jQuery and the dream of horses

I had a funny dream last night. It’s hard to describe how much it shook me up, mostly because of how much I remembered, and still remember. Like everyone else I know, I almost never remember much about my dreams, and what I can remember is usually nonsense.

Not this time. I remember specific details:

I was outside, maybe in Utah. It reminded me of an Edward Abbey story.

I was hiking. Maybe I was rock climbing, because I had some Carabiners on me.

Yeah, I was rockclimbing. There were horses around also. That explains the Abbey connection.

I was wearing a bluetooth device and speaking into it.

I also had a device, not unlike the iPhone, with a screen covering one whole side. The other side was metallic, but also glowed a few different colors.

I’m not sure what the colors meant.

I was using a natural speech interface, combined with returned visuals on my handheld device, to write scripting commands.

The “syntax” was comparable to jQuery. I used speech interface to traverse through views, manipulate elements, see the results, and then make functions to automate the process.

I would query for, say, an Xpath selector, and occasionally check the rendered visual, or ask for a list of components.

In the dream, I was working on a very specific AJAXy task, not unlike something I’ve been working on in real life. I was working with an XMLHttpRequest setup, with syntax something like:

onsubmit: function() {
      var data = this.element.serializeArray();
     
      if (this._submitButton) data.push({ name: this._submitButton.name,

value: this._submitButton.value });
     
      var options = $.extend({
        url : this.element.attr('action'),
        type : this.element.attr('method') || 'GET',
        data : data
      }, this.options);
     
      this._makeRequest(options);
     
      return false;
    }

Although it could have been complete nonsense, I remember all kinds of intriguing details about the programmatic interpreter I was using. For instance , it would alert me if it had trouble parsing my request into VSOO (verb-subject-object-object) and I’d modify my command.

Oddly enough, I’ve never been interested in natural language at all. When I was at Box.net, one of the founders insisted on using Dragon Naturally to navigate his OS and write e-mails. The insanity only lasted a few days before we hid the microphone and microwaved the Dragon CD. I didn’t mind the extra chatter, I also thought it didn’t really fit in an open office environment.

But outside…maybe that would be different. At the very least, it would be a dream come true.

This was posted 3 years ago. Notes.