When I was at university, the subjects that I was taking were all on the Blackboard system.
Granted, it's a commercial product, but the features I found invaluable are as follows:
1) A news button. Here the lecturers/tutors left instructions as to what you should be doing this week, how to contact relevant staff, notification of new assessments or lecture/tutorial notes. News items were in reverse chronological order, and had a date stamp.
2) A lecture notes button. The lecture notes were all here, in PDF/Word format, in chronological order. There was one PDF/Word file per week.
3) A tutorial exercies button. Here were PDF/Word files, in chronological order, that contained activities to do each week. One PDF/Word document per week.
4) An assessment button. Here were PDF/Word documents allowing downloads of assignment sheets, information on exams and a couple of practise exams.
5) A bulletin board for users to post questions/answers and help each other. The lecturers/tutors frequented these pages too.
This format was so easy to understand - every student knew what was required of them. Such a product would only take 1-2 weeks to build in PHP/MySQL.
Some of my subjects also had the ability to upload assignment files (usually Word documents, or source code) - although this might not be required for an English class. Some lecturers used software to check for cheating.
Online learning is good when needed information is at the student's finger tips. They can fit their learning in around work/social committments. It shouldn't really be self paced, otherwise a back-log of work will build up.
Jakob Nielsen - the man who wants all sites on the internet to be written in HTML 3 or 4, with virtually no images. His article is extremely insightful - stating the blatantly obvious.
News flash Jakob - nobody is using 9.6 kbps modems anymore! Graphics can be aesthetically pleasing while making a site more 'useable' than text alone.
New standards and the rich content features of web languages have a reason and a purpose. Graphical browsers have been about for 9 years - isn't it time he used these features, and stopped telling others not to?
After increasing the GAMMA Correction, I saw his speakers under the lower/center monitor. They look rather small, and their seperation is not good for locating other aircraft by listening to where the sound is coming from.
If he wants extra realism, he should have a 4 speaker system FL + FR + BL + BR with a sub-woofer to annoy the neighbours at 3AM.
For the price of all those monitors, I would rather purchase a 23" CRT, if I had the money.
Can anyone familiar with Mac OS X explain why the virtual memory column in the activity meter screenshot has rather high numbers?
http://www.deskmod.com/panther/actmonitor.jpg
If virtual memory represents page file / swap partition access, wouldn't this slow things down a lot? Especially if there was only one disk in the box.
The screenshots look nice, although the look does not appear to have changed much since 10.2
I got a tatoo when I was 21 on my right bicep. If I wear a long or short sleave shirt (the type with a collar), it can't be seen. When my employers eventually saw it, they were not concerned. This is because wearing normal work attire, it is invisible.
I also got a tongue piercing, and it took a week for it to be noticed by my employers. They didn't seem to mind, and I was still allowed to meet clients because it wasn't obviously visible. I ended up taking it out (after a year) because I didn't want to chip my teeth.
I also dyed my hair black (from dark brown)... it wasn't a big change and my employers didn't mind.
If you do get something done, don't make a big deal about it. Get it done for personal reasons, not to impress your colleagues. Don't go to extremes, be subtle and decorate a location on your body that is hidden by business clothing, but not by recreational clothing (if possible).
PS: Don't EVER get a girl's name on a tatoo... If you want to impress her, get a heart tatoo and write her name across it every day with a permanent marker. You *will* thank me one day.
MSIE is very decent at CSS1-2, DHTML, XHTML1, 1.1, 2, etc. In most cases the same code produces the same output on Mozilla. I rarely have to create seperate cases/content for MSIE.
Why would you put an Valid XHTML 1.0 image/link on your site when it clearly isn't XHTML compliant?
Have a look: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2 F%2Fwww.utsc.utoronto.ca%2F~02petraz%2Ficons.shtml
It also isn't CSS compliant: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/val idator?uri=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.utsc.utoronto.ca%2F%7E02petraz%2Fi cons.shtml&warning=2&profile=css2
So maybe you should look at your source code before you criticise MSIE.
By the way, I am a Linux user, so don't think I love M$. I just need to use Windows/MSIE for web development work.
Now if only I could remember by lady's birthday I could walk without a limp:-)
Why buy a book when you can download?
on
PHP Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
I find the documentation from php.net and mysql.org to be first class.
The Windows CHM manual for PHP is easy to navigate and search: http://weblabor.hu/php-doc-chm/ PHP Documentation Downloads: http://www.php.net/download-docs.php MySQL Reference Manuals: http://www.mysql.com/documentation/index .html
PDFs are ideal because you can search/print them easier than HTML. Plus they are free.
