April 24th, 2010
I thought I’d give some link love to some of the lesser-known web development blogs I enjoy reading. This post was prompted by a post about my site at GiveUpInternet.com. I didn’t expect the link (as I don’t think my blog is very good for web development stuff), but I do appreciate it heaps! This blog hasn’t really focused too much on web development, perhaps I should post more web development articles 
- GiveUpInternet.com — As it says on the site, “Give Up Internet is a Humor Blog for Internet People and Developers.” While it’s technically not a web development blog, I love the posts on this site. Unlike a lot of other “humour” sites that post stupid things a lot of the time, it’s got actual funny posts. It’s one of the only humour blogs that I’m subscribed to.
- The CSS Ninja by Ryan Seddon— This is a great blog about nice little tricks that can be done in CSS. One of its focuses is doing things that previously required JavaScript, in pure CSS (no JavaScript whatsoever). This includes cross-browser CSS-styled checkboxes, a lightbox in pure CSS, and an easy way to preload images using CSS2.
- David Walsh’s blog — David is one of the core MooTools developers, and as such, he blogs mainly about JavaScript, and occasionally some PHP snippets. While, in my opinon, his posts on PHP are often messy
, his posts on JavaScript are excellent.
- AdequatelyGood.com by Ben Cherry — If you’re interested in JavaScript (especially the nitty gritty of its internals), this is by far the best blog on the topic that I’ve seen. Ben has written detailed articles on a lot of unique features of JavaScript, including scoping and “hoisting”, and how it handles object to primitive conversions.
- Hallvord R. M. Steen’s blog and the Opera sitepatching blog — Hallvord is a developer for Opera Software. His blog covers the state of the web as it unfortunately is at the moment – Broken browser sniffer scripts, standards violations, and just general scripting stupidities. Things are definitely improving, but there’s a LOT of broken scripts out there. Opera has a file called “browser.js” that contains patches to make these broken sites work correctly in Opera. Hallford’s blog (and the Opera site patching blog) detail the things that Opera does to patch these broken sites. There have been some very interesting posts, including the horrible XML and XSLT on the Israeli rail website, how Google Docs used to print documents, and many others.
That’s all for now… I might eventually write another blog post like this. Or a proper blog post
Until next time,
— Daniel
Tags: development, giveupinternet, I love these people
Posted in JavaScript, Web Development | No Comments »
March 28th, 2010
In this post, I’ll discuss some of the techniques that I personally write JavaScript. There’s no right or wrong, this is all my opinion (still, feel free to flame me if you feel it’s necessary ). This post is aimed at people that understand basic JavaScript and HTML techniques, and want to see how I code my JavaScript. I will talk about the JavaScript of the past, how it’s changed, and some techniques used in modern JavaScript development. This will probably be a multi-part series if I ever get around to writing more posts Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: JavaScript, MooTools, MooTools > jQuery, Programming
Posted in JavaScript, Programming | 1 Comment »
January 3rd, 2010
So, I’m not sure how many people agree with me (I haven’t really searched around to see if anyone has the same opinion), but I’m starting to form the opinion that there are two different types of developers: Those that can develop an application but don’t really understand the concepts behind it, and those that have a relatively deep knowledge of how their code works and all fits together. Or, in other words, those think it’s alright (and perhaps have it as a job), but are not very passionate, versus those that are very passionate about programming. Generally, I guess something like the following could be said:
People in the first group:
- Have done their main programming study at University or TAFE OR are self-taught with just the basics, generally nothing about best practices. Generally, they’ve learnt just enough to get by, nothing more
- Will copy and paste code and be happy that it works, but might not really understand how it actually works
- Don’t really consider programming a hobby
- Might be considered “code monkeys” in some situations
- Generally need help with fixing odd bugs
And people in the second group:
- May have done a University course, but their main learning is self-taught
- Write applications, scripts, websites, whatever for fun (and might actively participate in open-source projects)
- Don’t copy and paste code very often. Instead, they learn from other people’s code, and then rewrite that code in their own style
- Consider programming one of their biggest hobbies
- Aware of some of the latest trends in software development
- Might often question things, like the ways people do things, and why code is written in a specific way (or is this just me?). Usually I do that just to learn how things are done.
- Can generally investigate and solve odd bugs pretty well
Anyone else agree with me? Personally I’m proud to be in the second group, the awesome group 
Anyways, I’ll write another proper blog post, eventually. I started working recently, and will definitely have to blog about that
Until next time,
— Daniel
Posted in Programming | 7 Comments »
April 11th, 2009
Well, back to posting coding-related blog posts, for now anyways . Seeing as a lot of people seem to be confused by Object Oriented Programming, I thought I’d post a quick (or maybe not so quick) post about what OOP is, the main features, and how it can benefit you. This is paraphrased from an assignment I had on OOP last semester at university. I use C# code examples throughout this, but the concepts are very similar in other languages. Note that in this post, I assume you know the basics of programming, and just want to learn more about object orientation.
Now, let’s begin looking at what OOP actually means. At its core, the Object Oriented paradigm consists of classes and objects. A class is a “thing” or entity that has a purpose, and an object is an instance of this entity. For example, a Car would be a class, and my car would be an object (instance of the Car class).
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Add new tag, C#, csharp, object orientation, object oriented, Programming
Posted in C#, HIT2302, Programming | 3 Comments »
March 21st, 2008
TCP sockets in Pascal are generally hard to use; Free Pascal doesn’t come with any high-level socket libraries by default, only a relatively low-level socket library. Some external libraries are available to make using sockets with Pascal easier, and one of these libraries is Synapse. Synapse is an easy-to-use socket library for Pascal, and in this blog post I’ll try to show how to use Synapse to connect to a remote server and send/receive data from it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: hit1301, pascal, sockets, synapse, tcp, winsock
Posted in HIT1301 Portfolio, Programming, pascal | 5 Comments »
