:Programming Czar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni_rAamVP2s

It must be .Net that gave it the killer tracking power.

With Silverlight they could even bring this super powerful app to the web.

Got to love Hollywood Though I figure most people who program in a Microsoft language sound like this. I kid, I kid.

No Comments

I’m hear, sitting in the first session. Pretty good talk about looking at accessibility for people with disabilities. Lots of stuff we are doing wrong

I’m up next after this, added examples from the last talk. Freaking out as always but it’s only 45 minutes long so should be in like flint.

No Comments

Well it’s been blowing up on the web which is no big surprise. I’ve had more time to play with it and have a few more observations from myself and others on the web.

More after the jump
(more…)

No Comments

Google Chrome was released today. It’s nice to see the rumor finally become true. I’ve had about an hour of playing with it and this is what I can see.

Plus

1. Based on Webkit which has a lot of CSS3 features so that gives us a place to play with all those cool new functions. Granted they will only work in this browser it’s still overall cool.
2. Google Gears by default. I’ve recently come to love the idea of gears to do a lot of cool things with applications in the browser. It fills a different role then AIR which I also have love for but it will be nice to also be able to just tell someone to download chrome and go to an address then to have to have them install a plugin in a browser.
3. Being able to treat applications like applications. This is where it more directly attacks AIR which is interesting. We will see how well this goes because you have a lot of control with AIR and I’m not sure what all can be done with Chrome. Only time will tell with this one.
4. Task Menu. I haven’t had to kill anything yet (I have just for fun though) so not sure how well this will work but it will be great if I can kill that rogue tab that’s acting up as opposed to having it lock up and kill my whole browser.

Neutrals
Only one at moment but haven’t seen anything on extensions yet which I’ve been interested in with Firefox and would love to see what can be done with this.

Cons

1. Bookmarks - Just don’t like how they are done. Couldn’t find a way to organize and so not really sure what this will turn into. Hopefully this gets cleaned up in some way
2. New JS engine - This could end up being a positive but for now it’s a negative. For the apps I use it hasn’t been any faster then Firefox. If it does become significantly faster that would be great but we will see. I’m hoping it doesn’t have the memory issues Firefox has but I haven’t left it open with a ton of tabs yet. My concern is that it’s another engine we have to worry about when writing code. I’m just not looking forward to having to find the little differences in another engine. But this could turn into a huge positive if all this stuff pans out to be a non-issue.

Well I’ll keep playing with it for a few weeks and we where it goes. Right now it’s not a Firefox killer but we will see. What it will probably do is become my second browser for testing things when I need to be logged into 2 different accounts on the same site for testing. IE was currently filling that role but I’m fine dumping that.

No Comments

Added a new plugin to do syntax highlighting for code.

Here is a test for some php code.

$echo "test";
 
$theArray = json_decode($theData);

If you want to find out more about the plugin you can go to

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/

Or you can find more out about GeSHi (the php script that actually does the highlighting that powers this plugin) by going to

http://qbnz.com/highlighter/index.php

***UPDATE***
Of interest, don’t include the <? in the code or all your PHP code gets removed.

No Comments

Just putting together a list of sites that I have found with some free fonts. They are great to have around for when you want to come up with something different for a logo, navigation or header. Enjoy.

http://www.dafonts.com/

http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/tallys.html

http://www.formfett.net/?p=42

http://graphicleftovers.com/fonts/page/1/

No Comments

Well the talk went. The whole time in my head I’m telling myself to talk slower but it didn’t really work. Turned a 50 minute presentation into 30 minute one. And unfortunately not enough questions to fill more time. I have some things I will add to the presentation for when I give it in October at HighEdWeb 2008 that came about from questions. Actually showing off the graceful degradation concept will be the big thing. Other then being too fast I think the talk went okay. Hopefully it will get easier over time. It’s hard giving a talk though to such a diverse group of people (position wise.) I would guess it was 1/3rd developers and 2/3rd manager/pr types and it’s hard to really hit both because you don’t want to get to technical but at the same time you aren’t getting technical enough. HighEdWeb seems like it will have the more technical side of the coin which I’ll try to adjust the presentation more to next time around. And maybe I’ll get more laughs from some of the geek humor I threw in.

No Comments

Here are the slides for my presentation today. Hope you enjoyed it if you saw it.

Slides

No Comments

Well just made it through the first day of eduWEB 2008. Just putting the finishing touches on my slides for tomorrow. I’ll be talking about AJAX and how we used it on our athletics site. Will be interesting, being it’s my first time talking at a conference.
(more…)

1 Comment

TechCrunch has an interesting story up about Google here. It has profanity in it but it’s upside down so it must have the opposite effect.

˙looɔ ʎʇʇǝɹd ʇɐɥʇ ʇ,usı

What this is a perfect example of is that you can never trust the data given to you by the client, EVER! Unfortunately most people don’t know that this was even possible (including myself until I saw this.) Now while being able to put in upside down text may not seem like a huge issue this can allow things to get around filters that were setup (say for profanity) or possibly allow for injection type attacks.

So this is just something good to know is out there as a possibility, cause we all know “knowing is half the battle!”

No Comments