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  SOME LESSONS LEARNED

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.Today, I wanted...

   Investor,Startup,Lesson,Experience,Investment     2011-10-12 11:47:02

  The Five Stages of Hosting

As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here. 1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all t...

   Website hosting,Recommendations,Stages,Advantages     2012-01-30 05:43:42

  File upload once again

File upload is one of the oldest operation of web design. After 20 years, it's still has no big change, difficult to handle, lack of interaction and poor user experience. Web developers have thought many methods to improve the experience of uploading file in web apps, they developed various plugins based on different JavaScript libraries. However, because of the difference among different web browsers, there is no common interface which makes these plugins work properly or easily on all web brow...

   Web design, File upload, Asynchronous,HTML5     2012-09-02 11:52:21

  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong. Here’s wh...

   Learning,Thought,Before,Wrong     2012-01-30 05:45:36

  About JavaScript source map

Last week jQuery 1.9 was released. This is the last release before jQuery 2.0. It adds many new functions, one of them is the source map. By accessing http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js , you can scroll to the last line and you will see below line :  //@ sourceMappingURL=jquery.min.map This is source map, it is a separate file and it is put at the same directory as the source file. You can click here and see what it looks like. It's an very useful functio...

   Source map, JavaScript, jQuery     2013-02-01 07:06:44

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  GDC 2012: How Vector Unit made the leap from console to mobile games

Matt Small, creative director at independent developer Vector Unit, thought his small studio would focus on consoles forever when it was working on Hydro Thunder Hurricane for Xbox Live Arcade. But then the smartphone and tablet market picked up, and mobile devices started to offer increasing amounts of processing power. That increase in power opened up new opportunities for the people at Vector Unit, which had years of developing for consoles. So the studio worked with Tegra chipmaker Nv...

   Advice,Game design,Palm,Phone,Change     2012-03-14 13:46:22

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  Helping people find good Perl tutorials

If a co-worker comes to you and asks you: "I would like to learn Perl, where can I find a good Perl Tutorial?", I am sure your would have a few recommendations. If the same person did not know you she would have to type some search term in Google and hope she found the right learning material.Recently Christian Walde (Mithaldu) asked "How do newbies find Perl learning materials online?". Dave Cross responded by checking the top results when searching for "perl tutorial".It shows that many p...

   Perl,Perl tutorial,Resource,Website     2011-11-03 13:34:33

  Google Dart? Don’t bet against JavaScript

Procotols, programming languages and operating systems all compete in a constantly evolving software ecosystem. Out of that ecosystem only a few technologies truly have staying power and survive over the long term. An example? How about Ethernet? It’s been a survivor over the last thirty years despite existing in a constantly changing landscape that’s been populated with many worthy competitors. Ethernetâ€â„...

   Google Dart,JavaScript,Comparison,Future     2011-12-06 09:49:39