TechToolBlog

Weekly Bits #1

Tim — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:52:41 +0000

How/Why in the world do some people in IT/Software Dev world spend so much time at conferences, meetups, user group, etc…? I get that these things energize you, allow for networking, etc, but it seems these things take over people’s social life or even scarier – it is their social life. I try to go to 1 maybe 2 events a year. CodeMash the last couple of years, but I was pretty disappointed last year and probably will be taking a year off.

Microsoft announced WebSiteSpark – pretty cool, but does anyone really pay for Visual Studio anyways?

Joel Spolsky rips/digs at TDD again, it’s pretty amusing to watch the TDD people get pissed. I agree about Duct Tape Programmers

Yes, Craigslist is killing the investigative reporter

Source Control is good thing, go get yourself a free single license of Surround SCM and thank me later.

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The New IDE

Tim — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:54:59 +0000

I’ve been writing a new web application at work lately, very web 2.0 ish with lots of jQuery & ajax calls being made on every page. After doing some performance testing, it’s very apparent that the various browsers fall into 1 of 3 categories, fast, medium, & slow for how fast they render. Chrome & Safari are seriously blazing fast compared to the rest, so much so, I’ve started to dump Firefox for Chrome as my browser of choice. But one major element is stopping me from being a full time chrome users – Debugging. That’s right, Firefox isn’t a browser to me anymore, it’s a freaking IDE. Firebug for dom and css inspection/manipulation, JavaScript debugging, packet inspection. YSlow & Hammerhead for performance tuning. Colorzilla for design elements. Web developer toolbar for various odds & ends. Fireshoot for screenshot taking. Yes, I know Chrome & IE ship with dom/css inspection but they don’t measure up to Firebug yet. Until Chrome can catch up with these plugins, Firefox is still the default browser.

Fast

Chrome, Safari

Medium

IE 8, Firefox 3.5

Slow

IE 7

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Getting Your Education

Tim — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:06:26 +0000

My friends at Educator.com recently rolled out their new website. Sufficient to say, they did a great job on the new site design & the content looks very promising. It’s very interesting to see how their business model will work out, $20 a month or $200 a year subscription.

With all of the education budget crisis we are seeing in this country, could a system like this help fill the void? Educator isn’t offering “core” classes, rather advanced Math & Science, in which good teachers are tough to come by & students are of a different nature. Just a thought…

Some of their courses

Daily Find #122

Tim — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:38:27 +0000

Pear:Log – ELMAH for PHP if you will

In case you don’t know it yet, Seapine is releasing TestTrack RM (Requirements Management) very soon, in fact the beta site was opened last week & you can now go sign up for it.

CodeIgniter Conference

ASP.NET AJAX testing with Visual Studio 2008 Web Test

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Balsamiq Awesomeness

Tim — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:49:02 +0000

We are building a little something here at work and I needed to throw together a quick UI design before things got heated. In the past I’ve come across Visio designed application or a mix of visio & photoshop. I found some decent visio stencil sets for web applications but I just wasn’t satisfied with the end result and didn’t want to jump into Photoshop to make things prettier. I wanted a something simple, that understood I was building a web application, & a low learning curve. That’s what I found with Balsamiq Mockups. I highly recommend you give it a try.

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