Category: Programming
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Google Groups out, Stack Exchange In
Recently I had a technical problem I was dreading having to find the answer to. It involved installing and configuring Java; that’s one of those topics where answers and resources seemed to be plentiful on google groups. But recently, google groups has been spammed to death, and my best bet was to find a forum…
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Searching & searching and finally finding it!
Wow, I bookmarked something in delicious a few months ago and only today got around to wanting to look at it again. It was an important page for me although I had no plans to use it immediately. So I bookmarked it on delicious and thought, gee, it’s always there when I will need it.…
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Client-Side pages in XSLT: Promising?
I just learned something amazing: XSLT transformation browser side (meaning: giving the user an XML document and an XSL document and letting the browser process it) is lightning fast — far faster than server-side processing. So why is no one using it? Kamal Gill wrote more about this (especially with respect to plone). I think…
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Designing for Children: The Constructivist Approach
In response to the announcement that SimCity will be ported to the One Laptop per Child platform, Alan Kay writes a long piece wondering whether Sim City is truly an example of constructivist learning. He talks about designing software environments for children and at the end concludes that Sim City might not be the best…
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Geekend coming Up!
Since I’m officially looking for work, it may seem a little curious to redouble my efforts to master more technical skills. But after reading this Oreilly article on an xml editor for documentation, I’m tempted to download XMLMind this weekend. Partially to learn the tool, but partially to produce some DITA and Docbook documents quickly…
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Here are my tools: Off to Make some Websites!
For the next month I’ll be making and designing several websites (at the same time I’ll be looking for a job). Here are the tools I currently use: Notetab Pro text editor. Highly recommended, but not enough key shortcuts to make me happy. Oxygen XML Editor (also for XSLT). Highly recommended, but I haven’t done…
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XML, Schemas and Recipes
As mentioned before, I’m preparing a recipe book using some kind of xml and xsl. Here are some resources I’ve located so far: Anders Moller’s XML book , which includes many excellent examples and a full 96 page chapter on using XML Schemas (PDF). Sweet! Recipebook DTD RecipeML , an older dtd a Norman Walsh…
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Wiki Resources
Ultimate Wiki comparison guide. Highly technical. Andrew Stellman on how managers at corporations can learn from open source project management. Andy Oram: Rethinking Community Documentation . On the post before this one, I’ve been gathering lots of useful ebook links. Uche Ogbuji develops in python and xml. Here’s his copia weblog which is far too…
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CSS Tricks to Scale Images
Nifty tricks: scaling images by percent with CSS and by em. That is truly cool (and helpful if you’re trying to design for portable devices/ebook readers.
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Ebooks vs. Simple HTML for PDAs
The most interesting/useful content on my Axim PDA is not ebooks but my recipe collection. And basically I just save the files AS IS from my web browser. That is a bitch; lots of websites generate their pages dynamically so it is cumbersome (if not impossible) to download them offline. I like ebooks, but there…
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Plone Conference
Plone Conference Slides HTML talk about Plone/Wikis Now, if only there were mp3s. Listingpages, a plone product to create custom listing pages in your Plone site. How to Design Programs , MIT college textbook about programming Scheme (teaching basic algorithms in the process). As embarrassed as I am to admit it, I never knew OPML…
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RSS Feeds Compared.
Next project: writing an XSLT script to transform a static HTML page into an atom feed or RSS feed. I want to use the script whenever the static page is updated. Introduction to Atom Feed. tim bray comparing atom feeds and rss feeds (Readers may remember a recent post of mine about a person who…
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Python, Wizard of Oz, Switching Costs, and Python IDE Shootout
I’ve been updating my python/plone weblogs on my bloglines account. Here’s some great things I’ve been finding: Ian Bicking on why web programming is important for python. Lots of comments. Ludo responds to the charge that php is better than python: The key PHP advantage is, in my opinion, just one: the tight integration with…
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Eclipse Docs and Faking
Gary Pollice on why I teach eclipse. Demo about writing a book on eclipse, converting to docbook and printing to pdf. More here. How to figure out which technical writers are faking it.
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CSS BASED Forms & Nvu
css-based forms (Jeff Howden) From Teleread, we have Nvu a cross-platform Mozilla-based CSS Editor. As an aside, I’ll say that I’ve seen decent XML Editors and decent CSS Editors, but not one that can do both. I use Oxygen XML Editor and WestCiv’s Style Master. For Python, I’ve using Eclipse and the Pydev plugin. And…
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Headfirst/Creating Passionate Users Weblog
Today I discovered two very insightful weblogs by veterans in the technical publishing industry. First Joseph B. Wikert from Wrox has a weblog about publishing trends called Average Joe. I’ll be catching up on his posts over time. Also, a great User Experience group weblog called Creating Passionate Users by some programmers/usability people who wrote…