April 2005 Archives

I visited a lot of blogs yesterday that were discussing the buyout of Macromedia by Adobe. One can only wonder what will happen with Macromedia. Jason Kottke has a collection of links to many people commenting on the buyout.

I came across an article today via del.icio.us that has some implications regarding links in websites.

Sometimes, when you are building a website, or web page for that matter, you tend to build within the scope of your personal preferences. For example, one of the things I like most about Firefox is that I can open a link in a new tab. This is convenient because I do not have to navigate away from the page where I found the link. Additionally, should I find another link on the next page, I can open yet another new tab without leaving that page. To assume that everyone is using Firefox would be a mistake. So, I chose to allow users to open ( some, but not all ) links in new windows. According to the article - that's all wrong and a percentage of my users will be disappointed at my lack of sensitivity to their needs.

The article made a lot of sense. So, from here on out I will change that strategy and give people their choice. I will probably not make this change till this weekend - but its coming.

I found a basic cheat sheet that will come in handy if you use mySQL. It describes the syntax for a variety of SQL statements from describing tables to querying using regular expressions.

Robert Clark is traveling across America and photo documenting his trip with a cameraphone.

Brian McCallister has listed a few guidelines for building web applications.

#5 - View complexity is usually higher than model complexity..

Building robust, usable interfaces is one of the most difficult tasks in web application development.

I got a new toy today.

I love it, too! I used it tonight (Friday) to take some pictures of my daughter's soccer game. I took roughly 43 pictures of which only 32 turned out good enough to use. That wasn't because of the camera - that was me. Photographing sports events isn't as easy as I had hoped.

I still think I got some decent photos. The good news is that I only used 1/3 of the battery ( if that ) in pretty close to one hour. I was also smart enough to get an additional 128 mb of memory - so I can take pictures to my heart's delight.

Today I will try to get pictures of my son's game and post those too. I also started an account at Flickr. I only uploaded 3 pictures there. Feel free to browse through. Needless to say, I will probably be taking as many senseless, self-indulgent photos as humanly possible in the very near future. I'm already planning my next photo escapade.

Thinking about starting a blog to expose your employer? Complain about a business?

Better think about the consequences . . . Unless, you decide to blog anonymously. Here's a link to a blog that lists a number of people that have been disciplined, fired, or not hired for blogging.

I don't know exactly what the nature or content of their blogs were that got them fired, however. The list is kind of long if you ask me. The bottom line - blog for fun, blog about your life; but don't blog about your job unless you can do it anonymously.

BMWs must be pretty cheap in British Columbia if one can decide to ram apartment buildings with them. The story here. I would rather cruise in a BMW.

This is cool. Google Maps has incorporated satellite imagery. Using the "Map" view you can find the address you are looking for and then switch over to "Satellite" view. I found the house where I used to live. Where I live now, the satellite didn't have the detail I was looking for. But for more populated areas like San Francisco you can zoom in as far as the software will let you. Now you can't zoom in to see people on the street or stuff like that. But, if you are looking for a particular building ( and the images allow you to zoom in close enough ) you will probably be able to find it. Have fun with it.