The intention is to have a Stack Overflow-style site where you can ask and answer questions about how to progress or start your IT career.  What training courses and certifications are worth their money, what companies are good to work for, and how to get where you want to go in your career.

Have a look and give your support here.

Here’s a great post from nettuts outlining some key differences and new features.

I don’t really have much to add on this, but just a few thoughts:

1. Speed improvements are good and all, but when you can get ten times better javascript performance by changing browsers, nearly doubling the speed of your .css() method not the most important thing. Still, I can’t expect the jQuery team to be able to retire browsers for people I guess…
2. A lot of changes seem to deal with allowing functions to be passed into methods.  Being a .Net 3.5 guy, I’m love this anonymous delegate stuff, so it’s good to see!

Yeah, that’s all the comments I have right now. Told you I didn’t have much to add!

Much of the design work is already done. The database schema is solid and it isn’t trivial – it took me a number of iterations to get right. The UI flow has been decided, and at this point, I’m happy to reuse most of the layout, css and images.

At Tech.Ed this year, I heard a lot of great things about ASP.NET MVC. The Hands-On-Lab I did gave me just enough of it to get me interested, so when I decided I was going to rewrite this thing in .Net, MVC seemed like the way to go.

So I’m now attempting to learn how it all works, and it’s going really well. The secret? The NerdDinner tutorial courtesy of Rob Conery, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, and Phil Haack (actually I get the impression that Scott Guthrie wrote the tutorial, but the originating book is authored by all of them).

Seriously, if you’re looking at playing with ASP.NET MVC, run through this tutorial from start to finish. I guarantee by the end of it you’ll be all over the basics, and loving the way ASP.NET MVC is put together.

I’m looking forward to getting into some real development with this project.

This is just a quick post to provide a link to the best response I’ve seen on Stack Overflow. And just to clarify, I mean best in terms of amusement. It gets a point across I guess, but wow is it creative.

So here you go: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

Some work I’m currently doing involves presenting nicely styled pages to the user of a web site.  The html I have to work with is not always ideal and needs to be massaged.  Because I’m dealing with templates, it’s often simply impossible for me to change the html – I can only try to modify the framework around the bits of html I’m given.

Enter jQuery.

Provided the html I get is more or less xhtml compliant, I’ve got a Document Object Model (DOM) I can work with.  Using jQuery, I’ve found that I can manipulate this to my heart’s desire.

Let’s say I end up with an table which has an extra row between the header row and the first actual row of data.  No problem!

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#mytable tr:nth-child(2)').remove();
});

And that’s it! Of course you may get a flicker of the incorrect display because we’re making the change only when the DOM is completely built, but we’re not really choosy in this situation.

Let’s try something a bit harder.  How about reformatting a table which contains a single column for debits and credits; the debits formatted with a red <FONT> tag.  And before you ask, yes, I’m serious.

We want this table to have a separate column for debits and credits.  Again, enter jQuery.

$(document).ready(function() {
	// first, deal with the headers
	var cell = $('#mytable tr:eq(0) td:eq(2)');  // look at the second cell (contains debits/credits)
	var w = cell.attr('width').substr(0, cell.attr('width').length-1);  // I know width is a percentage
	cell.attr('width',''+(w/2)+'%');	// half the width
	cell.text('Credits').before('<td align="right" width="'+w/2+'%">Debits</td>'); // split Debits and Credits header
 
	// now deal with each non-header row
	$('#mytable tr:not(:first)').each(function()
	{
		$(this).children('td:eq(2)').before('<td align="right">&nbsp;</td>'); // insert the new column
		var redVal = $(this).children('td:eq(3)').html(); // get current column value
		if (redVal && (redVal.toUpperCase().indexOf('COLOR=RED') > -1 || redVal.toUpperCase().indexOf('COLOR="RED"') > -1)) // if it's red
		{
			redVal = $(this).children('td:eq(3)').children('font').text(); // get the actual value to write
			$(this).children('td:eq(2)').html('<span style="color: red;"> '+redVal+'</span>'); // write to the debit column
			$(this).children('td:eq(3)').html('nbsp;'); // erase the credit column
		}
	});
});

Now this doesn’t give me beautiful xhtml, and I’m never going to feel happy about how this works, but it does the job.

Fun stuff.

I might have mentioned that I’m using php and while it’s pretty easy to do stuff, I sometimes feel uncomfortable with the looseness of it all.  If you’ve used php in addition to a “real” OO language, you’ll know what I mean.  Lots and lots of globally-accessible functions with no namespaces, duck-typing, all that sort of stuff.

So I’m following some better practices (as suggested by Jon in his comment on the last post).  Nothing is very groundbreaking and I’m sure most newer php projects use the same kind of things.  Anyway, here’s what I’m doing:

I’m using an ORM library to get from my database to my code and vice versa.  Specifically Doctrine.  I’m reasonably familiar how these things work having used NHibernate for .Net (a port of Java’s Hibernate), but I’ve been impressed with how easy it’s been this time.  I got Doctrine working beautifully for my spider-web of a MySql database inside an evening with no experience.  I’ll let you know how it works out in the long run.  And yes, MySql is the database right now but Doctrine allows it to change very easily as expected.