RedHat has apt-get support, although not out of the box.
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=393
Don't worry DebianTroll, I will try Debian soon... I have heard many great things about it. My modem connection only achieves 50.6 kbps maximum. I will try to get a copy of Debian 3.0r1 at the next Melbourne Linux User Group meeting. http://www.mlug.org.au/
Try reading the book "Why a university degree will help you get where you want in life." I forget who the author is.
If you enjoying reading, and read/., you might want to consider further study. If you are taking a break for a year, that's ok. Experience is good, but a degree and experience is better. Goodluck binaryhead.
Plastic notes do work well, and the colours make it easy to discern between notes with different values. Personally, I prefer the green ones;-)
The colour of the first plastic $5 notes faded when put through the washing machine, and the black ink came off (read: the Queen's head vanished).
When a recent/. story on the new US notes appeared, I printed the front & back on the same piece of paper, and made a note. It was too easy. The one person I showed it to thought it was real.
Maybe counterfieters are printing notes on transparency slides, the slides used for overhead projectors.
Computer crashes are annoying, although most of them are caused by buggy software, not faulty hardware.
The worst type of crash for me is when the operating system crashes, as opposed to an application crashing. My Windows 98 (fully patched & updated) crashes occasionally. Explorer (not Internet Explorer) crashes frequently, especially after deleting files. When deleted files go to trash, it doesn't crash.
No linux kernel has ever crashed on me. Occasionally an application will crash, but that does not bother me too much.
Applications that allow automatic saves ever X minutes are a great idea. It lessens the worry.
Physics 101: no theory can ever be proved correct, they can only be disproved.
The reason I am concerned about EM radiation is: 1) When ever I talk on my Nokia 3310 I get an instantaneous head ache. 2) The things that you can't see are often the most dangerous.
Sunlight is natural (and quite unavoidable). The incidence of skin cancer has increased with man's activity depleting the ozone layer (I should know - I live in Australia).
I worry about wireless transmissions because there is substantial energy in those EM waves. Being in an enclosed building, surrounded by wireless radio waves transmitted every second may not be safe.
How many people would live next to a TV/radio station transmitter that services a large area? How many people would prefer not to live under high voltage power lines (the type that can light a fluorescent tube at night by holding it up)?
All I'm saying is if it can be done with wires, that's the way I am going to do it.
I don't want to put wireless electromagnetic radiation around myself for 8+ hours a day. I sleep with my mobile near the foot of the bed, not beside my head on the bed side table.
Cables are cheaper, more reliable, presumably safer and less likely to interfere with other devices. Unsightly does not bother me. The risk is too great. Now if only I could stop drinking I will feel totally guilt free;-)
Q) Michael, have you thought of putting together a new Lindows distro to replace Windows NT4/2K/XP/2003 web/database servers?
It would need to have the bare essentials (no need to run Windows programs). Kernel, boot loader, Apache, PHP, MySQL and a minimalistic X-Windows to consume as little memory as possible. A MySQL GUI program and an HTML/PHP editor like Quanta, Bluefish or Screem would be a good idea too.
Businesses are paying far too much for Windows and the client licences, and the same for SQL server. In an IT industry where budgets are low, would such a web server be viable, considering all the business needs to pay for is the hardware, and a nominal $X for Lindows WebSQL Edition? Do you think that Lindows could take on this untouched market and win?
Fancy being able to take a crap and browse the crap @ Micro$oft.com?
Fancy being able to take a slash while reading the latest @/.
(Note: the above posting may have Aussie slang within)
I wouldn't want to touch the toilet loo, especially after everyone's wiped their ass and then touched it. Next they will be playing battleships (with the person in the next cubicle) with brown chunks on the screen.
I can see where AMD is coming from. They are a business, and they are doing their best to remain profitable. It wouldn't be fair to AMD if it's customers used non standard 'grease' (damaging the processor) and needed to replace them under warranty. This has the potential to cost AMD a lot of $$$.
If AMD goes out of business due to replacing thousands of processors, they will stop producing affordable processors and stop working on speed increases. Then most of the world will need to purchase PowerPC or Intel machines at a higher cost.
What is so bad about "Shin Estu" grease? Is it expensive, or hard to get? If this is the case, AMD should consider testing similar products that are cheaper and easier to find. It would not cost much. After all, car manufacturers do not dictate the brand of engine oil that must be used, only the type.
There are two parts to the question of whether HTML/JavaScript can be considered art:
1) Whether the end product can be considered 'art' when viewing it in a web browser, 2) Whether the source code can be considered 'art' when viewing it in a text editor.
