Archive for April, 2005
April 30, 2005 at 10:40 pm · Filed under Misc
I came home just now after a very long day of hard labor (helping my friend move into the City) and decided to check my email before I went to sleep. To my surprise I had received a Golden Ticket invite to the Backpackit website. I haven't had a chance to take a good look at it yet since I'm dead tired. I will have a look-see first thing tomorrow and report back on it. I would very excited right now if I still had the ability to feel. So.. tired... need.. Zzzzz.....
Edit:
Before I pass out, I managed to sign up real quick and took a screen shot of my Backpackit homepage. I hope I don't get in trouble for sharing this screenshot.
Edit:
I was informed that they do not want screenshots of the pages up until Tuesday. I was too tired to read through the invite last night to notice that. So I had to take down the screenshot. Don't worry, you'll see it on Tuesday.
April 27, 2005 at 7:54 pm · Filed under Ruby on Rails
When I first learned about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I quickly went through some sample code and looked at the syntax of the code. I must be honest and confess that the Ruby syntax was not what I was expecting, or used to. Coming from a strictly Java and PHP world, the lax syntax of Ruby was a big turn off to me. No curly braces? No semi-colons? What on earth is going on here?!?!
Well, I just needed to step out of my habit. I still haven't had much experience with Ruby, but I have come to accept the syntax and learn to work with it. I understand that Ruby allows you to use curley's and semi-colons, but when there is no strict structure enforced, you get different developers writing in different styles, and that get pretty ugly.
The next thing I looked at was how Rails handled its view in the Model-View-Controller paradigm. Being a front-end developer, the View is very important to me. When I first got involved with JSP's, I hated how developers would put scriptlets all over the html page and mix the logic in with the presentation. The same problems occured in PHP. Now here was a brand new framework on a relatively young language, and yet it seems like the same problems exist on Rails. Rails (and Ruby) use the same scriptlet syntax as asp, php, jsp, etc. To embed some logic or code into your html, you use < %= %> to print out a value and < % %> to process other Ruby code. To the defense of Rails, there isn't much "logic" within the html templates, but the scriptlet tags are still there and some reason it just bothers me.
Instead of complaining, I decided to see if there were any Ruby templating engines out there. I was glad to find quiet a few. Some good ones and some not so good. I found a nice listing of the more popular ones on this page:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?HtmlTemplates
I haven't had the chance to delve into each one in detail, but from what I've read and the tutorials I've seen, my favorite ones are:
- Xtemplate http://xtemplate.sourceforge.net/index.html
- Amrita2 http://amrita2.rubyforge.org
- Iowa http://enigo.com/projects/iowa/index.html
- Kwartz http://www.kuwata-lab.com/kwartz/index.html
When I have a better understanding of each one, maybe I will create a comparison chart and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.
April 25, 2005 at 9:46 pm · Filed under Misc
It's that time again! Time for a random post about anything that isn't entirely development related. Our last Fun Fact Filler post illustrated the "popularity" of my blog since I started it. This time around we're going to focus on something a bit more interesting: The Dvorak Keyboard Layout. I found out about the Dvorak Keyboard from Matt Raible's blog and thought it was interesting enough to write about.
According to an article I found on Google, the commonly used QWERTY keyboard layout was actually created to slow down typists. According to the article,
The reason for this apparent insanity is, basically, that the earliest typewriter mechanisms were very slow, and tended to jam when typists attempted higher speeds. It didn't take long for physical typewriter technology to improve, but the QWERTY layout had become ensconced.
Now isn't that interesting? Well, I'm glad I never learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard. Now I can learn using the proper keyboard layout! Alas, I doubt the Dvorak keyboard will replace the QWERTY one. 
Read more about the Dvorak Keyboard layout.
April 23, 2005 at 3:33 pm · Filed under Javascript
For all you web developers out there, here is a collection of bookmarklets that you can use in your mozilla browser to help you debug your sites. If you are truly serious about web development, then you need to either get the Web Developer Extension, or use the bookmarklets mentioned on this site:
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html
Those are, of couse, just the web developer bookmarklets. You can view the rest of them here:
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/
You may also download and install ALL of the bookmarklets using the Bookmark import tool. Follow the instructions on this page to find out how:
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/importall.html
April 21, 2005 at 10:20 pm · Filed under Misc
Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and now Goowy Mail. Goowy mail is a Flash based email client and it is currently in beta. I used to be a big fan of Flash a while back. I even made a number of all Flash sites myself a few years back. This was all before I found out about CSS design, accessibility, usability, etc. I no longer view Flash the same way.
For one thing, I dislike websites that are created entirely in Flash, especially when there is no need for it. What do I mean by a need? Well, take this goowy email site. There really isn't any need for it to be created with Flash. Flash, in my opinion, should only be used when a static image or text doesn't properly convey your message. Good use of Flash would be for guided tours, photo galleries (mainly because it makes it harder to "steal" images), video/audio players, etc.
As you can tell, I'm not too impressed with this Goowy application. If their only selling point is the fact that its in Flash, then I'm afraid its only going to impress a few people and only for a little while. Once everyone realizes that its just another email application, they won't care if their page transitions are fluid or that their menu items make cool (or annoying) clicky noises. In the end, its how functional and useful the site is and not what technology was used to create it.
For now, I'm pretty happy with Gmail. It serves its purpose and I use it regularly. If Goowy mail can promise me near 0% spam and a nice way to organize my contacts and emails, then I might give it a try. If they are trying to impress me with eye candy, then no thanks.
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