Category Archives: Code

Somewhat Unrelated Links Gathering Dust

Posted on by David
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I have a bad habit of stashing links to stuff I want to blog here and there (well, mostly here) and then never getting around to posting about them. In an effort to circumvent my usual behavior, here are a few slightly dusty links.

Extreme Usability
Great post about the benefits of pairing a usability/interface person with an engineer to rapidly iterate improvements in design. I’ve had the same experience when working side-by-side with our web admin.

Password Design Pattern
Good tips on designing password protection systems. Directly related to my earlier post today.

IBM Gets Folksy
Post about how IBM plans to implement folksonomy tagging to its massive intranet operation.

Google Code

Posted on by David
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Google has released a number of open source code projects developed by their staff: Google Code. A lot of it is pretty esoteric. One that caught my eye was PyGoogle, a python module that can be used to call the Google search API. We use a search engine at work that uses Python, so in theory we could use the PyGoogle library to incorporate google search results with our own. Nifty.

AJAX

Posted on by David
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Wondering how Google creates such great interfaces for web applications such as Gmail and Google Maps?

AJAX:

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

Defining Ajax

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

* standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
* dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
* data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
* asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
* and JavaScript binding everything together.

It’s basically the creative use of several mature web technologies in combination. Follow the link above to read more in the very informative article by Jesse James Garrett.

The Hard Truth about Linux on the Desktop

Posted on by David
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Is it really cheaper to deploy Linux desktops in a large organization? A former CTO of the World Bank does some price comparisons with desktop manufacturers that large organizations typically use. Shocking revelation: linux systems, if available, usually cost more than the same box with Windows installed.

Part I: Corporate Desktop Linux – The Hard Truth.

There are 3 more installments to come, which I am looking forward to reading.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

Posted on by David

Eric Meyer has released a simple standards-based slide show system, or S5 for short. This is a very slick way to create a slide show in HTML. I may give it a shot for the next presentation that I do. What I find very exciting about it is that it should be pretty easy to adapt a bunch of existing tools in order to author S5 presentations. In fact, someone has already created a City Desk template that does so.

Managing a Domain Name

Posted on by David

Here is a tip that we used during a recent move of ASHA’s web site to a new hosting provider: a week or so before the switch, set the time-to-live for your domain name record to a very short interval. This will ensure that domain name servers around the web will be constantly updating your domain record so that when you map the domain to a new IP address (almost always required when moving your production servers to a new hosting provider) the change will quickly propagate across the Internet. If you don’t do this, some of your site visitors may have to wait several days for the change to make it out to their corner of the Net.

Source Control HOWTO

Posted on by David

Eric Sink is writing a series of articles on how to use source control. Definitely check this out if you manage development teams in-house or out.

Source Control HOWTO

I have started writing a series of articles explaining how to do source control and the best practices thereof. See below for links to the individual chapters in this series. The Introduction explains my motivations and goals for writing this series.

License Expired! Pop-up Error with Zend Demo and Apache/PHP on Windows

Posted on by David

This thread has the answer to why a pop-up window suddently began to appear when I booted up my Windows XP box at home. I had installed Apache and a demo of the Zend PHP editor. The pop-up error began once the demo license expired yet it gave no indication of what system was causing the error. I thought I had gotten infested with a virus until a little googling turned up that thread above. Zend needs to improve that error to something meaningful.