Programming
HTML 5
Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.
A List Apart turns 10!
Congrats to the folks at A List Apart on their 10 year anniversary. It's one of the best web design knowledge resources around.
"When Google was little more than a napkin sketch and the first dot-com boom was not even a blip, we started a magazine for people who make websites. Celebrate A List Apart's first decade. Join Zeldman for a look back at the way we were—and why we were that way. Find out what we've done and who did it with us, peek into our process, and get a clue about what's next."
The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time
Some of the comments on the Slashdot post are hilarious. Haven't laughed out loud like that while reading in a long time.
The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time (Slashdot article that provides the link to the article listing the error messages).
81.5 percent spam?!
According to an article on Ars Technica,
Spam accounted for 81.5 percent of all the e-mails sent in June, according to MessageLabs. In the US, Illinois was the most-spammed state, with 92.1 percent of all e-mails considered spam.
That’s a crazy amounts of spam. Catch the full article here.
Most lucrative college major? Computer Engineering
According to an article on Yahoo! Canada Personal Finance:
The most lucrative college major today: computer engineering
It's interesting that the term Computer Engineering means different things to different people. Some people think it's some kind of new area of study whereas others simply dismiss it as a fancy term for Computer Science graduates.
Having studied Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto (arguably the best place to study the subject in Canada), I know Computer Engineering to be a mixture of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Computer Engineers not only know how to design and develop software but also the machines used by the software.
If you're looking for a big paycheque straight out of school, think about an engineering degree. The four highest paid majors for people with less than five years experience were all engineering-based, with computer engineering leading the way.
Check out the full article here
On loving your work
In reflecting on how much David Heinemeier Hansson still loves Ruby on Rails, he states:
In light of this, I strongly recommend that you find a vocation in your life where you just really enjoy the act itself. Not just the results, not just the external incentives. The actual work. There's not enough time to spend it doing anything else.
By the way, for those not familiar with David Heinemeier Hansson, he's the guy who invented Ruby on Rails.
Via Loud Thinking
Two book reviews
It’s not every day that two books currently in my possession are reviewed one after another on the same site. Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street recently published a short review of The Art and Science of CSS and Simply Javascript, both published by Sitepoint. I purchased a PDF version of the former and have a hardcover of the latter and they’re beautiful books to look at. Anyway, check out the take-away from each review below:
With that in mind, reading The Art & Science of CSS will teach you how to use CSS to accomplish a number of useful design tasks, so I think it's worth its price unless you already know most of what there is to know about CSS.
Revisiting the sub-title of this book, I think the audience that will get the most out of it falls somewhere in between the novice and expert levels. To me it seems best suited for designers or developers with a decent knowledge of HTML and CSS and some familiarity with JavaScript. If that describes you, I can recommend Simply JavaScript.
jQuery resources
I recently started looking into Javascript libraries such as Yahoo! UI (Y! UI), jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, Dojo etc. and have come to like the first two, primarily due to the quality of documentation they have. The latter two are also very popular but aren't (in my humble opinion) libraries that a Javascript beginner can get into. There is very little documentation in terms of tutorials or example pages and frankly I was pretty overwhelmed by them.
Y! UI by far has the best documentation of the lot and has pages upon pages of examples. In fact, the documentation is so good that it made the library seem a little complicated at first. However, once I took the time to read portions of it carefully, I found it to be excellent. There's a lot of customization that can be done to the provided widgets and a lot of work is being done by Yahoo!'s developers to get new features out.
However, my library of choice (at the moment) is jQuery. The main thing that drew me to it was its syntax. I found it to be very similar to CSS, which I also like working with. I don't want to get into it very much now, but if you'd like to know more, check out jQuery and Learning jQuery. In a recent posting on the Learning jQuery blog, more tutorial resources were provided so you might also want to give those sites a look-see too:
On reading and current books
A few weeks ago, someone asked me to write a post about all the books in my bookshelf. The excuse I’m using for not writing that post is that the bookshelf in my room was moved to the basement last winter so I don’t have a bookshelf. Seriously though, the truth is that most of the books on said shelf were my university textbooks and honestly, who reads calculus and engineering economics textbooks unless they have to? Okay, to be fair, some people might and they’re probably way smarter than me so, good for them, hehe. There were some textbooks that I actually liked reading while I was in school (Labyrinth of Technology) but those are so few in number that I can’t remember them off-hand.
Actually, if you asked me about all the books I’ve read from cover-to-cover over the past year, I would say “none”. Casual yet meaningful reading is something I’ve seldom done in my life and is something I feel I’ve missed out on. Reading is important. Just reflect on the fact that Divine Revelation sent down to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) started with the word ‘ikra (read).
So, in an effort to ramp up my meaningful reading, I’m starting off with some technical books. As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve great interest in web design (not to be confused with web development) and one of the most famous books on the subject is “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug. I got a hold of that book through work today and have started reading it with great anticipation. So far, it’s been a pleasant read and I hope it gets better and better with each passing page. “Simply Javascript” by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams also arrived at work today and from what I’ve skimmed through, it looks like a good one too.
I hope to write a review of those books but don’t expect them anytime soon, hehe.
Err the Blog cheat sheets
Err the Blog has quite a few application and programming-specific cheat sheets that may come in handy for some of you.
There are cheat sheets on bash, capistrano, chmod, curl, e (text-editor), emacs, markaby (I want to give that gem a go), markdown, radrails_ruby, regexp, textmate_rails and many, many more.
Check out the complete list of sheets at Cheat Sheets
Reviewing Ruby on Rails
I thought it had been a while since I did any programming in Ruby/Rails so I’ve decided to work on a little programming assignment for myself. Besides, I got sick of playing PS2. I’m done the basic stuff and am just thinking about what else to add. I hope to unveil it sometime soon so keep an eye open for that.
Other than that, nothing much’s been going on…I’m loving the rain we’re having here in Toronto lately. I just love the way city streets reflect light when it’s raining and the flurry of activity when a raindrop hits a puddle…
On with programming!