I have a slight issue with the current trend of web design, where almost every written essay is designed in a single, or in worst cases split-page, slab of text, going from top to bottom, sometimes in a very wide form factor, which is very hard an uncomfortable to read.

After almost 20 minutes of playing around with this I’m still finding neat tricks and shticks.

I just wish I knew how to read German…

Dmig 5 — Cover

Sweet way of using pagination. Plus, check out the automatic page-loading when reaching the end of the page

Table of Content

Check it out for yourself: http://www.designmadeingermany.de/magazin/5/

If you have some of your own examples, or something you’ve seen and you’d like to share, drop me a line in the comments!

// ----------------------------------------------------------
// If you're not in IE (or IE version is less than 5) then:
//     ie === undefined
// If you're in IE (>5) then you can determine which version:
//     ie === 7; // IE7
// Thus, to detect IE:
//     if (ie) {}
// And to detect the version:
//     ie === 6 // IE6
//     ie> 7 // IE8, IE9 ...
//     ie <9 // Anything less than IE9
// ----------------------------------------------------------
var ie = (function(){
    var undef, v = 3, div = document.createElement('div');

    while (
        div.innerHTML = '<!--[if gt IE '+(++v)+']><i></i><![endif]-->',
        div.getElementsByTagName('i')[0]
    );

    return v> 4 ? v : undef;
}());
 

[Source via Ajaxian]

A programmer spends about 10–20% of his time writing code, and most programmers write about 10–12 lines of code per day that goes into the final product, regardless of their skill level. Good programmers spend much of the other 90% thinking, researching, and experimenting to find the best design. Bad programmers spend much of that 90% debugging code by randomly making changes and seeing if they work.
“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” –Bill Gates

A good programmer is ten times more productive than an average programmer. A great programmer is 20–100 times more productive than the average. This is not an exaggeration – studies since the 1960′s have consistently shown this. A bad programmer is not just unproductive – he will not only not get any work done, but create a lot of work and headaches for others to fix.

Great programmers spend very little of their time writing code – at least code that ends up in the final product. Programmers who spend much of their time writing code are too lazy, too ignorant, or too arrogant to find existing solutions to old problems. Great programmers are masters at recognizing and reusing common patterns. Good programmers are not afraid to refactor (rewrite) their code constantly to reach the ideal design. Bad programmers write code which lacks conceptual integrity, non-redundancy, hierarchy, and patterns, and so is very difficult to refactor. It’s easier to throw away bad code and start over than to change it.

Software obeys the laws of entropy, like everything else. Continuous change leads to software rot, which erodes the conceptual integrity of the original design. Software rot is unavoidable, but programmers who fail to take conceptual integrity into consideration create software that rots so so fast that it becomes worthless before it is even completed. Entropic failure of conceptual integrity is probably the most common reason for software project failure. (The second most common reason is delivering something other than what the customer wanted.) Software rot slows down progress exponentially, so many projects face exploding timelines and budgets before they are killed.

A 2004 study found that most software projects (51%) will fail in a critical aspect, and 15% will fail totally. This is an improvement since 1994, when 31% failed.

Although most software is made by teams, it is not a democratic activity. Usually, just one person is responsible for the design, and the rest of the team fills in the details.

Programming is hard work. It’s an intense mental activity. Good programmers think about their work 24/7. They write their most important code in the shower and in their dreams. Because the most important work is done away from a keyboard, software projects cannot be accelerated by spending more time in the office or adding more people to a project.

There isn’t a single thing here that I don’t agree with, and I just wish that more people would see it and really understand it.

I’ve started this project many times, with various technologies, from PHP stand-alone scripts, through PHP frameworks, Python, and some Ruby tests.

But this time I think I’m going to go with Javascript & HTML5 Web Workers.

This seems like the perfect setup, a platform agnostic app that doesn’t need anything special (except some File System APIs I guess) to work on almost any device, and it’s based on Javascript, so I think this will be my new weekend project.

Tips and ideas are welcome!q

So I figured I could use it in that project. after a few minutes of fumbling around with trying to find how to create my own Location object I realized it’s not really usable.

Searching the web didn’t come up fruitful either, apparently window.location object, and its constructor, Location(), are part of the BOM, and is not accessible except the window.location that can be read and modified, but if modified it will redirect the user to the modified location, i.e. it’s actually controlling the users browser.

This is not very useful if you are trying to manipulate a URL in one way or the other, and not really interested in moving the user to that location.

Anchors to the Rescue

Trying to find a suitable solution, someone mentioned to me the <a> element that actually has an href attribute which is basically the Location object I was looking for.

Investigating even further, I found that the anchor tag is pretty neat in creating and manipulating URLs.

For example:

Really useful, too bad that it’s really to find any info about this, and it’s practically undocumented.

