Archive for the 'tech' Category

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Many Directions

Published on September 30, 2006 in personal and tech. 1 Comment

Web Directions South has just wrapped in Sydney, but while I wait for the shower in our hotel room to be free I figured I should record a few rapidly fading memories.

Having attended last year’s Web Essentials 05 as a vicarious observer, getting to contribute to the conversation this year as a speaker alongside the inimitable Cameron Adams was a huge treat.

Despite a flaky Internet connection, our talk, JavaScript APIs & Mashups: Work You Don’t Have To Do, brought the house down thanks to a few generous helpings of serendipity and the nimble photography of one Lucas Chan that led to a photo taken early in our talk making a cameo appearance onscreen moments later.

Thankfully, I managed to distance myself from the topless rivalry between Cameron and Jeremy Keith this year, but I may have to revise some of the privacy settings on my Flickr account if I’m invited back next year (not that lack of evidence was a deterrent for the resourceful Cam).

My deep and sincere apologies to the family and friends of the moth that I killed during the presentation. If it’s any consolation, I suspect I will be living down the phrase “Ooh, a moth!” for several years to come.

Thanks, Priscilla, for being such a good sport when I dragged you up on stage to test your humanity with HotCaptcha. Take pride in having failed!

Amazing people aplenty at the conference, and it was a privilege to get to exchange thoughts and banter with so many of them: Molly, Andy, Derek, Jeremy, James, Gian, Laurel, Thomas, and the many readers of SitePoint (new and old) at the closing night party (yes, even those that were just after free drink cards)… I am truly overwhelmed.

It’s 3.15am. I catch a flight to Spain with Molly and Andy in exactly twelve hours, and I still have a newsletter to write. Perhaps I’ll skip the shower and get straight to bed.

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del.icio.us Max Notes Length Greasemonkey Script

Published on September 18, 2006 in tech. 1 Comment

When using the Firefox extension to post a link to the del.icio.us social bookmarking service, I’ve often typed long, informative descriptions into the “Notes” field, only to see that text cut short when I submit the link.

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RRR Interview MP3

Published on June 23, 2006 in personal and tech. 0 Comments

My interview about SitePoint and our new AJAX book is available for the next four weeks in MP3 format on the Byte Into It web site.

More permanently, you can also grab it here: RRR AJAX Interview (MP3, 10MB).

Talkin’ AJAX on RRR

Published on June 21, 2006 in personal and tech. 0 Comments

I’ll be appearing on RRR‘s Byte Into It tonight (102.7FM in Melbourne) between 7PM and 8PM to talk about AJAX and plug SitePoint’s latest book, Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications. There is a podcast feed for the show, or you can just download the episode from the archive if you prefer. I’ll mirror it here once it goes live.

Windows Vista Beta 2 64-bit Installation Attempt Failed

Published on June 11, 2006 in tech. 13 Comments

Like a good nerd, I spent my Saturday installing the latest pre-release operating system on my computer. Having bought a 64-bit processor several years ago, now, I figured it was about time to try running a 64-bit operating system on it, so I downloaded the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Beta 2.

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Huge Google Earth Update

Published on June 9, 2006 in Australia, geekdom, snippets and tech. 1 Comment

With this update, the southeast of Melbourne is now in high-resolution, as is Jess’s home town of Hamilton!(1)

Web Standards Group tonight

Published on May 25, 2006 in personal and tech. 0 Comments

I’m speaking at the Melbourne Web Standards Group tonight about techniques for producing rounded corners on the Web. Come along if you’re in town—free pizza for all!

Bikely

Published on May 24, 2006 in geekdom, JavaScript, snippets and tech. 0 Comments

Jules has whipped up this sexy Google Maps mashup for sharing bike routes.
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Google Maps does Aus/NZ streets

Published on May 19, 2006 in Australia, snippets and tech. 0 Comments

The maps look great with property boundaries, but still no search. Zoomin had better move fast!
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Keeping Up is for Suckers

Published on May 3, 2006 in geekdom, personal and tech. 2 Comments

Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog is always great reading, particularly if you’re interested in how people take in information. Though it has a definite tilt towards the world of Java development, most of the articles speak in general terms about learning and design — you won’t see any code here.

Kathy’s recent article The myth of “keeping up” really hit home with me. Loosely speaking, my day job is to monitor the entire realm of web technology. Realistically, this is one of those areas that is bigger than one person’s brain. Even if I spent 24 hours a day reading about the latest web technology (let alone reporting on it), I wouldn’t be able to keep up.

So… it’s time to let that go. You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you’ll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, “Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band…”

I never liked Weezer anyway.

Kathy offers plenty of good advice for being selective and efficient about what you choose to stay on top of. She mentions jumping on aggregators, tools that collect information from many sources and distill it down into an efficient view.

My aggregator of choice is BlogBridge (I even contribute code to the project, which is open source and cross platform), which has a whole range of subtle but indispensable tools that allow me to filter my information intake according to the amount of time I have available on any given day.

Another item of advice that Kathy offers is to track down an expert in any field you want to learn and get a breakdown what things you absolutely must learn, what things you probably should learn, what things would be nice to learn, and what things you can ignore.

Kathy goes on to suggest that technical publishers like SitePoint (where I work) should be thinking about these issues too, rather than just pumping out bricks of undigestable knowledge.

There’s an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).

I personally think SitePoint is doing a pretty decent job of this already, but there is always room for improvement.