It’s Only Software

Ran across this site with some nice examples of text manipulation in SVG. I bet, with a modern browser, you could implement the shiny floor technique using DOM-scripted SVG. I’ll be working on this and hopefully post some results shortly.

Seen here:

“Real programmers don’t comment their code. If it was hard to write,
it should be hard to understand.”

Yes, I’ve joined the podcast generation. I just started listening to a few podcasts and figured I’d share my brief thoughts so that you spend your listening time wisely. NB: I have only listened to one episode of each, so it is a distinctly small and statistically irrelevant sample size (although in the case of Ajaxian, it is 5% of the currently available audio content ).

• Audible AJAX – (Monthly:30 Mins) by the Ajaxian guys. I listened to Episode 20, regarding the Tamarin project.  Although Ben does a lot of apologizing about the audio quality (which I didn’t find bad, for a podcast), the content was great. Good interviews with a lot of stars in the web industry. About 30 minutes long. Recommended!
• Java Posse – (Weekly:60 Mins) I listened to Episode 105, an interview with Joe Winchester from IBM. I found the interview (clocking in at almost 60 minutes!) really long and, although interesting to listen to, I didn’t really feel like I learned anything. Based on the recommendation of a friend, I’ll revisit this again before making a judgement.
• Cranky Geeks – (Weekly:30 Mins) John Dvorak ranting for 30 minutes wih various guests. Think “Imus for Geeks”. I found some of the discussion hilarious (yes, I am a nerd). The only (big!) downside for me were the inclusion of ads! The ads showed up 3 times during the 30 minute podcast – really disappointing. Still, the content was humorous, and I actually learned a few things (or, about a few things, since it’s not really a show to “teach you stuff”). I’ll be back for another listen.

Anything else you’d recommend?

So there’s been some [1], [2], [3] grumbling in the Spring Web forum (which I tend to participate in when I have a spare moment) regarding the datedness of the only Spring tutorial on the Spring site, “Developing a Spring Framework MVC application step-by-step“. Although it’s a great introduction (heck, it was one of the first articles I read about Spring, it hasn’t been updated significantly since its introduction in July 2003. A lot of new Spring MVC users want to have some good, solid advice on how to use the new Web features that arrived in Spring 2. I have decided to get back to basics and try writing such a tutorial myself. I’ll post it in bits for review on my site, and hopefully some folks will like it.

This is a perfect name for some kind of mashup relating to Slashdot. The only problem is that I can’t think of any data that could be sensibly mashed with Slashdot – can you?

What makes a good web representation of a developer? The 1990-s response to this question was typically an HTML-ized version of one’s resume (yes, I had one, and I know you did too). The 2000-s response to this question seems to be not so much “you want to hire me, look at my resume”, but “take a look at all this nifty information, and oh, by the way, I can be hired if you want”.

My plan for developing the site is to use the random notes I jot on this blog to build out articles that someone might want to someday read. Like most late 2000 bloggers, I figure if it’s interesting to me, then it’s sure to be interesting to someone else.

I’m attempting to work on a simple project as a test for learning RoR. I’m finding a distinct dearth of good, free reference material and examples out there. I have a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails that I’m working through, but it’s nice to have a good online reference available too. RDoc is fine and good, but a couple good, step-by-step tutorials would be even better.