Just a quick note to translators: there is a unit test that you can use to check what strings remain to be translated. Make a copy of /test/pt_BR_TestTemp.php for your language and run it. This will list strings that are missing and strings that are no longer needed.
Added by Jonathan Aquino on June 26, 2007 at 12:39pm —
1 Comment
When reading a programming book, it can be tempting to skim the code examples. But they likely have some nuggets that are worth learning. The problem is that we don't like to read code written by other people - or at least it doesn't come naturally to us. What we need is a technique for rapid understanding of new code.
I propose
reading the code aloud. Now, to make sure we don't get distracted by syntactic details, we can probably come up with some rules for what to omit.…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on March 13, 2007 at 1:29am —
No Comments
So, we recently made a major release of the Ning Core. The Core, as we call it, is the platform stuff which provides all the services used by the playground (the PHP stuff). It is mostly written in Java and is (in my opinion) a fairly interesting distributed system.
The most recent change is mostly in how we handle data for a given application. In the past we have optimized heavily for supporting tons of fairly low load applications (the "Bullwinkle" system). With the "Rocky" core we…
Continue
Added by Brian McCallister on February 1, 2007 at 12:44pm —
No Comments
Martin Fowler's
Refactoring (1999) is a landmark book for software engineering. It is a catalog of techniques for cleaning up code. Unfortunately, this remarkable book is tarnished by some frivolous names chosen for its list of "refactoring smells" (anti-patterns). Unlike the memorable pattern names from…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on January 13, 2007 at 2:20am —
No Comments
IE 7 seemed to be faster than Firefox, so I decided to measure page-load times for the two browsers on four popular websites.
My test setup is shown below. None of the three browsers had any extensions installed. Page-load times were measured using IBM Page Detailer on my IBM T43 laptop with a wireless connection to a cable modem, in Victoria BC, Canada.…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 28, 2006 at 1:24am —
No Comments
Received an early Christmas gift - a big Amazon gift certificate. Here's what I chose.
- Design Patterns. This must be the third time I've purchased this book. My first copy was lost; my second, left at my previous employer. When I first encountered this book in 1997, it was a revelation - these beautiful structures and patterns, crisply named and catalogued - Observer, Memento, Adapter, Visitor, Façade… Brilliant…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 22, 2006 at 11:48pm —
No Comments
Just wanted to share a style of code-indentation that I've found to express clearly the logic of if statements and other control structures inside template files. That is, when PHP and HTML are mixed together, this technique can make it much clearer what's going on (in terms of nested structures, such as if statements, for loops, etc.).
You simply indent with each level of nesting, regardless of which language you are in; for example:
This makes a…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 21, 2006 at 1:31pm —
No Comments
Our new "eBay Seller Photos" site makes it a snap to drop an embedded slideshow of your auction photos into your auction pages or anywhere else on the Internet It's a version of our popular Ning Photos site that's been juiced up with some eBay-specific features, all made possible by the eBay REST API.
Getting your own eBay Seller Photos site just takes a few seconds (just like getting your own copy of any Ning site) -- visit…
Continue
Added by David Sklar on December 20, 2006 at 5:19pm —
No Comments
I have to put in a good word for the jEdit text editor again. Every so often I find some astonishing new feature in it (such as search-and-run-Java-expression-on).
Here's one that comes in useful for my current i18n project: Using the jEdit Highlight Plugin (and regular expressions) to highlight code that needs to be done (white), code already done (green), and code I don't need to concern myself with (dark blue).
You can color any text you want, specifying the criteria…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 19, 2006 at 3:50pm —
No Comments
Remember when you got your first computer? Modems were not a requirement in that day.
Then you got your first real PC. 14 kbps modems were alright, but for faster downloads from your city's BBS, you really needed a 56 kbps modem. And even with RAM at $50 / MB, it was worth the upgrade from 4 MB to 8 MB, even if it did hurt the wallet. Especially now that MS Word 6.0's come out. Word 2.0 is faster, but 6.0 looks so much better. Yeah, WordPerfect for DOS has a clever WYSIWYG interface,…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 16, 2006 at 11:53pm —
No Comments
Here's how to create a proper "constructor" in Javascript. Note that the confusing "new" operator is not required. Also "private variables" are implemented through the magic of closures.
function gizmo(id) {return {
id: id,
toString: function () {
return "gizmo " + this.id;…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 15, 2006 at 7:13pm —
No Comments
Interesting idea here. Setting the cache headers is key.
Ed Eliot: Automatic merging and versioning of CSS/JS files with PHP
Quote from my friend Doug on
YouTube's upload-UI issues:
Noticeably absent from the list of Amazing Youtube Tools is an uploader tool. I would like to tag and title the video on my mac, maybe using spotlight or…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 14, 2006 at 9:30pm —
No Comments
Joshua Bloch:
How To Design A Good API & Why It Matters (video, 1 hour). Brian's also got a good
list of API links that I'll be reading through next.
Douglas Crockford:
Advanced Javascript (three videos totalling 1 hour). On prototypal inheritance.…
Continue
Added by Jonathan Aquino on December 12, 2006 at 10:30pm —
2 Comments