If completing a tasks takes you 29minutes this year. Next year it should take you at least a couple minutes less. Sometimes all you need to enhance your efficiencies and save yourself time at the end of the day is to learn how to properly use the tools you’ve already have installed. There is a great article over at sixrevisions.com with 9 practical ways to enhance your web development by using the Firefox web developer extension. Most if not all web developers already have this extension installed and likely use it on a daily basis. One tip that the article brought to light is a great piece of functionality is ‘Tools->View Report’ to see how your website performs from an optimization standpoint.
Click here to read the full article and hopefully save yourself some valuable time.
A colleague recently pointed out a great article about the difference between “IS NULL” and “= NULL” over at http://www.sqlservercentral.com.
Often small details in syntax can be overlooked causing unintended results or nonfunctional code. It’s very important when working with any language that you consult available help documentation whenever necessary.
Any developer who works with SQL will want to understand the important differences between “IS NULL” and “= NULL”.
“= NULL” is an expression of value. Meaning, if the variable has been set and memory created for the storage of data it has a value. A variable can in fact be set to NULL which means the data value of the objects is unknown.
Now “IS NULL” is a little trickier and is the preferred method for evaluating the condition of a variable being NULL. When you use the “IS NULL” clause, it checks both the address of the variable and the data within the variable as being unknown.
Click here to see the full article to better understand the difference between IS NULL and = NULL.
When I first heard that MySQL, the open source database provider had been purchased by Sun, my immediate response was one of dread. The perception of a merger aquisition seems to be a negative one when in reference to open source. The fear of course is that great software that we’ve been using for free is suddenly going to become proprietary and closed.
I read the announcement from both the MySQL homepage as well as Jonathan Schwartz’ (CEO of SUN) comments on his own blog. There were a couple things that caught my eye and thought I would comment on.
In Jonathan’s article he re-iterated a number of times Sun’s commitment to open source. It’s interesting to note that Sun is one of the few companies rising out of the personal computer boom of the early 1980s to be able to adjust to the current state of technology and software. They have struggled since the bubble burst in 2001 to stand as a hardware company alone. Sun seems to have realized that in order to provide complete solutions to their clients they needed to become far more service oriented.
The idea of providing services is proving to be far more solid of a business model than just a hardware or software company alone. It really just about emphasis. Microsoft runs a similar business, however the focus is on the software. Microsoft makes money by selling software and then providing services at further cost. Sun however is banking on the fact that companies would rather pay exclusively for services to make the software work.
Sun now has licensed a number of it’s products under the GPL and made them available open source. StarOffice was acquired from StarDivision and released open source as OpenOffice, the Lustre shared disk file system and even their longtime operation system Solaris has become open source.
The success of this merger is going to be dependent on how Sun relates to the open source community in the future. Keeping it’s place as an advocate and support will help it grow into the primary source of services for enterprise level applications. However if Sun decides to begin taking a heavy handed approach, an ego based insistence that the name Sun Microsystems be plastered high and low as the only provider, then they will not excel.
SAJM (Solaris, Apache, Java, MySQL) or whatever the acronym ends up being will become a new standard only if the open source community decides it, much the way LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) became such. But the first hint of Microsoft heavy handed tactics will put Sun back in the “proprietary” camp and left out of the open source “tree-house”.
If your a developer at heart and trying to make your own website without the help of your talented designer(s) then sometimes just getting some inspiration is all you need to get started.
Now that you have an idea - you need the right resources to get the picture in your head expressed by utilizing HTML and CSS.
It’s very important when creating a website that you start out with a visual idea, then a plain HTML page that uses CSS to express your idea. Once you have a your HTML page with valid CSS you can use your programming knowledge to create tools and features that drive your site.
Working with CSS can be a difficult task if you don’t have a vast amount of experience. For some inspiration and great CSS help checkout this collection of useful websites:
Some of the best CSS resources on the web
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