There was a meeting today but I wasn’t able to get to my office before meeting starts, and so I decided to connect to my remote computer from home to attend the meeting. Soon I realized that I chained four computers by “remote desktop”-ing from one to another. Here are the details:

Notation:

• Computer A - Laptop at Home
• Computer B - Desktop at Home
• Computer C - Desktop at Office
• Computer D - Laptop at Office

Facts:

• I didn’t bring D home last night
• My home phone is far away from B
• VPN is installed on B, but NOT on C

Limitations:

• To connect to C remotely, I must have VPN client installed
• To connect to D using remote desktop, I must be from intranet
• The meeting requires D and any phone

Solution:

1. 1. I dialed VPN from B connect to C. But I realize that I cannot reach the phone from B;
2. 2. So I turned on A positioned close to the phone, and connect to B with Remote Desktop. Next I found I actually need to connect to the meeting server from D;
3. 3. From A, in the Remote Desktop window connected to B, I tried to open another Remote Desktop connection to D. But D only accepts request from intranet and thus B’s request is rejected;
4. 4. From A, in the Window showing B, I connected to C using Remote Desktop;
5. 5. From the Remote Desktop Window just opened on C, connect to D using the third Remote Desktop.
6. 6. To make it worse, we actually used net meeting for screen sharing and so I was connected to another Desktop from D.

Reflections of objects usually give the interface a crisp and clear look and feel. It’s no magic to generate such effects in Flash or WPF/e as they’ve got dedicated graphic components. In the Ajax/DHtml world, creating graphics suffers from problems such as lack of tools, platform incompatibilities and bad performances.

Some of the standards available for use are canvas, svg, and vml. But none of the three is supported by all major browsers.

This morning, from Ajaxian.com, I saw link to a post in which the author mentioned his reflection generating script. It’s implemented based on canvas, which isn’t supported by IE at all but sufficiently covers Firefox and Safari. Here is the link to the demo page.

Then I’ve got some idea regarding implementing the cool effect with pure Javascript and DOM, which at first I thought should be straightforward. So I started immediately. But soon I figured out that in order to create the reflection, I must be able to “flip” the original picture, which is immediately out of the capability of JavaScript and standard html! “Hmmm, so that’s why it wasn’t done before.”. However, right before I was going to give up, I found the solution. Which leads to the following.

Reflection Implemented!

Works on IE7.0 and Firefox 2.0. Didn’t test on other browsers. You may click here to see it in action or click the image to open the screenshot, if it is not working on your browser or is too slow to open.

Well…the effect is implemented, but by no means a feasibly one due to increased rendering overhead. But that’s the best I can do.
Because for each element needs reflection casted, there will be the “height of the element” number of clones of the exact same elements created to vamp the shadow.

The demo page can be found here. It may take a few seconds to load, although the file itself is fairly small.

Current features

• Reflection of images;
• Reflection of div elements, partially supports nested images and text;

So the reflection of text is an extension of the original idea.

(I will explain the algorithm later)

It’s implemented for proof-of-concept purpose. So the code is really badly organized and contains no documentation. I didn’t even bother to edit it in an IDE. Glad it got up and running as intended quite smoothly with little debugging. :)

Workshop 2 - Social Computing, Best Practices

By computing, I thought they were to introduce some “algorithms” for computing/collecting users’ online behaviours. However, it turned out to be a general discussion about current status of the web. Maybe I am too much a “practicalist”.

One thing I found I can brag about is that I could finally get ideas on most of the issues being discussed…even though they’re mostly well-known news, the who acquried who with billions stories. Because of that, I didn’t learn a lot new from it, except that YouTube’s copyright headache, (now forwarded to Google), might not be as fatal as I thought. Instead of suing online video sharing services, the media corps. tend to take the advantage to market themselves via these platforms.

After the point I heard this, there was nothing notably important.

Lunch Buffet

There is lunch buffet every day. Some people went there around noon just to get a free lunch. But I don’t like it at all.

Whatelse

There is actually a lot more interesting workshops. There was an all-day long hands-on AJAX tutorial, covered both the basics and Dojo toolkit. However, most workshops were about IBM products/technology/concepts. They had some really nice one-day hands-on tutorials on most IBM software products. The only problems is that when I tried to register, they were full! Hmmm….next time, if ever, I’ll be an early bird.

Modern corporations, like Google, are well known for their rich online applications or systems. Online Word, Online Spreadsheet, Online Sliders and Calendar etc., provide users better Internet surfing UX. There is no doubt that these applications are getting more complex than their ancestors, and people found that their behaviours are getting closer and closer to Desktop/Windows applications.

During recent years, a huge amount of work has been carried out my thousands of people, directly or indirectly, influenced the design pattern of internet applications. (You see they are now more like applications, rather than web pages.) These include, but not limited to, fully discovered power of Javascript, more organized W3C standards and their wide acceptance by worldwide Internet Developers, robust and standard compliant Web Browsers, as well as permeation of powerful PCs and Broadband Internet connections in most households. With all of these, and probably more, developers and users are ready to enter the new era of Internet, the so called Web 2.0.

A web application differs from a desktop application in that:

• First of all, their platforms are different; while desktop applications reside on operating systems, web applications are handled in a web browser, which in nature, is designed for retrieving informations from remote machines. This feature can be utilized in such a way that informations are stored in central servers, reducing the duplication of having each user to store the data on his/her own machine and sychronize it on regular basis.

• Secondly, web applications tend to be much more light-weighted. Generally, a web application is loaded each time a user requests the url in web browser. Therefore, upgrade and deployment of web applications are only need to be carried on on server side, which prunes the need for users to learn and trouble-shooting the installation of the application.

Just to name a few. So as web applications having so many differences with traditional desktop application, both in run-time and development process, is there going to be a new industry “Webware Industry” emerging in the next few years, or will web application development, eventually be merged into “Software Industry”, which in the past, doesn’t treat “web programming” as a software development practice.

For now, I would expect the IT industry, as a whole, will keep growing for at least 5 - 10 years, as there are so many works ahead of us, and web applications are still in their infancy period. With more functions specified in Javascript, more control over and features of DOM and CSS, more seriously designed web browses facilitating Web Applications, not to mention tons of frameworks that are being built by robust web2.0 companies, we could imagine one day, the only neccessary desktop application on our machine, is a web browser.

:)