golf courses. Or you could figure out, according to published calendars, when most people will be away from home and thus not watching the latest sitcom. And that’s just the beginning.