More people would agree that the end product is art. Granted, HTML/JavaScript are not efficient tools for creating a painting, but they can arrange/create eye candy. Does this mean crap site designs/implementations are just art that we don't 'appreciate'? In my opinion yes and no. Whilst art is subjective, creating a user interface using such technologies has a lot of objectivity to it... there are many things that should not be done, and code needs to be done in a certain way.
This brings me to the question of whether the code may be considered art. I think to some extent it is. It might not be pretty to someone who hasn't seen HTML/JavaScript before.
As a web developer myself, I think code is artistic. Whilst a traditional artist must have 'fine honed' their skills in order to scuplt, paint, etc. using brushes, strokes, chisels and other tools, so does a web developer. Their skills must be good too.
How you may ask? As with other programming languages, there are coding styles, standards, best practices (like how readable it is). Redundant tags (like poor use of tables to present non-tabular information) should be avoided. I like to put new opening/closing tags on new lines, I like to indent child/nested tags by one tab (within reason of course).
Personally, I think I have made good code when the HTML/XHTML/CSS is validated, when the code has good layout and is readable, and when the parsed version in a web bowser looks good too. Not just in one web browser, but all of the target browsers.
I understand that looking at code is not the same on the eyes as looking at a painting or a sculpture, but it is quite similar on the brain. A sense of anger, pleasure, confort, bewilderment, pride, disappointment, interest, etc. are possible - possibly not to art critics but 'code critics'.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at university, the subjects that I was taking were all on the Blackboard system. Granted, it's a commercial product, but the features I found invaluable are as follows: 1) A news button. Here the lecturers/tutors left instructions as to what you should be doing this week, how to contact relevant staff, notification of new assessments or lecture/tutorial notes. News items were in reverse chronological order, and had a date stamp. 2) A lecture notes button. The lecture notes were all here, in PDF/Word format, in chronological order. There was one PDF/Word file per week. 3) A tutorial exercies button. Here were PDF/Word files, in chronological order, that contained activities to do each week. One PDF/Word document per week. 4) An assessment button. Here were PDF/Word documents allowing downloads of assignment sheets, information on exams and a couple of practise exams. 5) A bulletin board for users to post questions/answers and help each other. The lecturers/tutors frequented these pages too. This format was so easy to understand - every student knew what was required of them. Such a product would only take 1-2 weeks to build in PHP/MySQL. Some of my subjects also had the ability to upload assignment files (usually Word documents, or source code) - although this might not be required for an English class. Some lecturers used software to check for cheating. Online learning is good when needed information is at the student's finger tips. They can fit their learning in around work/social committments. It shouldn't really be self paced, otherwise a back-log of work will build up.
Jakob Nielsen - the man who wants all sites on the internet to be written in HTML 3 or 4, with virtually no images. His article is extremely insightful - stating the blatantly obvious.
News flash Jakob - nobody is using 9.6 kbps modems anymore! Graphics can be aesthetically pleasing while making a site more 'useable' than text alone.
New standards and the rich content features of web languages have a reason and a purpose. Graphical browsers have been about for 9 years - isn't it time he used these features, and stopped telling others not to?
By the way, I could not validate his page: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://useit.com /alertbox/20030616.html
And he seems to have several CSS warnings: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=h ttp://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html
These warnings stem from heuristics - rules of thumb are very common in the field of useability. These warnings attempt to avoid useability issues by ensuring the text colour is not the same as the background colour.
I choose not to live in the past.
After increasing the GAMMA Correction, I saw his speakers under the lower/center monitor. They look rather small, and their seperation is not good for locating other aircraft by listening to where the sound is coming from.
If he wants extra realism, he should have a 4 speaker system FL + FR + BL + BR with a sub-woofer to annoy the neighbours at 3AM.
For the price of all those monitors, I would rather purchase a 23" CRT, if I had the money.
Can anyone familiar with Mac OS X explain why the virtual memory column in the activity meter screenshot has rather high numbers?
http://www.deskmod.com/panther/actmonitor.jpg
If virtual memory represents page file / swap partition access, wouldn't this slow things down a lot? Especially if there was only one disk in the box.
The screenshots look nice, although the look does not appear to have changed much since 10.2
I got a tatoo when I was 21 on my right bicep. If I wear a long or short sleave shirt (the type with a collar), it can't be seen. When my employers eventually saw it, they were not concerned. This is because wearing normal work attire, it is invisible.
