One-of-a-Kind Partners
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
I believe that anyone who has gone through college/uni would defintely have certain experience with “certain” people: the ticks, the prarasites, the lazy asses who leave assignments to you. Having such one-of-a-kind partners when doing assingments are certainly horrfying, especially if it’s a 2-pserson project, and when the marks are shared equally. I call’em one-of-a-kind coz you can’t really find uber-lazy attitude in college. Maybe lazy is not the right adjective, irresponsible would be better.
The “mini project” that we did this semester required us to work in teams of 2 to develop a membership system with “whatever language you choose”, though Visual Basic 6 is the preferred language. The thing is that the marks are not given individually on the parts that you do, marks are given to the team as a whole. Both partners get the same marks. So if one fella decides to do a crappy job, both of them will get crappy marks. Read the rest of this entry »
Meme?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Poor me, I still have no idea as to what on Earth is a meme. I can hardly understand the explanation at dictionary.com or at google. But looking at ItchyHands’ post here, I guess I’ll just list to you stuff that I read often:
Monthly Magazines: can’t afford any. But Treehouse e-magazine does look rather interesting.
Must read websites:
- 456 Berea Street: “Between Web Standards Boulevard and Accessibility Road”
- Particletree
- AJAX Magazine
- Webgraphics
- Ajaxian
As a web designer/developer, you would naturally want to know what cool sites are popping up. So head on to Techcrunch since tt covers everything Web 2-ish. Lastly, do checkout the Yahoo! UI Blog and the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library.
That’s about all the stuff that I read on the net, other than the regular , News.com, EWeek and Neowin. As you can see, most of it are programming/scripting related =P, but hope you’ll find them useful anyway.
Tags: out_there
What I’m Busy with Lately
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
The last couple of weeks were super busy for me. We had a subject called “Information Systems Development” where we’re required to develop a simple membership system for a fictionous business. Firstly, we were required to crap about the company’s background. Then came the planning process: creating DFDs, Entity-Relationship diagrams and so on.
I find the ER-diagrams quite useful, as you’d refer to it when making queries. However, the usefulness of DFD has yet to be seen by me, especially with a project this size. It’s “formal-ness” and the requirement to include every single freaking detail is certainly beyond my understanding. For example, why would you need to draw out a diagram for a reporting module? If your report is really that complicated, a seperate sheet that lists the steps taken to render that report would be more useful in my opinion.
Unfortunately, my course: “Information Systems Engineering” puts too little focus on the basic foundation: programming. It’s very apparent in this project we did this semester. There were hardly any emphasis on the coding approach taken. Sigh, sometimes it makes me think if I chose the right place to further my studies.. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: college-assignments, general programming
Demonstrate your Position in High Society
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Do you belong to high society? Then take this chance to demonstrate your position in an unambiguous manner.
Click here to sign up for an “exclusive” web mail account, with 512 MB space and some other features, for an amazing introductory price of US$ 399 a month. Plus, you’ll have the exclusive use of username@millionaire24.com, which is so much “cooler” than @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. There’s a 10,000 user limit! So act quick and sign up today!
That’s USD 3,990,000 a month for you to operate a mail-service. Heck, at US$ 399 a month, I can have a me@sirname.com address, and a dedicated mail server. I really feel sad for those who do sign up.
Tags: humour
XML? You Gotta be Kiddin…
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
If you’re tried doin your own Ajax app, no matter the size, you’ll probably know for a fact that parsing XML with JavaScript is no easy feat. Heck, the word “parsing” doesn’t even make it sound easy. Most of us would resort to setting things up in such a way that the server returns (X)HTML codes that are slapped into the DOM tree. For small “applications”, like my explore box, using some overweight library just to parse XML for display is foolish. Small “applications” should of course, feel small. They should load quickly and respoind instaneously.
So introducing: JSON (JavaScrip Object Notation). Simply put, JSON is yet another text-based way of representing data (like XML), but it can be parsed much more easily. How easily? For JavaScript, zero libraries are needed. How easily? Say you have an obejct defined in aJSONtext in JSON notation, all you need is: var myObject = eval('(' + aJSONtext + ')');. And there you have a JavaScript object with the necessary data. More on JSON in JavaScript here.
Unfortunately, XML is not well suited to data-interchange, much as a wrench is not well-suited to driving nails. It carries a lot of baggage, and it doesn’t match the data model of most programming languages. When most programmers saw XML for the first time, they were shocked at how ugly and inefficient it was. It turns out that that first reaction was the correct one. There is another text notation that has all of the advantages of XML, but is much better suited to data-interchange. That notation is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
You can read about JSON versus here at it’s official site. JSON’s (I don’t know if it’s “J-S-O-N” or simply “Jason”) been around for a while now. But there’s a number of recent articles tat you should read: JSON versus XML, speeding up AJAX with JSON and XMLHTTPRequest versus iFrames.
The article on iFrames is pretty interesting. You could probably conclude that using iFrames + JavaScript (JSON) is the better compared to AJAX.
