Old code is like a zombie. It doesn’t die. It walks the earth forever, devouring the brains of programmers who would maintain it.
Read more...I thought the yoga place Diana found yesterday was a little hokey… They had her participate in a tea ceremony, and then they used sensors and some PC software to “read her aura”. Well, whatever, I thought. She likes yoga better than a gym membership. I decided not to say anything.
But apparently Diana thought it was a little hokey too, because she Googled them today. What was the first headline that came up? “Critics Compare Dahn Yoga to Cult.” Evidently one of their members died during a training exercise on a mountain in Sedona.
At least Diana caught on before they conned her out of $1000 for a one-year membership.
Read more...I bow down to God of War...
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Yaaaay, toys!,
originally uploaded by gefyn. </div>Many thanks to the individual who recommended the PS2 games to Diana. They are amazing.
Add that to the games I picked up on clearance a while back (that were in storage waiting for a system to play them on), and I have enough to keep me busy for months!
So until this morning, I believed AJAX was the domain of masochists - people who were willing to slog through cross-browser incompatibilities just to build a single transparent list and make their Website a shred cooler than the competition. Then I listened to this podcast:
> IT Conversations: AJAX Progress and Challenges - > Technometria > “In this conversation, Phil Windley sits down with Ben > Galbraith, Bruce Grant and Scott Lemon, three experienced > AJAX developers and evangelists, to talk about progress and > challenges in the AJAX world.” http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1010.html
And there I learned of the frameworks: libraries of Javascript functions that abstract away all the problems with working on multiple browsers. Now, you don’t code a transparent menu from scratch; you put a menu object in your page and the framework handles it all for you. Not all features work across all browsers today, but at least now you can let the framework authors worry about that - your site’s code doesn’t need to be touched.
Prototype This is the more polished framework. It’s also integrated with Ruby on Rails. Check the links to script.aculo.us and Rico, two effects libraries built on top of Prototype. http://prototype.conio.net/
Dojo This framework doesn’t have a pretty set of example pages right now, but click on the HTML files in their unit test directory to see some [i]really[/i] cool widgets. (Like the full rich text editor!) http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/tests/
So what’s the takeaway from all this? I think AJAX is about to go mainstream. I hope people will design responsibly and not use it for its own sake, but you should definitely consider whether your site will benefit from it. Plain-old HTML is going to look dated very soon.
Read more...New camera...
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Phoenix Zoo,
originally uploaded by nephariuz. </div>Target had a Sony DSC-L1 on clearance for $170. It’s twice the resolution of my DSC-S50, and holds up a lot better in low light. It also bears more resemblance to a candy bar than a brick. :) Yay, Moore’s Law.
We took Lenny to the Phoenix Zoo this weekend, to keep him from driving us crazy and to try out the camera. Here’s a sample shot.