Play with it

This feature already gaining a lot of attention, and I believe that once it shows up, and people really start extending it, it will be one of the Killer Features that Firefox will have to offer. Something that is really needed for Firefox to start biting back some market share from Chrome.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Regular Generate & Copy public SSH keys

$ ssh-keygen; ssh-copy-id user@host; ssh user@host

Just change the user@host and you’re on your way.

Custom Port

If your host has a different SSH access port, then it get’s a little trickier, but still works:

$ ssh-keygen; ssh-copy-id ‘-p XXXX -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@host’; ssh user@host

Note that the ssh-copy-id call is a little different, and execute in quotes (if you copy & paste, the single-quotes can cause error, so replace them with normal single-quotes).

Source: Simple, Custom Port

This could mean a lot, and perhaps explain why some places cannot manage simpler tasks they did manage before bringing in some heavy duty expert.

Quote from the article:

Another light in which it might be informative to view this study is with respect to research into what’s called “stereotype threat.” This is a well-known effect in which stigmatized groups — such as African-Americans or women — perform worse when prompted to focus on negative stereotypes about their group. Thus, African-Americans taking the SAT, if asked to check a box listing their race before the test, will perform worse than if they were not promoted to do so. Conversely, Asian students asked to mark their race tend to perform better, because of positive stereotypes about academic achievement.

Or, take the case of a female, Asian student — prompted to think about her Asian identity, she is likely to perform better; prompted to think about her female identity, she is likely to do worse.

I want to build me one of those…

Back then, when I had a lot more time on my hands and reddit didn’t exist, a new version of an uprising browser named Firefox was releasing in late November, that was Firefox 1.5, codenamed Deerpark.

A few months before the release, an alpha was released, and immedietly I started playing with it, although it was barely usable, the new features and improvements that came with 1.5 were awesome. I felt the same kind of rush that you feel when you know you’re getting a present that you really want.

With the new release of Firefox 4, I feel exactly the same, after almost 5 years of not having that feeling. I’m waiting for a browser to be released in it’s final version.

Daily Use

I’ve stopped using Firefox as my main browser a while ago, at least 6 months now. I’m using using Firefox at work, where I need the powerful and very comfortable Firebug, but for browsing and web apps, I can’t work with anything but Chrome.

The main two features that keep me from using Firefox as my personal browser is speed, and the ability to detach tabs & create Application Shurtcuts.

Chromes Application Shortcuts combined with a few neat global keyboard hotkeys released me from most of the desktop apps

I have a setup that allow me to launch Gmail using Win Key+G, and it loads instantly, I don’t mean it loads in under 10 seconds, it’s ready the second the window decorations are ready and the window is fully opened (Win 7 has a small animation of a window fading in).

Although I still have lots of desktop application, most of my work on the computer is done using web apps, from project management to music, I got so used to Gmail that I can barely stand using Outlook while at work. Today I’m practically addicted to Chrome. I’ve tried other browsers, but Chrome usually gets me back after a very short time.

Chrome is blazing fast, and it’s always there, no matter how long the window was open, or what runs on it and almost never crashes. It has a few advantages, but those advantages should be picked up by browser vendors pretty quickly. Opera is pretty neat, and Webkit is nice also, but Firefox, with it’s huge repository of extensions and the almost never ending way of customization is lagging behind, and I don’t care what the hypesters will say.

Firefox is laggy & slow, a memory hog, Yes, I have extensions, and don’t tell me to uninstall a few, and it’s not the fault of Firefox, because it is, it should be able to manage the extensions it allows you to install instead of blaming poor performance on the extension. Firefox’s Extensions are it’s power, and that what made it famous, and made us all use it in the first place.

Hopes and Dreams

I really hope that Firefox 4 will be all that it’s promised to be, I have a lot more dreams I would like to implement natively in Firefox, but the two main features I’m waiting for are Real speed improvement, and the ability to drag tabs out of the window and creating a new window without killing the page or refreshing it and creating application shortcuts. Without those two I can’t really live at the moment.

But if you allow me to really dream for a moment, these features I really hope that will be implemented and will be actually working: Plugin memory management, Ability to customize bookmarks toolbar, a few improvements to the awesome-bar with better searching (again, related to bookmarks).

As it looks at the moment, Firefox is still in beta, and I’m not stating the obvious, because for Firefox 1.5, 2, and 3, beta versions were pretty stable releases, and were practically usable, but with the current beta version, it feels like the only thing was changed is the UI, and that sucks somehow, because I was expecting to see the fireworks, but nothing really works, or wasn’t implemented yet.

I really hope that Firefox 4 will be at least as good as Chrome, it really can, just make sure you don’t go into a stagnation due to your size, make bold steps, Firefox, please go back to Making the Web better.