Tech
Code Sorcery releases Pukka 1.8
Congrats to Code Sorcery on the release of Pukka 1.8. One of the major new features is search and although I haven't tried it yet, it looks pretty cool.
To-do list programs for Linux
Nice to see some coverage for Linux to-do list apps
Getting things done with Linux to-do list programs Via Ars Technica
Path Finder 5.0
Cocoatech's Path Finder hits version 5.0. It's by far the best replacement I've seen for Apple's Finder. Too bad this one's for Mac OS 10.5+ only...
Path Finder 5.0 is available, more file-management power Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Canada's Most Powerful Supercomputer at U of T!
Awesome.
University of Toronto to Acquire Canada's Most Powerful Supercomputer From IBM | Reuters
Via Alumni e-News (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering) October 2008 l Volume 2, Issue 10
Gmail's Advanced IMAP Controls
Great feature released by the Gmail team a few weeks back. Now there's finally a way to get rid of that pesky All Mail folder in Apple Mail! Note that you have to enable the feature in the Settings > Labs tab in your account.
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.
LinkedIn Engineer perks
Wow, I'm soo browsing the LinkedIn job board:
A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro. The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23" or one 30" Apple Cinema display.
Via the LinkedIn blog
Rogers Voice & Data Packages for iPhone
Rogers announces its voice and data packages for the hugely anticipated Apple iPhone available July 11th in Canada. Prices start at $60 per month and include a 400Mb data limit. Even the most expensive package at $115 per month doesn't include unlimited data.
Rogers.com - iPhone 3G Voice & Data Packages
(Via Daring Fireball)
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.
U of T Engineering ranked #1 in Canada, #11 in World
I always knew my alma mater (University of Toronto) had some of the brightest minds in the world but now I know that the Times also agrees. Its Higher Education Supplement (membership required) ranked University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering No. 1 in Canada, No. 7 in North America and No. 11 overall in the World's Top 50 Universities for Technology.
Congratulations to the faculty and keep up the good work!
Read the university's official announcement here.
Via: Alumni e-News, December 2007. University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
Code culture at Google Inc.
In his post over at the Google blog, Reza Behforooz, a Software Engineer at Google states how how easy it was for him to contribute to the GMail code base even though he doesn't work on the GMail team:
In my first month at Google, I complained to a friend on the Gmail team about a couple of small things that I disliked about Gmail. I expected him to point me to the bug database. But he told me to fix it myself, pointing me to a document on how to bring up the Gmail development environment on my workstation. The next day my code was reviewed by Gmail engineers, and then I submitted it. A week later, my change was live. I was amazed by the freedom to work across teams, the ability to check in code to another project, the trust in engineers to work on the right thing, and the excitement and speed of getting things done for our users. Engineers across our offices (and across projects) have access to the same code; I didn't have to ask for anyone's permission to work on this.
If this post came out of a small software company, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but coming out of Google, one of the hottest software companies in the world, it's pretty cool. The author goes on to mention his work in other software projects at Google and it's worth a read. Check out the whole post at "Crossing team and global boundaries"
(Via Google Blog.)
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: