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My opinion on this discussion is that the HTML5 committee has only one question to ask themselves:

“Can someone implement a HTML5 compliant service/client without having to pay royalties to any entity for using one of HTML5’s elements?”

If answer is “Yes”, let the committee go ahead. If answer is “No”, committee has to go back to the drawing board. So there are two options: either HTML5 opts for Theora (and Vorbis when they are at it), or the involved technologies become royalty-free and grant the license even to open source projects.

My guess is that if HTML5 will go H.264 without requiring the MPEG LA to provide such a licensing model, we will see derivatives of HTML5 popping up along with a “HTML5 as it was meant to be” badge, just like the “best viewed with” badges back in the 90s.

Oh man, this were amazing 2 days here at Skytec. After the the Uxebu and Sitepen taught the ins and outs of Dojo in a very successful workshop on Friday, we went on for the third dojo.beer() on Saturday.

While technically the workshop wasn’t part of dojo.beer() it felt like one event to me. Maybe we should think about always including a workshop/tutorial-day as part of dojo.beer(), i.e. one tutorial-like day and then an unconference-like setting on the second day. Hey, I can drink beer on two days in a row!

Pete Higgins showed his awesome skills at the end of the first day, when he did an improvised version of his patterns talk. While the crowd learned some solid basics just before, they were introduced to what can be done with Dojo if you dive in further. I guess most of them went home both satisfied with what they just had learned and the strong urge to do more.

On the second day, which was the actual dojo.beer(3) unconference, Dylan Schiemann gave an intro to the Dojo Project, the Foundation and how to contribute. Sam Foster showed us a little unit testing with Rhino (I wonder when I can have SquirrelFish or TraceMonkey as standalone development environments. The building blocks are there, I guess). Wolfram Kriesing showed EventList, a pretty crazy google-calendar-yahoo-pipes-google-docs-mashup-turned-widget. That is thinking outside the box (model). Tobias Klipstein did a short intro to Dojango, a reusable app for my favorite environment: Django. I have to say I love this combination. I worked on a Django-Dojo-Webapp for the last year and it is an amazing experience. The work on Dojango will get you started in no time and it will give you some more helpers to get you Dojo-based site done more quickly. It’s in early stages but continually improving.

Nikolai Onken presented the documentation of Dojo and how to contribute. The Docs are pretty good, but it’s pretty hard to find your way around when you are new to Dojo. The docs will likely be the first place, where I put my newly signed CLA to good use. In between the sessions we shared some stories where we put Dojo to good use. It’s pretty exiting to see so many Dojo-based sites even without realizing it is Dojo behind the scenes. Luckily there is an extension for Firefox which tells you just that ;-)

Finally there was Pete again, who shamelessly plugd a mini app. Looks like dojo.conflict(), aka the $, is some dangerous stuff ;-)

(If you haven’t seen Pete giving a talk, you should drop everything on the next possible occasion. Somehow he reminded me of Hammy, the hyperactive squirrel from “Over the Hedge”. I guess, he could rewrite all of dojox within a day if you supply him with enough additional caffeine ;-) )

Thanks to everyone who helped making this happen at Skytec, esp. Wolfgang, Roberto, Florian and Manuela. I’d guess this was just the start for many more community events at Skytec AG. Besides Dojo, Django is on my radar as well.

OK, the title is slightly exaggerated, but the community events are expanding:

Wolfram of Uxebu has announced two dojo.beer events, one in Amsterdam, one in Munich.

Also in Munich, you can still join an intensive one-day workshop the day before dojo.beer! We will welcome the whole Uxebu gang, as well as, Dylan Schiemann of SitePen and Pete Higgins.

Both Munich events take place at Skytec AG, which is my employer. Many thanks to everyone, who helped this effort. When it comes to me, we could have many more community events here in the future.

Look at the many projects from NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post and others that pop up in information visualization blogs and feeds of our favorite web framework Django. Speaking of which, Django itself originated in the news world at Lawrence Journal. Isn’t it great? Instead of dying the long and painful death that has been predicted years ago (or at least that’s how it felt to me), newspapers start to kick butt.

We see wonderful and useful web apps and APIs, so you can create your own web app with their data! It’s also a wonderful testimonial for web frameworks like Django and Rails. NY Times shows that it is definitely AND and not OR: they are mainly a Rails shop but used Django for one project the involves advanced GIS (Geo-Information System) logic that is better supported in Django than in Rails.

So if I didn’t have the great job I have, I would totally ditch Google, Yahoo and whoever and try to land a gig at a large newspaper. That however keeps me wondering where our German newspapers stand when it comes to innovation? Will have to investigate…

After I abandoned my old blogging space a few months ago, I spent some time looking for a decent blog service. I really thought Pownce might be an option but they bought out and were eventually turned off.

Tumblr seems to be the closest thing to what Pownce was. Maybe even better. We will see. I tried the old man in town, blogger.com but while writing the second(!) post, I realized, Blogger is nothing for me. It failed at pasting, for whatever reason…

Hopefully I’ll stay longer here ;-)