I’m using an MVC pattern so my code doesn’t get too mixed in with my UI.  Now I’m sure there are plenty of libraries and frameworks out there that would help me with this, but I’m rolling my own… if you can call it that.  I’m used to .Net’s code-behind method so I’m really just copying that to an extent.  Each php page will have an include at the top that references the code-behind.  The “code-behind” php file will set up all the data and will provide functions that can be called by the front one.  Simple, but it should be effective.

Finally, I’m using JQuery for UI prettiness.  I had a serious look at a lot of javascript libraries and JQuery came out on top for what I needed.

So that’s it.  That’s what I’m doing.  So far it’s all fitting together quite nicely, but I’ll be sure to post updates if I want to rave about something or if something sends me into a fit of frustration.

As always, comments are welcome.

Damian

The most common excuse I give myself is lack of time, but I don’t think that’s really true.  After all, I have tons of design work done and you’d think that’d be the boring part right?  I think the problem is lining up spare time, motivation, and resources.

Spare time exists in snippets everywhere.  When I’m on the bus, in a particularly boring lecture, at home after work, etc.  Motivation is more fleeting.  Sometimes I’m really keen to get into this project, other times it’s the furthest thing from my mind.  Finally, resources are either available or they’re not.  I haven’t had a laptop for a while, so I intended to develop mainly from home.  I’ve borrowed a laptop, but I don’t want to fill it with all my development tools.  Having said that, I’m doing it in php and I don’t need much of an IDE to cut code.  I could probably get some meaningful stuff done in notepad if need be.  Testing? That’s harder, particularly as I’d need a database running and a php web server.

So you see that even though I’m motivated more often than not, those three things don’t always line up well.  I don’t often have much motivation when I get home from work, even though I have time and resources.  When I’m sitting in a boring lecture, I’ve got plenty of motivation and time, but I don’t have the resources.  You get the picture.

So, how do I change this?  Well you’ll be pleased to know I have a plan:

1. I bought a laptop.  It’ll arrive in about a week.  It’s powerful and I can put whatever the hell I want on that thing so you can rest assured it’ll be running all the dev tools I want.
2. Portable Apps.  I rediscovered these when I was thinking about how I could improve the situation.  If a computer is available, I can spin up a full WAMP stack as well as GIMP, Notepad++, and FileZilla.
3. Target deadlines.  I have them.  And work breakdowns, heirarchical todo lists and all that stuff.  I’m organised.

Essentially, the idea behind it is to let users describe what they want to do with the Internet rather than where they want to go.  The web at the moment is really based around sites that you have to actually visit to be able to use the information.  Their idea is to skip this visiting stuff and let the tool (or commands written for it) do all the work for you, giving you only the information you were after.  They have a really good description on their blog post (linked above), and I can’t really think of a better way to describe it than them (which is probably good), so have a read if you’re interested.

It’s really lightweight and very easy to install, but at the moment it only works for Firefox.  It’s also surprisingly easy to write new commands.  I’ve been a .Net kid for a while now but it only took me a couple of hours to hack up a new command.  Admittedly the Ubiquity language is Javascript so it’s not terribly unfamiliar.  Still, that’s a pretty short learning curve.

Commands have the ability to give you a realtime ajax preview before you actually execute the command.  In most cases, I don’t even use the execute functionality and I suspect that for the small things, most people won’t.

Anyway, when I was trying it, the built-in “define” command wasn’t working for me.  It would look up a word when you pressed enter to execute the command, but it didn’t give me a preview.  So, in order to get a nicer dictionary lookup and at the same time try out this funky little thing, I decided to create my own.  Of course once I’d got mine working, the define command started working properly.  I like mine better – it gives prettier results.  It’s not just because I made it myself… but that’s the main reason.

You can go here to have a look at it.  Subscribe to it if you want to use it or hey, just steal the code or whatever, I don’t care, it’s public license – do what you want.

So in summary, it’s easy to use and I think it has the potential to be something really big.  If you have a look at the examples of what they’re ultimately trying to be able to do, it’s pretty impressive.  Imagine typing “find restaurants near me with reviews over 4 stars” and being given a google map with markers and summarised reviews of each.  Very useful, no?

Hmm, combine that with voice recognition and you’ve got a genuine futuristic computer from the movies!  Rad.

For example, here’s the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane.

I’m fairly blown away by the sheer number of streets that are covered to be honest.  This map gives you an idea, but once you get to the capital cities, you can see just how dense the coverage is.

I had a few discussions about this with a friend and he was more interested in the CG Kittens idea I very briefly alluded to in the main text. To summarise, the idea was that if the kittens in KittenAuth were 3D models rendered on the fly, you’d get an essentially unlimited number of images.

Well someone has gone and done something very similar. On a small site called SpamFizzle, there’s a description of a 3D CAPTCHA design that renders simple objects and asks the user questions about them. It looks like a great idea to me. It could require some fine-tuning, but I think the premise is sound.

I’d love to credit the author some more, but there are no details on that page. I presume it’s the same author as the only other page on the site, Michael G. Kaplan.

Regardless, it’s a great idea and worth a read if you’re interested.