Translating Geek Into English
, I discussed an offshoot from MySQL called MariaDB. Interestingly, I just read this quick article over at InfoWorld. It talks about the pros and cons of forking (for us, the end user) and what they feel Oracle must do to keep MySQL on top and relevant.
A valuable Flex resource, in case you’re not familiar with it, is Adobe’s Tour de Flex. If you’re doing any kind of Flex development, this really is a “must have”. Besides showing off what you can do using Flex (and Adobe AIR), the Tour de Flex provides a single, simple interface for referencing:
Most categories also have a “techniques” section, giving specifics for how to accomplish common tasks. There’s tons of sample code that are also visible in action, so you can easily understand how the code works in practice. And, of course, the related language reference is included.
Tour de Flex is available in both an online and desktop version (thanks to Adobe AIR for the latter).
Through an Amazon service, this blog is now available for reading on Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a subscription service, priced at $1.99/month (for what it’s worth Amazon sets the price and keeps most of the money). I don’t know what kind of interest there is in this, but I thought I’d make it an option. This does mean I’ll need to work harder to make the blog content meaningful, though, if people will be paying good money for it! If there’s anything you’d like to see in this blog, or see more or less of, please let me know.
If you haven’t yet read it, this article called The $300 Million Button is well worth your five minutes. It’s by Jared M. Spool and posted on the User Interface Engineering Web site. I don’t want to give away the secret of the article, but it discusses a very common practice on e-commerce sites, and how it tests with end users.
An issue to consider when programming is how variables are passed from one context to another. For example, the following code calls a function, referencing a variable in doing so:
$it = 'Larry';
some_function($it);
Will the function receive just the value of that variable ( Larry) or will it receive the variable itself? The answer depends upon how the function is defined. In this post, I’ll explain this concept further, in not too-technical terms.
I’m a big fan of Adobe’s AIR, and not just because I’ve written a book on it! I’ve been developing AIR applications, for in-house and client use, for a couple of years now, in both JavaScript/HTML and Flex. I’ve recently, and not so recently, come across these two good articles on Adobe AIR:
From the titles, the articles are self-explanatory, but the emphasis is on performance. The interesting thing about the first article is that it discusses the theory of performance, which people don’t think about enough (e.g., what does it mean to perform well?). The article uses a specific example for which one could easily come up with three different senses of “performance” (the article uses Flex for the code).
The second article has lots of specific, excellent tips, many of which being applicable to any application you develop (although the example also uses Flex for the code, it’s mostly ActionScript).
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