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  Small team? Fix your life with a non-virtual assistant

Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research.I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me?I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this ambiguity is indicative of the issues).Most of my mindless time-sinks involve at least a credit card number and are often a con...

   Work,Assistant,Team,Small,Individual,Get an assistant     2011-10-28 10:26:36

  Speech balloon with pure CSS--One step further

Many of us want to add cool features to our websites to make our websites user friendly ad more attractive. Especially in Web2.0 era. Today we are talking about adding speech balloon feature to our webpage so that we can display beautiful help windows while users mouse over some help icons on our page. First, let me introduce one post written by Umar Ashfaq named "How to create a speech balloon with pure CSS". He also explains how this works. You can also refer Magic CSS shape for more informati...

   Speech balloon, Pure CSS,border     2013-03-16 04:11:58

  Management Myth #1: The Myth of 100% Utilization

A manager took me aside at a recent engagement. “You know, Johanna, there’s something I just don’t understand about this agile thing. It sure doesn’t look like everyone is being used at 100 percent.”“And what if they aren’t being used at 100 percent? Is that a problem for you?”“Heck, yes. I’m paying their salaries! I want to know I’m getting their full value for what I’m paying them!”“What if I told you...

   Management,Utilization,Efficiency,Innovation     2012-01-05 08:13:41

  Rediscovering the RSync Algorithm

A:Ok, you’re synchronizing this over the web; and what do you use for the synchronization? B: Oh, we implemented the rsync algorithm. A: uhu. And what do you do with really big files? B: The same. A: And you also synchronise folders? B: Yes. A: And how do you do that? B: we iterate over the folder, using the algorithm on every file, recursing over subfolders. A: Can you try 2 things for me? First, a very large file; and second, a large codebase, and see if it holds. Introduction First ...

   ReSync algorithm,Discovery     2012-02-14 10:47:24

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Cross Browser HTML5 Drag and Drop

HTML5 Drag and Drop has been talked about a lot lately, but it’s hard to find really useful information about implementing it across multiple browsers.Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft all have pages describing how to use it, but their examples seem to work only in their particular browser (Apple’s example doesn’t even work in their own! Updated, Jan. 11, 2009: Although I have not been able to get this example working on Safari 2.0.4 and 3....

   HTML5,Drag and drop, Demo,Source code,Cr     2011-09-20 13:42:45

  Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3

As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today? Don’t get me wrong. We all need to understand HTML5 and CSS3. And a lot of it can be used today. My point is that we seem to be spending a disproportionate about of time reading up on the subject when so many other areas deserve our attention. While others are reading yet another tut...

   Clients, Opinion, Web Designers     2011-06-24 00:55:06

  Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote

The other day, a friend asked me a seemingly simple question: what's the best way to convert a list of integers into a string, presuming that the integers are ASCII values. For instance, the list [97, 98, 99] should be converted to the string 'abc'. Let's assume we want to write a function to do this. The first version I came up with was totally straightforward: def f1(list): string = "" for item in list: string = string + chr(item) return string ...

   Python,Optimization,Anecdote,Loopup,ASCII     2011-12-18 10:52:49

  What else is new in C# 5?

The big new feature in C# 5 is asynchronous programming support, which I wrote about last week. However, the C# folks have also slipped in a couple of smaller features and I thought I’d round things out by mentioning those. Method caller information There’s a complete style guide to be written on Writing Enterprisey Code, but one of my favourite “enterprisey” tells, after the use of Visual Basic, is obsessively logging every function you pass through: Function Ad...

   C# 5,New feature,Analysis     2012-03-20 07:45:11

  HP To Apple: You Win.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world. That phrase was one of the first things that jumped to my mind today when I heard the news that HP was not only killing off their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC busine...

   HP,Apple,Palm,Competition,webOs     2011-08-19 07:38:41

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