equivocal ramblings

If you use a high resolution display, like me you might find your eyes starting to water as you read all these trendwhore websites that use tiny tiny body fonts, like Verdana at 10 pixels. I’ve always solved this by Ctrl + Mousewheel up or down, but doing that for each and every site is a tad bit tedious.

Enter No Squint. I’ve fallen in love with it. No Squint allows you to select a default zoom level (I chose 110%, a slight bump up) and also remembers if you changed the zoom level while browsing a website. So now pages with ridiculously large fonts, or ridiculously small fonts are tolerable.

The best part? I’ve not noticed it at work except that my eyes are less tired now.

Thank you Jason Tackaberry. You did a good job on this one — so much so that I had to add a new category to this journal to post this in: Brilliance.

As taken from the CodeIgniter website:

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

I must say that after looking through the documentation, watching the introductory screencasts and then experimenting with it myself, it really does live up to it’s claim of real-world thoughtfulness. CodeIgniter flexible and clear when it comes to the MVC pattern, and all through the tutorials I never once felt that I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even reading the documentation, it’s all amazingly well explained.

I’ve so far not felt mystified by something in the framework, and haven’t yet had to ask any questions on the forums of IRC channels — something I’ve had to do numerous times with CakePHP, a similar open-source project. This of course isn’t to say that Cake is bad, but good documentation is king when it comes to programming.

Overall, the first impression you get when you run CodeIgniter is that of confidence. This is of course the benefit of having a commercial entity backing a project — little things like the documentation that typically don’t get done with a non-commercial project get taken care of.

Best of all? CodeIgniter comes with a license that qualifies as ‘Open Source’.

Lookout CakePHP, you may have the major portion of mindshare right now, but CodeIgniter is a serious contender.

Last night I installed the ICQ instant messenger and was thoroughly disgusted by what appeared to be a monstrosity of a user interface. Remembering that there was interoperability between AIM and ICQ, I decided today to download AIM and give that a shot.

Here is what I saw (Clicky for a larger version):

And I was shocked. The AIM of today is a far cry from the AIM of last year. This new client sports a custom skin; usually this is a bad thing, but I think they may actually have come up with one of the better examples of non-standard interfaces.

What was really shocking was that the client came with something called AIM Explorer — a web browser of all things. The first time I noticed it was when I attempted to recover my password, and I just stopped and stared for a few minutes.

It actually looked pretty okay, but after a few minutes of usage, I realised — this is what the Internet Explorer team is trying to do and failing misreably at. I mean, its subtly animated, got little glow effects, its blueish (duh), its got Firefox style tabs, and interestingly enough, it’s got anti-spyware/adware detectors for common stuff. Oh, and a working feed reader (Clicky for a larger version):

Lets not forget the thumbnails that appear when you move your pointer over a tab… Yes folks you read that right. Thumbnails. That work. That don’t slow you down. That aren’t ridiculously useless. Shocking.

Did I mention it’s based on Internet Explorer? Yeah, that part sort of got me off-guard too. The first browser to come out of AOL/Netscape not to suck, and its IE based, and beats the living daylight out of what the IE Team is pushing.

Well, I was informed that I once again have the pleasure of redesigning the GNOME Journal a second time. Thankfully, this time there isn’t a time limit of, We’re going live as soon as the design is done, k? As fun as that was, its nice to have had some time to think it over properly, and I’ve decided to do several things differently this time:

• I’m going to keep the current article formatting style, but with enhancements — GNOME is all about usability etc., and having a full screen of text isn’t all that usable. Elastically sized article div, welcome.
• Smoother look — I was looking at Download.com the other day, and what really stood out was how smoooooooth the site looked. Definitely not a bad thing.
• More… help, more community — as it stands now, there’s no direct linkage to GNOME, or the GNOME community, and I’d like to bring that out a little more this time. In my original mockups, there was a highlights splash of sorts, drawing attention directly to it, showing of the best parts of the journal. Maybe some smaller highlights this time, and in a visual fashion as well.

Mockups later today.

I have a Java assignment to pass up tomorrow. The class has to do with the basics, like data structures, and references. Now, the question is based entirely around a linked list, which you’re expected to build from scratch.

One problem though — the question cannot be solved by any means I know. Lets go through it together. First, you need to create a class called Student. This class contains information like the student’s name, id and so forth. Next, create a class called StudentNode, which contains an instance of Student called data, and another called nextStudent. data will contain the actual student information, and nextStudent will function as a pointer of sorts, thereby allowing advancement to the next item in the list.

Or will it? If nextStudent points at the next Student and Student doesn’t contain any reference to the next item in the list… how does one advance beyond the first item in the list? I don’t know. Do you?

Update: Just realised something. If I interpret their incredibly phrased document in just the right way, I can include a StudentNode instead of a Student in the StudentNode class…

snook.ca redesigned recently, and for the first time I saw an implementation of the so-called dockable comments that I liked. Usually they’re flashy ‘look at my superior CSS-fu’ type things, but here they’re actually useful — as you type the comment, you can scroll up/down for reference without losing sight of the comment or the ability to type.

Very handy.