Im glad to say that I’ll be a judge at the Connecticut Student Innovation Exposition, held this year on May 19th, 2012, at the XL Center in Hartford, Conn. This convention is the culminating event for more than 1,200 middle and high school students engaged in cutting edge science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs.

Good luck! I cant wait to see the projects and ideas.

http://robot-or-not.com/
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://clearairchallenge.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Device Agnostic Design
An article from Smashing Magazine talks about Device Agnostic Design which is a great future proofing advancement from responsive design. Being device agnostic means that you use your content to set break points, not the device you want the content to display on. This is important because if we spend time developing content for specific devices we are creating the next developer nightmare. There is no way to predict the size or aspect ratio of screens in the future. What happens if you design your site to perfectly fit your favorite tablet only to discover that the next generation of that same device has a slightly different sized screen.

For now, it seems as though developers are at the mercy of hardware makers. All we can do is hope they create some sort of a standard, and quick. In the meanwhile, we’ll have to make design decisions based on the content we want to show. After all, content is King.

I learned javascript years ago in an ad hoc manner, it was never something I seriously studied. I knew just enough to get the web aps I used to work and I moved on. Now I need to revisit my knowledge of the common language on the web.

Ajax is another world in dynamic reactive websites, and I like all the cool things you can do with jQuery. Really, I want to know whats going on under the hood. I think that’s crucial. At some point those frameworks end and you’re really still just working with javascript patterns.

The Khan Academy already has a million users learning everything from basic math to trigonometry and beyond, it can serve a few million more. Imagine a world where you child does homework in class and watches lectures at home, at their own pace whenever they want. They can rewatch old lectures to relearn things and they can pause it whenever they need to. Now, all the time in class is spend with individual students. Welcome to the future of education.

As a professor I think this is a great twist in the classroom paradigm. This allows more time to be spent with each student helping them individually. There are tools and dashboards that allow a teacher or mentor to see what exercises a student has done, what they struggled with, and what they know. Using this you can even ask a student who gets it to help a struggling student as the first to respond and assist.

Best of all, it’s FREE and on the internet so anyone in the world can be a student. Your kids can be helping tutor children in Africa. You can be a mentor to others in your field and you too can learn from literally thousands of topics. With groups Khan Academy and Wikipedia we can get one step closer to making quality education available to everyone.

Winter is nice and all, but that truly was a winter wonderland. I cant wait to go back.
Sure, im limping around the office as a result of falling while attempting a hill WAY beyond my ability, but really… I cant wait to improve and then come back to conquer that slope!

So I’ve planned both events in the same month two weeks apart and I’m looking forward to it.
Cheers!

Use a CSS style Reset:
Browsers come with a default styling for most elements but unfortunately these definitions are not the same across all browsers. Even something as simple as a

tag can be interpreted differently across different browsers. (Bottom vs top margins in older versions of IE 6/7 vs FF and Chrome). Using a CSS reset makes all the default inherited definitions the same and will simplify your debugging while reducing the number of styles needed to account for different default element styling.

There are a number of resets you can find with a quick search. The most extensive is Eric Meyer’s reset, and this maybe a bit overkill as you will have to redefine all properties of every element. Experiment and see what works best for you and how you code. The CSS clear I use is attached below.

If you want to look into this further or if you want t help deciding which reset is right for you, a great article can be found from SixRevisions.

Create a Common CSS library:
Put all your generic one definition selectors in one place (generally the top as this will cascade better–more on this below.) If they only have one definition then you can very likely reuse the class elsewhere in the document. Keeping a generic name will allow you or someone else to easily understand the classes being used. Think float-left, float-right, clear-float, em, caption, highlight, center-text, center-auto, etc… I’ll list this out in another tutorial in the future.

I also declare all the colors used in a project as stand alone classes so I can quickly add them to a class without having to recreate a whole new class just to account for a change in text color.

I may not use the whole library in every project, but I use at least 75-80% and I know my commonly used code is there, and keeping all the colors in one placer makes it easier to copy and paste for other styles.

Cascade your CSS:
I start general and the work my way to being more specific. Using more specific selectors will allow you to drill down in setting properties. If you do this correctly you can greatly reduce the number of !important tags you use in your stylesheet.

CSS hierarchy: Element >> ID >> Classes >> !important >> DOM

Use Bug Killing CSS:
There will probably always be quirks among the many browsers creating the need for browser specific style sheets, but these style sheets should be as simple as possible. They should only list the properties for definitions that need to be overwritten to work in the given browser. Do not copy the entire rule. (I know this seems obvious-Its OK to laugh- but I’ve seen this on major websites).

Validate your CSS:
Don’t forget to use the w3c validation tools. This is the best way to spell check your style sheet in addition to checking syntax of all your elements. Plus, you’ll have the piece of mind knowing that your code is standards compliant.

If you’re just now learning about SOPA and Protect IP – scheduled to be voted on by the senate in the near future then you might want to do your research quickly – as over 30,000 websites will be down tomorrow to protest this ineffective, business killing, nanny-state, double speaking bill.

In the name of “internet security” aka (profit protection) the MPAA, RIAA, along with the Chamber of Commerce want to change the way the internet works from the router up. They want to be able to remove ANY website’s DNS listing because someone might have posted a link to a copyrighted material SOMEWHERE on the website. No court hearing to see if the plaintiff actually controls the rights, no appeal if they are wrong, no recourse for you to claim damages… just another way to frighten and kill competition from the same people who were VERY willing to sue single moms and students for downloading music and movies instead of adapting their business models to a new medium.

In case you didn’t already know Im talking about RIAA, MPAA, Chamber of Commerce, and an evil gang of media thugs (CBS, ABC, FOX, COMCAST, DISNEY, etc). These media thugs claim that there is a culture of thievery on the internet, and that may or may not be true, but what the forget to mention is that THEY CREATED THIS CULTURE – and whats more they PROFITED FROM IT.

CBS, for example, owns C|net, which was the exclusive distributer of Kazaa and Limewire in the mid 1990s and 2000s. C|net makes money every time someone downloads an application from them from referrals and advertising, sometimes up to $5 a download. With over 500 million downloads between just these two applications it’s safe to say they might have made more than a billion dollars creating this online culture. Now that phase I is complete they want to use this online community WHICH THEY FOSTERED AND PROFITED FROM as justification to rewire the internet in a way that coincidentally will make them even more money while creating unknown security and architectural problems for the rest of us.(http://www.filmon.com/cbsyousuck/)

The book contains many classroom examples and real life websites currently using this methodology and is presented with a light geek humor making it easy to read and understand these revolutionary concepts. Every web developer and designer should read this book to understand the challenges and opportunities that losing control of the screen size presents.

I cant wait to read the rest of the series and redo my website (again).
Score: 5/5
Summary: Its concise and well written; important and creative. if you work online you need to read about this concept. It is the next evolution of the internet and its time to start future-proofing your websites.

Some of the work is marked as sold– bravo. Below is a shot of one of Mike’s pieces. Im glad to see other local artists working and living downtown.

Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, 8am-7pm.

Personally, I like it. Sure, Im his friend, but this shows a serious dedication and attention to detail. Its not a sprint, this is a marathon. Those lines are precise in their perspective and perfectly straight. Sure, use a ruler and you get the same effect – but this is a relatively large scale work, about 32 or 36″ tall, so a large amount of time went into this. There is a certain style to this that’s working and I like it. It rigidly adhering to rules of perspective in the foreground and center and throws it all those same rules out the window along the edge.