Fuji Instax
November 21, 2008
Just plants!
November 20, 2008
Sonic & Mario
November 20, 2008
way-HOOO
Perryman’s Gingerbread Babies
November 19, 2008
What a great combination…
A List Apart Survey 2008
August 15, 2008
I took the survey!
My new Action Book
July 18, 2008
I’m heavily in to task management and organisation (although I’m not very good at it), and I’m very fond of GTD. Most of my planning and organisation is based on the GTD method.
I use Things on Mac to manage my tasks, iCal to manage due dates and deadlines, and take notes on a plan old pad during meetings. Fingers crossed they get Things for iPhone (which looks great so far) syncing with the desktop version very soon.
Anyway, a couple of guys at work started talking about Action Method. At first I was very confused, and didn’t really understand Action Method, it seemed to me like just another implementation of GTD. The guys bought the Action Book and few other bits and pieces from Behance. They arrived, and I started to understand Action Method a bit more.
As I see it (and I’ll underline that, this is just my interpretation), it is a really good off-line (analog, non-digital, pen and paper) task management method. While GTD isn’t specifically online or digital, there are many good applications and web applications that will help you manage tasks, GTD style.
Because I’m a big believer and fan of most things being digital (I rarely get photos printed these days, but prefer to share my photos with friends and family via Flickr) I didn’t think the Behance products and the Action Method were going to be of any benefit for me. However there was still one aspect of my workflow that is always off-line, my note taking.
My new Action Book
So, I got an Action Book!
My note taking was ad hoc, messy and really confused me when I came back to it even a day later. The Action Book is a fantastic means to quickly and easily take notes when in a meeting with a client, yet provide a simple framework for keeping my notes organised and structured.
I now have a place for organising what I want to achieve in the meeting, a place to jot down random bits and pieces, a section to note specific tasks that I need to complete, and larger, longer term notes that I can come back to and address later but aren’t immediately important (the back burner).
My Action Book has only just arrived, so I’ll write another post in a month or so about my Action Method learning’s.
Microformats and jQuery
June 20, 2008
I’ve been reading a book on Microformats, written by John Allsop. I’m not very far into the book yet, but so far it sounds very interesting.
I’ve read a fair bit about Microformats in many blog posts, and the microformats website itself is very informative. While I understand and appreciate that microformats are important for the greater good of the internet infrastructure, as a business owner and manager of the development team, I’ve been struggling to find a business proposition as to why we should start using them in our website development.
I assumed they would make coding more complex and perhaps increase client budgets (through development time) for no real gain for the client. I’m still tossing around the idea in my head, of how can the client really benefit from the use of microformats on their website.So I decided to play with a few microformats and dreamed up a hCard and jQuery combination (or mashup?).
Using jQuery it was really easy to dig into the body of the page and pull out address information, which is exactly what microformats are all about, creating markup that firstly humans can read and second computers can read.
Once you have the data using jQuery, your imagination is the limit really. I came up with a few trivial examples. The first example demostrates mining for the address and simply linking it to maps.google.com.au. The second example mines for the addresses and then as you click on them, plots them on a Google Map. I was amazed at how quickly and easy it was to program these examples using jQuery.
With this expirmentation I’ve found the business proposition and argument as to why we should start programming using microformats where possible; they make development easier and faster all the while increasing the infrastructure of the web!
You can download the source for the microformat and jQuery examples.
Tree Inspector, Version 0.3
June 4, 2008
I’m at it again! We had another tree problem the other day which I was involved in fixing. However, this wasn’t a standard sized tree, it was huge!
I whipped out the tree inspector and starting working away on the tree. Everything was going smoothly, but with such a large tree and so many levels deep, it became really confusing, really fast!
I’ve updated the tree inspector with +, - and | placed strategically so it looks a little more like the trees as displayed in Explorer (on Windows). I will update this to use images at some point, but I didn’t want to make the distribution of the tree inspector hard (at the moment it is one file, and nice and easy to install). I’ll look into embedding images into the HTML using base64 encoding.
I’ve also encountered a seemingly common problem with the basic HTTP authentication that I added in the last version. On a couple of windows based servers the basic http controlled authentication (using the WWW-Authenticate header) wasn’t working properly (better described here).
If you’re working with a shared host, this is not always so easy to fix. In this instance, it was easier to comment the authentication code out of the script, upload, use it and then delete the file. I decided to make it easier to disable the authentication, and now you can turn it on or off by changing the bUseAuthentication variable at the top of the script.
Happy tree fixing.
Tree Inspector, Version 0.2
May 26, 2008
I had a situation this morning, in which I had to whip out the Tree Inspector to resolve a problem with a FarCry tree. Some of the nlevel values were wrong, but Tree Inspector didn’t allow me to fix those; so now it does!
I’ve added a version number to the top (along with a h1 title), and you can now modify the nlevel values by checking the checkbox appearing next to each node.
It also occurred to me, that if this file sits unprotected on a website, someone who knows the name of the file can do some real damage. So I’ve added basic Authentication support to the script so it is now protected by default.
You should change the username and password before using the script, and I suggest you upload the file, use it and then remove it. Just like the install directory (that comes with FarCry), this is a file that shouldn’t be sitting on a production server.
Cairngorm Stub Files
May 23, 2008
I really like Cairngorm, I think it is an excellent framework to build RIAs in. I just don’t like all the work, memory involved in setting it up all the time.
I’m not really sure how others do this, but I usually grab an example application (such as the Advanced Cairngorm Store) and start ripping out all the bits and pieces I don’t need. This is a laborious and boring task, so I decided to do something about it.
I created a set of Cairngorm Stub Files (setup under the com.example path). They contain stub-code/files for most of the Cairngorm infrastructure that you would usually use in a Cairngorm project.
The files make a nice starting point, and because there are so many bits and pieces to the Cairngorm Framework, they also act as a nice cheat sheet to all of the classes, and patterns in Cairngorm.
Let me know if you find any bugs and I’ll update the stub files.
