I flew down to San Diego for the Emerging Technology Conference today. I’m here thru Thursday which is the longest I’ve been gone from home since TechEd last year. And I’m only home eight days before heading off to SPARK and MIX for an even longer trip. Well, the SPARK/MIX trip is just one day longer than ETech. But a day can seem like an eternity to my three year old son who was predicting “Daddy come home in one minute” as I was pulling out of the driveway.

I skipped the pre-confernece tutorials, though several looked interesting. I’m really looking forward to hearing Bruce Sterling speak tonight.

And for those keeping track of my travel shenanigans with Alaska Airlines, no problems with the flight today. Apparently they only screw up when I’m in a hurry. And even better news is that I’ve re-earned my MVP status. I used to fly with them all the time, but then with the new role and new baby I just didn’t fly much last year. But they had some “quick earning” program that let me re-earn my status. They even gave me MVP status for the flight today, so I got to sit in first class. Crowded flight too, so it was nice. Of course, in what has become true Alaska Air style, I had to wait on hold and deal with a subordanant flunky for twenty minutes before I could talk to a supervisor who could get me registered into the quick MVP program, but it turned out OK so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

In preperation for SPARK later this month, we (i.e. the Architecture Strategy Team) has set up a SPARK Blog. So far it’s mostly links to a fewpeopletalking about SPARK, but it’s also appears to be an opportunity to use the work “SPARK” whenever possible, such as “SPARKs Fly“.

I’m just waiting for someone to blog about SPARKitecture. 😄

Last week, I ordered a couple of my shirts from Zazzle and they arrived over the weekend. I got one each black and white and I wore the black one to work today. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the shirts and the printing job.

Of course the coolest part was being asked where I got the shirt and being able to reply “I made it”.

BTW, I met a couple of folks from Zazzle at Mashup Camp. They told me about a couple things working that I’m not sure are public yet which is why I left them out of my daily roundups. They told me the 304 shirts was actually a kinda slow day.

Last week at Mashup Camp, Yoz showed me Ning. I had heard about Ning, Ning is a social software enabler…I guess enabler is the best word…with a fascinating approach to building software. Well, getting started building software at any rate. While they provide other more basic functions like hosting, Ning provides the ability to clone almost all of the apps running on their site (over 6500 as I write this). When you clone an app, Ning makes a copy of all the files from that app on your own domain (typically appname.ning.com, though you can pay to have your own domain name). They also provide a set of basic starter apps that you can clone to get started.

I decided to try it myself. Behold Partisan Hacks.

Partisan Hacks is a clone of Ning’s Do I Rock? starter app, which is itself basically a copy of Hot or Not. The difference is that you rate how big a partisan hack the individuals are. As I wrote for the About page, I was basically inspired by Jon Stewart’s now famous appearance on the now cancelled CNN Crossfire. Of course, I’ve been throwing the term around myself a bit lately, hence the reason why the topic was top of mind for me.

From a technical perspective, I added two features to the basic Do I Rock template code. First, I modified the detail page to include a link to Wikipedia as well as to pull in search results from MSN. Second, I added an RSS feed to the most partisan, least partisan and newest additions to the site. I’d never used PHP before, so it took me a bit longer that I would have expected to make the changes, but still it only took me a couple hours to make those as well as other minor cosmetic changes to the site.

While hacking PHP was somewhat tedious (back to my ASP days of the mid 90′s), one area that is both compelling and productive is the Ning Content Store. It’s the shared database on the back end of any Ning application. I didn’t really make any changes to my content, but it appears to dead simple to add new info to content objects. I was thinking about how I would build this app w/ ASP.NET, and realized that having to build a custom database would offset most of the productivity I would gain from using ASP.NET instead of PHP. According to Ning’s Roadmap, they’ll be bringing Ruby and Rails support online soon. I’ll have to see how much better an experience that is than their current PHP based approach.

I don’t know how I missed this before, but Tim Bray blogged about not inventing XML languages over a month ago. This comment is right on the money: “The value of a markup language is proportional approximately to the square of the number of different software implementations that can process it.” Conceptually, I agree with him – my primary argument against XSPF is that it has the same basic semantics as RSS, but RSS is much more widely used. But his list of the “big five” markup lanugages seems more like the “wannabe five”. How many different siftware implementations process any of the things on his list?

I’m not arguing the technical quality of these lanugages – frankly I’m not that familiar with any of them but Atom. But if you’re arguing the network effect, none of these formats Tim lists qualify. I’m sure he wants them to be popular, but wishing doesn’t make it so.