Aside from the great round up of 30 AJAX tutorials – really a must-read for anyone interested in deploying AJAX – which I mentioned not long ago, here is a neat site which helps you to quickly create your very own AJAX loader icon!
Double take
Was in the supermarket earlier.
As usual, I went in without a pre-planned shopping list, unlike some people. Went browsing in the bathroom items section and suddenly recalled that I needed to replenish my shower cream. Well, being the adventurous type of guy I am, I decided to try a brand – still a well-known one here, mind you – I have not tried before. After deliberating for a while, I settled on “Revitalising” from Shokubutsu; actually it was a toss up between “Revitalising”, “Soothing” and “Moisturising”.
Lo and behold, by the time I got back and started to store everything in the cupboards, there it was: another unopened bottle of “Revitalising” from Shokubutsu! 😯 ❓ 😳
Well, guess I am still a very logical type of guy after all!?!?
Hidden meanings
Everything in the world has a hidden meaning…
Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics.
When you see them you do not understand them.
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.
It is only years later that you understand.Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957
Greek Author, Poet and Playwright
Office 2.0 setup
For those of us dealing with Information Technology daily, the web is an indispensable source of information. However, apart from Gmail, many people may be unaware the availability of many Web 2.0 applications – some free, others using a subscription model – which basically will allow us to work from anywhere as long as we have access to a web browser. Well, here is a good list of Office 2.0 setup.
Of the ones listed, I regularly use
- del.icio.us for managing bookmarks
- Gmail and RoundCube webmail clients
- Google Docs and Spreadsheet
- weblogs like WordPress and Joomla
- and trying out SugarCRM
GTD redux
During my previous brief foray into GTD, I had in fact started reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and tried out quite a few applications, both on- and off-line, to try to find a wonder tool that can help to get my life back into tip-top shape. Sadly, the book currently remains unfinished and I have also stopped using the one application – ThinkingRock – which I settled on at the end of my search.
However, for one reason or other, I decided to give it another try today. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of quality of free applications out there that have sprung up in the mean time.
Continue reading →
Grids are good
During my recent sojourn into the world of designing (specifically for the web) – not so much in the graphics design department but more of the structural approaches -I happened upon some articles highlighting the benefits of an approach known as grid-based design. In a way, I suppose it is quite natural for a pen-and-paper or print layout technique to be eventually transferred to the web domain?!
However, the caveat is that grid-based designs are probably (my interpretation) more suited to conventional websites that need to follow the normal visual design standards and may not necessarily apply to artistic web sites where the goal is to be “different”. The theory is that the human eye sees a web page in a certain way, roughly from the top left to the bottom right, and the eyes can be guided to see elements in a pleasing and distinctive way when grids are used for the placement and alignment of all visual objects on the web page.
In fact, I bought the idea so much that I converted my Tango blog to one of the grid-based templates. Here are two links providing many hours of fun reading if ever you are interested in the theory and application of grid-based layout!
Still around
For the past few months, work has been pretty busy. Well, being tired and stressed is a combination that is certain to kill off any creative juices… 😉
Anyway, as a result of needing to rapidly put together a simple web portal and web application, I have had to scour the internet for inspirations. The fortuitous by-product of this process is that I have managed to find many websites which carry (and good quality) free templates (for WordPress or otherwise). To cut a long story short, after sticking with fUnique theme on this blog for the past few, dormant months, I have switched to something simple and elegant – Moo-Point. This is based on Sandbox, which according to its author, is
… a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned… More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.
Incidentally, the Barthelme theme which I have been happily using for my Tango Blog was created by the author of Sandbox. As far as customisations go, I have so far implemented the slick Javascript drop-down box from IAMWW w2 DnD theme and also added some automated features by pulling my bookmarks from Del.icio.us, an example can be seen here (obselete http://www.yyquest.net/web/recommended/).
Great design resources
- Templates and CSS
- Coding applications
- Huge lists
Baking cake: beginning CakePHP
Recently, as a result of a project at work, suddenly found myself needing to develop a PHP web application in quick time! This is kind of cool since I have always wanted to do more with PHP but have not found the time or a nice project to work on. I have subsequently discovered a RAD (rapid application development) framework known as CakePHP, which uses the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern. In case you are not familiar with the concept of MVC – like I was 🙂 – here is a concise illustration of how the MVC pattern works. After following some of the online tutorials I found, I think the MVC pattern and CakePHP (with its active development community) are both excellent tools for developing PHP applications.
Here is a draft of a new book on CakePHP aiming at newbies, with its associated forum.
ps. Mambo has just announced that they will switch over to the CakePHP framework for their next release.
Perspectives
Read this interesting story (sorry, only in Cantonese!!) from a blog I frequent, which really got me thinking.
Firstly, sometimes we can really learn something from the most unlikely of sources, provided we are open-minded to receive the wisdom. Secondly, and stemming from my experiences in Tango, attitude is essential to attain competence (and of course excellence!) in anything. Someone having all the right physical attributes but to proud to admit limits in knowledge is often overtaken by someone else who may be physically disadvantaged (height, size, etc.) but with humility and open-mindedness to try something different.