In Seattle for Week

I’m in Seattle for the week at an ISB proteomics training course.

I’m having a hard enough time just keeping up to date reading my blogroll so I won’t be posting much this week. What I do write about the course will reside over at myProteome.

Staying at the Watertown Hotel near Lake Union. It’s right smack near UW which is pretty cool. I’ve already been on a few runs through the campus and down along the lake. The hotel itself is pretty modern, not like the Marriott in Cambridge, MA I was staying in a few weeks back.

That’s it for now.

The platypus of the Internet

I agree with Justin’s post regarding how easy (or pain-free) it is to do XUL development. I toyed around with it a month or so back and agree that it’s amazingly simple to develop something that presents well and for all intents and purposes behaves like a normal application. Kudo’s again to the Mozilla foundation.

For an organization with proven javascript abilities, its no wonder that Google was able to develop their Firefox toolbar efficiently with only a small team.

For a small team that had never worked together, or used XUL, to create a product quickly that works across languages and platforms from a single ~250K download – that’s good stuff, if you ask me.

Cool Sites: Swik and Redfin

The folks at SourceLabs have released Swik, the free and open database of Open Source projects that anyone can edit. It’s sort of a SourceForge/Freshmeat meets Delicious meets [enter your search engine here]. It has a wiki aspect for allow users to modify content which is an interesting perspective. I guess the mass awareness of “open-source” dictates a need for sites like Swik, CodeZoo, Freshmeat, etc.

The second, and arguably far cooler, site is Redfin. Redfin is Seattle, Bellevue and The Greater Eastside’s only aerial residential real estate search engine. It presents a pretty slick interface (ala Google Maps) and overlays MLS real estate information. Pretty slick and the concept is something I’ve been thinking about as of late.

Example search, All houses in Medina > $1 million.