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A Coder Interview With Mike Ash (source: The Code Project)
This week we talk to Mac and iOS developer Mike Ash.
"Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves."
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The Revenge of the IE Box Model? (source: Jeff Kaufman)
Was Microsoft right all along?
"Internet Explorer misinterpreted element width going all the way back to the CSS1 specification. But now some people think the IE version was better, and in fact CSS3 now lets you specify how you want to set the width."
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How to do cheap backups (source: Mixpanel Engineering)
Keeping prices low is a goal, but the real resource of interest developer’s time and attention.
"We want to do reliable backups on the cheap. By “cheap” I mean in terms of cost and, more importantly, in terms of developer’s time and attention. In this article, we’ll discuss how we’ve been able to accomplish this and the factors that we consider important."
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The 7 habits of highly effective developers (source: DZone)
Next: The Programmer Principle.
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is an influential and best-selling book. I'm a developer by day, so I wondered if the same habits could be applied to coding."
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52 Things People Should Know To Do Cryptography (source: University of Bristol)
A topic a week is all we ask.
"Cryptography is a highly interdisciplinary area. calling on expertise in Pure Mathematics, Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. Here are 52 things we think all students should have some familiarity with."
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How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy (source: Carlos Bueno)
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
"Here we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it."
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Why You Should Care about a "Scratch for HTML5" (source: Hack Education)
What a tool that could help teach Web-building might look like.
"Scratch teaches computational thinking - logic, problem solving, model-building, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking - via drag-and-drop. Could the same ideas be applied to web-building?"
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What the Demise of Flash Means for the User Experience (source: UX Booth)
The control freak vs. a delightfully inconsistent experience on any device.
"If HTML5 thrives where Flash struggled and becomes the dominant choice for new mobile and desktop technology, will users benefit from the transition? Yes, as long as designers and developers do their jobs right."
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Alan Turing's reading list (with readable links) (source: John Graham-Cumming)
The great books, genius edition.
"Alex Bellos published a list of books that Alan Turing took out from the school library as a child. I've tracked down as many as possible should you wish to follow his reading."
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This is very cool. I wonder if there could be a corresponding age with book to see how his interests evolved. Ironic that he took out a book about escaping a prison camp as a child, and later in life faced prison and escaped (via voluntary chemical castration) for his sexuality.
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. "
— Hunter S. Thompson
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Why Mobile Matters (source: LukeW)
There's nothing like a graph to show you what's winning.
"When I initially proposed the idea of Mobile First over three years ago, there were a lot of skeptics. The situation today has a lot more people convinced that taking mobile seriously matters."
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Are graphic designers ruining the web? (source: .net magazine)
First it was IE, then WebKit. Now they're coming after you.
"Sites are becoming more attractive and, in some cases, more user-friendly, but at a cost: page weight and complexity. Developers and designers debate who's to blame."
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Couldn't agree more. there has to be a balance between logic and design and it seems things are shifting towards design.
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The increase in bloat is mainly coming from javascript, not graphics
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ed welch wrote: mainly coming from javascript
Not true, most js frameworks are small and compressed.
"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." Einstein
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." Mark Twain
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Yes, it is true.
Take Reuters.com for instance:
total javascript = 414 KB
total image = 264 KB
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Is their javascript transmitted uncompressed?? 414k gzipped is probably ~80k over the wire, so somewhat smaller than the images. Still a lot though.
-- Ian
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Not to mention the majority of JavaScript can be downloaded once and used on multiple pages.
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AspDotNetDev wrote:
Not to mention the majority of JavaScript can be downloaded once and used on multiple pages.
Maybe jquery, but not the rest. Um, you could even look at the page I mention and see for yourself, rather than making false assumptions. Look at http://www.webpagetest.org/[^]
while your at it and see how having dozens of javascripts slows down the page loading
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I just looked at the page using the FireBug Net panel. I sorted the JavaScript from largest to smallest. Here are the largest JavaScript files:
- Facebook Widgets
- jQuery
- Twitter Widget
- Google Analytics
- yahoo-dom-event.js
Those are all third-party reusable libraries, and they are the bulk of the JavaScript. The majority of the other files appear to either be for reusable widgets (e.g., ticker, navigation, stocks) or mini libraries (e.g., geolocation, connection, cookie handling, animation, events, dom manipulation) that can be shared across pages.
Yes, I did make assumptions, but yes, they were correct.
By the way, merely having that many JavaScript files can slow down page load time, regardless of their file size, as browsers tend to download JavaScript files before downloading other files, and the latency alone increases the download time (browsers usually only allow about 5 concurrent downloads from a single domain). The solution to this is to host JavaScript files on a CDN with multiple domains to download from. This reduces the latency and allows the browser to download many of the JavaScript files simultaneously.
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AspDotNetDev wrote:
having that many JavaScript files can slow down page load time, regardless of their file size, as browsers tend to download JavaScript files before downloading other files
Yes, exactly. Therefore, you have to agree that the graphic designer isn't the only one responsible for the bloat
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How to crash other WP7 applications... (source: Niko Vrdoljak)
...and how not to crash WP7 apps.
"Do you know what is easiest way to crash someone’s WP7 application? Just quickly double-tap its “Rate my app” link. Here's what happens and how to fix it."
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