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  7 big mistakes that make your layout a disaster

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a desi...

   Web design,Mistakes,Content,White space     2011-11-24 03:36:23

  Surprising applications of math

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the ...

   Math,Number theory,Algorithms,Differential euqation     2011-11-18 09:24:19

  Apps and web apps and the future

Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future: The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. Let’s set aside one thing right away. The browser is an app. Text editors, outliners, and web servers are apps. And, without them, there’s no web at all. Somebody has to write these things. That implies APIs and more tools ...

   App,Web app,Future,Difference     2011-12-14 07:10:43

  How I explained MapReduce to my Wife?

Yesterday I gave a presentation at Xebia India office on MapReduce. It really went well and audience was able to understand the concept of MapReduce (as per their feedback). So, I was happy that I did a good job in explaining MapReduce concept to a technical audience (mainly Java programmer, some Flex programmer and few testers). After all the hard work and a great dinner at Xebia India office I reached back my home. My wife (Supriya) asked me “How was your session on …ââ‚...

   Java,MapReduce,Java Flex     2011-08-28 04:22:53

  Why is Great Design so Hard?

I want to take a slight detour from usable privacy and security and discuss issues of design. I was recently at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, an annual event where Microsoft discusses some of the big issues and directions they are headed. In one of the talks, a designer at Microsoft mentioned two data points I've informally heard before but had never confirmed. First, the ratio of developers to user interface designers at Microsoft was 50:1. Second, this ratio was better than any other comp...

   Apple,Microsoft,UI design     2011-03-28 02:06:31

  To our youth

Youth is the best period in our life for most of us. We have dreams, passions and energies. We can work day and night for our dreams.We can hang out with friends the whole day. But there will always be a day when we are not young anymore, our youth will pass by. We will not be able to go back to our youth any more. Do you have anything to say about your youth? Recently, a Chinese IT engineer @本座 wrote a short code snippet to describe our youth. Here we share what she writes: public vo...

   Youth,Programming,Rollback     2013-05-02 05:26:56

  How to fire an employee who is not good enough?

It's always a tough decision to make to fire an employee. No matter he/she performs how bad, it's hard for the boss to say one person is fired. How to fire an employee who is not good enough? On Quora, there is one such question asked and we think one answer is very attractive and useful. The answer is given by Michael O. Church who is a New York functional programmer. The best employees are multipliers who make others more productive, and next are the adders (workhorses). Subtracters are the g...

   Fire,Career,Talent     2012-09-13 20:04:34

  passing parameters to XMLHttpRequest’s onreadystatechange function

I’ve been smashing my head against this all day – but I finally got something working consistently and reliable, so I better damn well document it. This is as good a place as any, and hopefully it will be useful to others.I needed to make an Ajax call, so I turned to my good friend XMLHttpRequest. One wrinkle was that I needed to pass in a parameter to it… so I tried:var test = "bar"; req = new XMLHttpRequest(); req.open("GET", myURL, true); req.foo = test; req.onreadystatech...

   JavaScript,AJAX,XMLHttpRequest,parameter,onreadystatechange     2011-10-09 01:32:09

  noConflict mechanism in jQuery

Many JavaScript frameworks like to use $ as function or variable name, jQuery is one of them. In jQuery, $ is just a reference to window.jQuery, so even if $ is deleted, window.jQuery will still be available to ensure the whole library can work normally. jQuery API design takes fully consideration of multiple frameworks conflicts, we can use jQuery.noConflict function to easily handle control. jQuery.noConflict accepts one optional boolean parameter[1] to determine whether to hand jQuery object ...

   jQuery,noConflict,$     2013-03-14 19:40:36

  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

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