Every year we have what's called the NakedJen Film Festival, and Murphy-willing, this year will be no exception.

This is how it works. On Christmas Day you go to a lot of movies.

It doesn't matter where you are. It's called the NJFF because NakedJen invented and perfected it, and spred the good word like Johnny Appleseed with the apples. If you ever get a chance to do the NJFF with NakedJen, I say go for it. She's a wonderful person to go to the movies with. And she was my choice for Blogger of the Year in 2007. Hard to go wrong with that combo!

Anyway, given that it's December 23, it's now time to start considering which movies we will see at this year's FF in NYC.

In no special order...

1. Black Swan. Sounds sexy and intriguing and Natalie Portman is a fine actress.

2. True Grit. A Coen Brothers movie with Jeff Bridges. Say no more. Must-see. Every year there's one of these. Sometimes they are disappointing. Last year it was Sherlock Holmes. Totally boring. A few years back, Sweeney Todd. I'm going to say True Grit is the Big Hope for the blockbuster of NJFF 2010.

3. Tron. It's always good to have a schlock scifi movie as an option. I don't seriously think this will make the cut, but you never know.

4. King's Speech. This has the makings of a truly boring movie. I used to joke, when imitating British speech (I'm good with accents) that I'm speaking with marbles in my mouth -- and in this movie (I hear) they actually do speak with marbles in their mouth.

5. Somewhere. Okay Sophia Coppola is an automatic. Lost In Translation was a masterpiece. If Somewhere is 1/150th as good it's a must-see. Only problem is it's playing in just one theater in Manhattan, and it's waaaaaay uptown.

6. Rabbit Hole. Nicole Kidman. I could watch her in a shitty movie, and have many times. This one doesn't sound like much fun, but I'm in. xoxox

Those are the movies I'm thinking about for this year!

 12/23/2010; 4:02:32 PM.   .

JSONP turns a bit of JSON into a bit of JavaScript.

I want a node.js module that does that. A web app that takes two params, the URL of a JSON file and the name of a callback. Example:

http://hello.com/world?url=http://oy.org/random.json&callback=myLocalSubroutine

What it would return is this:

myLocalSubroutine (["Oregon", "Pizza", "Wheat"])

Then Step 2 would simplify it to:

http://oy.org/random.json?callback=myLocalSubroutine

This, as I understand it, is what works best for JavaScript programmers working in the browser.

I wanted to provide this functionality in Frontier, but my guys are polling this thing ever 5 seconds (which is BS, they shouldn't do that, but WTF) and that would cost me $90 per month and it wouldn't run very well as soon as their stuff got a few hundred users, which is what we hope happens. A lose-lose-lose.

What we need is a bare-bones machine language thing that does this. Node.js would be ideal.

Caveat: Of course, I'm sure something like this already exists!

 12/23/2010; 10:22:03 AM.   .

Tis the season and ho ho ho!

The JSONification of the River was a big hit, and now the river renderings are starting to get real beautiful. Here's the latest one.

http://nicolasgallagher.com/rivers/wikileaks/

Ain't she pretty!

That's cool, I thought -- so what's next? Well I'm getting ready to do a really simple blogging tool, like the one we did in 2002, but even simpler. And I'm going to need to display the blog posts, so why not do it in a really modern way.

1. JSONify the RSS from the blog.

2. Render it in the browser in JavaScript.

Yes! That's certainly worth a try.

So this is what I did.

1. I did a JSONified version of the feed for Scripting News. You'll see that it bears a strong resemblance to the XML version, from which it is derived.

2. I did a JavaScript version that calls back to a local script which you must define called onGetRss. It renders the RSS however you feel it should be rendered. Have a look at the home page of scripting.com for some ideas. But don't stop there. Make it realllly beautiful.

It's worth a note to say that now RSS has escaped the confines of XML. It's become a more general language for describing stuff that updates.

 12/23/2010; 9:30:22 AM.   .