I also got a tongue piercing, and it took a week for it to be noticed by my employers. They didn't seem to mind, and I was still allowed to meet clients because it wasn't obviously visible. I ended up taking it out (after a year) because I didn't want to chip my teeth.
I also dyed my hair black (from dark brown)... it wasn't a big change and my employers didn't mind.
If you do get something done, don't make a big deal about it. Get it done for personal reasons, not to impress your colleagues. Don't go to extremes, be subtle and decorate a location on your body that is hidden by business clothing, but not by recreational clothing (if possible).
PS: Don't EVER get a girl's name on a tatoo... If you want to impress her, get a heart tatoo and write her name across it every day with a permanent marker. You *will* thank me one day.
MSIE is very decent at CSS1-2, DHTML, XHTML1, 1.1, 2, etc. In most cases the same code produces the same output on Mozilla. I rarely have to create seperate cases/content for MSIE.
2 F%2Fwww .utsc.utoronto.ca%2F~02petraz%2Ficons.shtml
l idator?uri=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.utsc.utoronto.ca%2F%7E02petraz%2Fi cons.shtml&warning=2&profile=css2
Why would you put an Valid XHTML 1.0 image/link on your site when it clearly isn't XHTML compliant?
Have a look:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%
It also isn't CSS compliant:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/va
So maybe you should look at your source code before you criticise MSIE.
By the way, I am a Linux user, so don't think I love M$. I just need to use Windows/MSIE for web development work.
I can remeber my ICQ number and password :-)
:-)
Now if only I could remember by lady's birthday I could walk without a limp
I find the documentation from php.net and mysql.org to be first class.
MySQL Reference Manuals:x .html
The Windows CHM manual for PHP is easy to navigate and search:
http://weblabor.hu/php-doc-chm/
PHP Documentation Downloads:
http://www.php.net/download-docs.php
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/inde
PDFs are ideal because you can search/print them easier than HTML. Plus they are free.
RedHat has apt-get support, although not out of the box.
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=393
Don't worry DebianTroll, I will try Debian soon... I have heard many great things about it. My modem connection only achieves 50.6 kbps maximum. I will try to get a copy of Debian 3.0r1 at the next Melbourne Linux User Group meeting.
http://www.mlug.org.au/
Mike
Thanks for the link!
:-)
On their site I found a program called Beep. It makes noises on keyboard/mouse input
http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep
It gets annoying after a while, but it is 'cute' enough to impress my girlfriend. And that matters as much as keeping my RedHat system up2date. LOL
Try reading the book "Why a university degree will help you get where you want in life." I forget who the author is.
/., you might want to consider further study. If you are taking a break for a year, that's ok. Experience is good, but a degree and experience is better. Goodluck binaryhead.
If you enjoying reading, and read
Plastic notes do work well, and the colours make it easy to discern between notes with different values. Personally, I prefer the green ones ;-)
/. story on the new US notes appeared, I printed the front & back on the same piece of paper, and made a note. It was too easy. The one person I showed it to thought it was real.
The colour of the first plastic $5 notes faded when put through the washing machine, and the black ink came off (read: the Queen's head vanished).
When a recent
Maybe counterfieters are printing notes on transparency slides, the slides used for overhead projectors.
Computer crashes are annoying, although most of them are caused by buggy software, not faulty hardware.
The worst type of crash for me is when the operating system crashes, as opposed to an application crashing. My Windows 98 (fully patched & updated) crashes occasionally. Explorer (not Internet Explorer) crashes frequently, especially after deleting files. When deleted files go to trash, it doesn't crash.
No linux kernel has ever crashed on me. Occasionally an application will crash, but that does not bother me too much.
Applications that allow automatic saves ever X minutes are a great idea. It lessens the worry.
They should try to extract salt out of the plant "lucern". This plant grows well in salty soil, and is used to combat soil salinity here in Australia.
:-)
Apparently cows eat it too
I was thinking the same thing!
Maybe (in the near future) the long arm of the law will be using a bong instead of a hammer on the judges desk!
Judge: "Bailiff, please role me a phat joint. Court is in recess for 1 hour."
Bailiff: "All rise..."
Don't care for the stuff personally, puts me to sleep and ruins my lungs.
My hosts file is here:t win.htm
;-) to load much faster...
http://www.froggy.com.au/mike.skinner/16bi
It blocks lots of adds, cookies, trackers and XXX sites. It might even block Slashdot images and adds
The Australian government caught wind of the people's desire to put Jedi down on the 2001 census, and forbid us from doing so.
I would have put down Jedi, but it might not have made that much of a difference with Australia's population of 18 million.
Thanks for your input.
Physics 101: no theory can ever be proved correct, they can only be disproved.
