James Turner

Taking props from Steve Jobs himself, there's one more thing! During tonight's final presentation, our project NoSpace displayed a weird layout issue in Internet Explorer 6. Now I could have let this go since technically the class is now completed, but it bothered me enough that I decided to look into the problem. The fix was simple enough, adding a float: right; to the div surrounding the calendar was all it took. Now the big question is why all of a sudden does something that was displaying correctly for all our previous iterations magically stop working for the final one! I guess the world may never know, but it's fixed and NoSpace should now display properly in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and Firefox 1.5, 2 as well as Safari 2 and 3, well it will while it's still up on the web. I will probably take the project down by the end of the week, so get your fix while you still can!

Well, I'm all out of stuff to write about, so this will most likely be my last entry on the learning remix. I just wanted to say I really enjoyed the class and both the mini and group projects. The blog limits could be lowered a bit, but other than that, I don't have any complaints. Although I already had a pretty high understanding of PHP, it was challenging for me to leave it behind and focus more on javascript and the dom to parse and display our output. In the end I think my group did a great job and I learned some new techniques that I have already applied in current projects.

A List Apart is a great online resource for web professionals. Ever month or so they put up new articles relating to web trends and issues going on today. A preview of html 5 is one such article. They go through and show the read some of the new tags related to the new html 5 spec. Mostly interesting to me are the new layout tags, header, nav, article, section, aside, footer. These tags easily identify and display a common layout that is normally done with divs and css positioning. Little tweaks like these really make the web an exciting field to work in.

I've mentioned a couple different frameworks in previous blog posts, include Ruby on Rails most recently. Before frameworks really took off, you would have to recreate the same basic functionality for every new website you created. CRUD are the most common actions used across all websites. CRUD stands for, create, read, update, delete. Some other things frameworks are great for are login systems and validation. Form validation is one of my least favorite things to do when programming a new site. Thankfully if you have a validation library it makes this normally boring tasks and makes it quick and simple. Also once you have a basic framework written, you can easily put a website up in a matter of minutes.

Foamee is a little application that integrates with twitter allowing users to owe other twitter users beer. Once you receive the beer you where owed, you can redeem the iou sent. This application is a really neat way to show just how powerful sites like twitter really are. I'm not sure if this is the first mini-application written for twitter or not, but it is definitely the coolest.

Subversion is a version control system gets it's roots from CVS. Version control is a big part of software development. Here at work we rely on it exclusively for our ever growing code base. Not only is it a great way to keep track of changes you've made along the way. It also has the ability to rollback changes and even revert to any previous version. Subversion is always great in multiple team member environments, you can easily work on the same files without worrying about overriding others changes.

Microsoft Office Live seems to be a new beta web application from Microsoft which allows it's users to easily host a number or office documents in one easily accessible location allowing multiple users to collaborate with one another. Could this be the answer to Google Docs? If so, unless they allow the editing of documents right online using nothing but the web browser, I fail to see how this is any different then hosting your documents on a secure intranet.

As Jim noted in his blog post NoSpace iteration 3 is available for your viewing pleasure here. You can also access our powerpoint presentation here.

Internet Explorer 8 has been announced. Along with the announcement came a funny blog post by the general manager listing some of the names that didn't quite make it. It's always nice to see a large company like Microsoft poke fun at it's self every so often. Personally I would have went with: IE 1000 or IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet!

Next to using vim from the command line, my next favorite text editor is TextMate. TextMate is a gui editor for Mac OS X. I've been using it off and on for the last couple of years. It is extremely powerful and extremely customizable, allowing you to change the theme, add text snippets, recording marcos and so much more. Although it is shareware, it is fully worth the price tag associated with it.