posted

January 2, 2012

Typography: An Essential Element of Modern Website Design

by

 

Typography (from the Greek words τύπος(typos) = form and γραφή(graphy) = writing) is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible.

wikipedia

 
Typography is an under-appreciated art form which is used most often and probably understood the least. Typography is of high importance for printing and screening, as well as for websites. Some of you are probably wondering just why I am making such a big deal about typography and why should folks in the web industry, like us, care about typography. Let me tell you this: “web design is  95% typography“.

read on

posted

December 4, 2011

Is Software a Science or an Art?

by

As we approach software today, often through web or mobile applications, people generally appreciate the elegance of the interaction or lack thereof. But as software engineers know, there is a lot going on behind the scenes.  Of course, with user interfaces for the masses becoming a necessity for modern applications, designers and more artistic–oriented folks have been contributing to the practice of software development. That leads to the question: Is software more of a science or an art?

read on

posted

November 29, 2011

How to set up and exploit an Apache Solr environment on Amazon EC2

by

What’s Solr?

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.

read on

posted

November 28, 2011

JQuery DataTable Plugin Pagination

by

One of the most common tasks when displaying data through an HTML table is to allow the user to manipulate data within the table. Displaying data on a grid can involve many different operations (retrieving, sorting, live editing, search). Using AJAX to dynamically fill the table requires even more work since the application (in this case, javascript code) has to convert JSON/XML/TEXT data to an HTML element. Each of these tasks can involve more or less time in order to be completed, and of course, tested.

read on

posted

November 19, 2011

Why Things Go Wrong: A Simple Programming Problem

by

Much of programming is writing code with an obvious solution, it’s being a code monkey. You lay things out, you move them around, you wire it up, but you don’t really need to stop and think. I’d estimate that everyone is about equally good at this. But some of the work is also spent solving problems you’ve never seen before. This is where bugs are introduced, bad decisions are made, schedules are thrown out, and things go wrong. These problems are the really defining part of being a great programmer.

read on

posted

November 9, 2011

Twitter Stock Ticker

by

Last night I was rummaging through some of my past projects doing a little winter cleaning, and I stumbled upon this jQuery plugin that I wrote a while back. I ran the code to see if it still functions (it was using jQuery  1.3). And to my pleasant surprise, the code still runs like a charm. So, I just want to take the time to share it with you all.

read on

posted

November 7, 2011

Android Pattern Lock on iPhone

by

I’m a loyal user of iPhone. I’ve been using it since its first version and now I’m on 4S. Though I’m staying in iOS camp and don’t have any intention of moving, I occasionally get the urge to test out and see what’s out there. That’s the reason why I convinced myself to own and play with Dell Streak 5″ phone and Google Nexus S. They are both smart smart-phones. But it’s hard to pick their pros and cons by simply “playing” with it. You’ve got to use it. Daily. For everything including surfing, speed dialing, social-networking and games. Everything. And that’s something that I didn’t get a chance to do until last summer when I was traveling and in need of an unlocked phone. I could make my iPhone work (don’t ask me how) but thought I’d give an Android phone a real kick.

read on

posted

November 2, 2011

Dieter Rams’s Ten Commandments

by

You might not be aware of it yet, however SFMOMA (the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art) is currently hosting Dieter Rams’s “Less but Better” product exhibit.

You might also not be aware of who Dieter Rams is, since he is not directly related to the software industry.

Indeed, for almost 40 years Dieter Rams was Chief of Design at Braun’s:  he designed record players, razors, radio sets, etc.

read on

posted

October 17, 2011

A quick introduction to not editing video

by

Pop quiz!

Given (A) foo.mov, (B) bux.avi, and (C) baz.m4v, which can your video software handle correctly?

  1. A
  2. A & B
  3. All of them
  4. All or some or none of them depending on their codecs, your software’s codecs, and whether they’re doing anything special with the container format.

read on