The reason I am concerned about EM radiation is:
1) When ever I talk on my Nokia 3310 I get an instantaneous head ache.
2) The things that you can't see are often the most dangerous.
Sunlight is natural (and quite unavoidable). The incidence of skin cancer has increased with man's activity depleting the ozone layer (I should know - I live in Australia).
I worry about wireless transmissions because there is substantial energy in those EM waves. Being in an enclosed building, surrounded by wireless radio waves transmitted every second may not be safe.
How many people would live next to a TV/radio station transmitter that services a large area? How many people would prefer not to live under high voltage power lines (the type that can light a fluorescent tube at night by holding it up)?
All I'm saying is if it can be done with wires, that's the way I am going to do it.
Have wireless devices ever been proved safe?
;-)
I don't want to put wireless electromagnetic radiation around myself for 8+ hours a day. I sleep with my mobile near the foot of the bed, not beside my head on the bed side table.
Cables are cheaper, more reliable, presumably safer and less likely to interfere with other devices. Unsightly does not bother me. The risk is too great. Now if only I could stop drinking I will feel totally guilt free
Q) Michael, have you thought of putting together a new Lindows distro to replace Windows NT4/2K/XP/2003 web/database servers?
It would need to have the bare essentials (no need to run Windows programs). Kernel, boot loader, Apache, PHP, MySQL and a minimalistic X-Windows to consume as little memory as possible. A MySQL GUI program and an HTML/PHP editor like Quanta, Bluefish or Screem would be a good idea too.
Businesses are paying far too much for Windows and the client licences, and the same for SQL server. In an IT industry where budgets are low, would such a web server be viable, considering all the business needs to pay for is the hardware, and a nominal $X for Lindows WebSQL Edition? Do you think that Lindows could take on this untouched market and win?
Mike
Fancy being able to take a crap and browse the crap @ Micro$oft.com?
/.
Fancy being able to take a slash while reading the latest @
(Note: the above posting may have Aussie slang within)
I wouldn't want to touch the toilet loo, especially after everyone's wiped their ass and then touched it. Next they will be playing battleships (with the person in the next cubicle) with brown chunks on the screen.
I can see where AMD is coming from. They are a business, and they are doing their best to remain profitable. It wouldn't be fair to AMD if it's customers used non standard 'grease' (damaging the processor) and needed to replace them under warranty. This has the potential to cost AMD a lot of $$$.
If AMD goes out of business due to replacing thousands of processors, they will stop producing affordable processors and stop working on speed increases. Then most of the world will need to purchase PowerPC or Intel machines at a higher cost.
What is so bad about "Shin Estu" grease? Is it expensive, or hard to get? If this is the case, AMD should consider testing similar products that are cheaper and easier to find. It would not cost much. After all, car manufacturers do not dictate the brand of engine oil that must be used, only the type.
Doh!
Lesson learnt. I will not try this again.
1stPost?
There are two parts to the question of whether HTML/JavaScript can be considered art:
1) Whether the end product can be considered 'art' when viewing it in a web browser,
2) Whether the source code can be considered 'art' when viewing it in a text editor.
More people would agree that the end product is art. Granted, HTML/JavaScript are not efficient tools for creating a painting, but they can arrange/create eye candy. Does this mean crap site designs/implementations are just art that we don't 'appreciate'? In my opinion yes and no. Whilst art is subjective, creating a user interface using such technologies has a lot of objectivity to it... there are many things that should not be done, and code needs to be done in a certain way.
This brings me to the question of whether the code may be considered art. I think to some extent it is. It might not be pretty to someone who hasn't seen HTML/JavaScript before.
As a web developer myself, I think code is artistic. Whilst a traditional artist must have 'fine honed' their skills in order to scuplt, paint, etc. using brushes, strokes, chisels and other tools, so does a web developer. Their skills must be good too.
How you may ask? As with other programming languages, there are coding styles, standards, best practices (like how readable it is). Redundant tags (like poor use of tables to present non-tabular information) should be avoided. I like to put new opening/closing tags on new lines, I like to indent child/nested tags by one tab (within reason of course).
Personally, I think I have made good code when the HTML/XHTML/CSS is validated, when the code has good layout and is readable, and when the parsed version in a web bowser looks good too. Not just in one web browser, but all of the target browsers.
I understand that looking at code is not the same on the eyes as looking at a painting or a sculpture, but it is quite similar on the brain. A sense of anger, pleasure, confort, bewilderment, pride, disappointment, interest, etc. are possible - possibly not to art critics but 'code critics'.