Friday, December 09, 2005

what the wg?

IBM DeveloperWorks is running a great short peice on the future of HTML. The amazing bit is that if you're using Safari or Firefox 1.5, the future is here:


http://rig.vlad1.com/~vladimir/canvas/cdemo1.html


http://developer.mozilla.org/samples/raycaster/RayCaster.html

posted by Yishay at 9:28 am 0 comments

Monday, November 21, 2005

the things they don't teach you in programming school

posted by Yishay at 5:39 pm 0 comments

Monday, November 14, 2005

and now for something completely different

Quotes on programming. some more geek humor. I liked this one:
"God is Real, unless declared Integer" - J.Allan Toogood, FORTRAN programmer
But you have to know a thing or two about the pain of FORTRAN to understand.

posted by Yishay at 4:46 pm 0 comments

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers

I found it. I knew I will if I just look hard enough (Is that a general theorem - what ever you want on the web is out there, just need to know how to find it?). Any way. Ever since I dumped windows, my main problem was to find a replacement for EndNote. Not that EndNote is such a charm, but it did the job and I couldn't find something that would do it in my new setup. besides, I wanted something web2.0 - online, shareable, tagged. well, here it is. http://www.citeulike.org

posted by Yishay at 12:58 am 0 comments

Monday, October 31, 2005

Just what I was looking for.

iseff: Introducing Openomy

It's time to introduce Openomy. It's far from complete and I have a lot of work left to do, but I want to get feedback as soon as possible, so let's start with the concept:

In short, Openomy is an online file system with an open API anyone can use to develop applications to meet their needs.

I think Openomy can be best described in more detail through the concepts which derived it. I'll break this up into three distinct concepts,

1. Openness and APIs,
2. Tagging, and
3. AJAX.

So, register on:
http://www.openomy.com/register

And send my your username, so we can start sharing. Mine is "yish"

posted by Yishay at 11:36 am 0 comments

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Talk to her (your coworker, your Dalia, whatever)

There's an entertaining thread on the PPIG discussion list about the importance of discussing your programming problems. The consensus is that its always good to talk about your problems. Event to a plant, and even to an English major. However, it is even better if your peer knows something about what your talking about.

posted by Yishay at 4:01 pm 0 comments

Painless HTML

This one's an html editor packaged as a Firefox extension. So, easy install, platform independent, and it works pretty well. Lets you navigate between code, structure and design views etc.

Of course, you need to be using Firefox as your browser first, but I'm sure you already are!

posted by Yishay at 10:37 am 0 comments

What me? Let w3c do it!

One nice thing about giving programming exercises is that you don't have to check them. Let the software do it for you. Well, not really, but at least you can expect it to be debugged.

posted by Yishay at 9:51 am 0 comments

25 seconds

that's the time it took since I posted until some stupid spammer left his greasy fingerprints on the blog. Pray, why? Do you guys really think that because you say "I like your blog" I will leave your plug for flavored nappies on my blog? Please - explain.

posted by Yishay at 1:03 am 0 comments

Warning: Programming can be bad for you

well, not. This is a bit of a long-winded rant, and I can't say how much of it I find convincing (although parts of it are). What I like about it that its an authentic piece of hard-core geek-speak, and yet - I think - human readable.

posted by Yishay at 12:46 am 1 comments

Monday, October 24, 2005

hit me with your javascript! hit me!

Ok, let's do some programming. We'll make a button that says "hit me!" but when you do, it shouts "ouch!". Something like this -


Unfortunatly, we can't do that on the blog - it blocks scripts. but no worries. just create an html file and open it in a plain text editor. (and don't ask me how to do that on a mac!)

An html file is a text file that starts with the tag <html> and ends with the corrosponding closing tag </html> Within that, there's usualy a "head" and a "body". So a minimal page would look like:


<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>



Try it. Create an empty text file, call it something.html, edit it in a text editor and insert the above. Now save it and open it in your browser.

It's probably not very interesting to look at. Why don't you add some text in the body? Or a title in the head, as in -

<title>groovy hedghogs </title>

Next, the button. So the guys who inveneted HTML thought: "why would there be a button, if not to do provide some input in a form?" Hence a button is a kind of input gizmo, and always part of a form. Which means, its in the context of a form tag. i.e. -


<form>
<input type="button" />
</form>


You also probably want to add a value="something" to your button.

And now - the ouch! For that, we need a bit of JavaScript. Once you get this done, you can call your frinds and tell them you coded. JavaScript is a programming language - or, as the name implies, a scripting language. All it has in common with java is 4 letters. JavaScript allows you to program interactions on web-pages (as oposed to interactions on the server, which are invoked throught the page). Here's a piece of JavaScript:

<script lang=JavaScript">
function boo() {
alert('hoo');
}
</script>

I think its pretty self explanatory. So I'll move on. What you want to do is create a script like this in your page and attach it to the event of a user clicking on your button. So, copy the code (including the script tag) to your page above the button (think why). And add the onclick event handler to your button:
<input type="button" value="blahh" onclick="boo();" />
Done.

Now check if it works, and if you still have the energy, go figure how to pass the text to display as a parameter to the function.

posted by Yishay at 12:58 am 0 comments