Was over at the WordPress Theme Browser the other day, looking for nothing in particular. Then I noticed that there seems to be a lot of new and nice-looking :wp: (even AJAX-enabled) themes available. Time to change, I reckon. Expect to see some changes either around here or in one of the sub-blogs in the near future!
Seat comfort
While on the subject of travelling, here is a great site providing all sorts of info on airlines seats. You get to find out what your sleep pattern means as well as ratings of sleep comfort of seats available!
Alas, none of this is relevant for people – myself included – stuck in Economy class… 😥
Haves
Happiness doesn’t depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel toward what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much.
William Dempster Hoard, 1836-1918, Wisconsin Governor
AJAX tutorials
Well, after the Round-up of 50 AJAX Toolkits and Frameworks which I mentioned recently, here is a fairly decent list of AJAX tutorials from Max Kiesler again. There are 90 of them, so take your time!
Webmail
It’s not often that I get excited over an email client. Honestly!
However, since discovering RoundCube (or rediscovering as it were, because I had known about the project for about 6 months prior to becoming a convert), I just love how everything comes together on this open-source project still in 0.1-beta phase. RoundCube is an IMAP webmail client which has an AJAX-based user interface that is both user-friendly and responsive – not unlike GMail – and no redundant features, I may add. A quick installation guide of RoundCube on your server can be found here; here is another guide on installation for Site5 servers.
Finally, a good list of Web 2.0 softwares.
AJAX
Ajax seems to be all the rage for web development right now. No, in case you were wondering, an Ajax is not some kind of cleaning kit that you use to clean your monitor or CPU case… 🙂
Ajax actually stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
If you are still clueless after the previous sentence, just think of Ajax as providing a set of tools which form the building blocks for interactive applications (think GMail) that you can access through your browser. This allows, for example, the “drag and drop” that we are so familiar on any Windows PC on a web page that you visit, and is certain to revolutionalize how we go about everyday tasks in the near future. It is already quite conceivable that an entire word processor that is responsive can be built as a web application thanks to Ajax. Well, Max Kiesler has posted a Round-up of 50 AJAX Toolkits and Frameworks. This is an impressive resource which hopefully I will get to explore more one of these rainy days.
Online programming books
Here is a huge list of programming books available online (and mostly free) to file away for one of those rainy days when I can work on some personal programming projects. At last count the list includes 345 titles, and rising…
Sleeping in airports
Having arrived at some airports at late hours myself, I can sympathise with those who has had to put up at airports in the wee hours due to delays, cancelled flights, or simply long connections. Well, the Budget Traveller’s Guide to Sleeping in Airports is a way for you to find out what you are in for in advance!
Quitters
One of the harder lessons to learn in life, in my opinion. After all, winners are supposed to win – all the time, no? 🙂
Employ the power of positive quitting. Most of us view quitting as something negative, but it’s not. ‘Winners never quit,’ we’re told, when, in reality, winners quit all the time: choosing to stop doing things that aren’t creating the results they desire. When you quit all the things that aren’t working for you, when you quit tolerating all the negative things that hold you back, you’ll create a positive ‘charge’ in your life as well as create the space in your life for more positive experiences.
Jim Allen
Inspirational Speaker, Author and Life Coach
Our thoughts
Changing others is always difficult. If we want a world of compassion, we need to start living it ourselves.
Our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if the other person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We must practice this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, Author and Peace Activist