All Things Distributed

JANUARY 12, 2008

For those of you who always wanted an Amazon robot you can now buy this special Amazon version of the Danboard character from the Yotsuba & ! series.

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Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 30, 2008

Using the z-index to affect stacking order in CSS is a much deeper topic than it may appear at first. The idea seems quite simple, but if we take a look we can see that there is actually quite a bit going on here that warrants a closer examination. Most of the time, stacking order just kind of works behind the scenes and we don’t really pay any attention to it.

Code 40

Code Systems 40

The Agile Manager

JANUARY 28, 2008

We tend to consider an IT project successful if it is delivered “on time and on budget.” From an IT governance perspective, however, this doesn’t tell us all that much. At best it is an indicator of basic operational competence, that fundamental project controls are working. At worst it’s a false positive, indicating nothing more than the team was particularly lucky that all assumptions held true, or that their contingency was sufficiently large to absorb the impact of those assumptions that did

Government 40

Government Strategy Efficiency Development 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 28, 2008

All developers at one point or another will have to work with code that they didn’t develop. Whether we are replacing the person who created the application, or simply trying to work on a project developed by someone else in house, this is always a bit of an interesting experience. It becomes necessary to familiarize ourselves with the existing coding techniques used on the project so that we can quickly edit and maintain it for our purposes.

Development 40

Development Code Design Programming 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 22, 2008

There has been an awful lot of talk around the web community about Microsoft’s new feature in IE8 - version targeting. Initially, I hated the idea. However, instead of jumping in blindly, I thought it deserved a more detailed look on my part. What Is It? Version targeting, as proposed by Microsoft, will use a X-UA-Compatible declaration, either via a META tag or as a HTTP header on the server, to determine which rendering engine the page will be displayed in.

Engineering 40

Engineering AWS Code Servers 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 21, 2008

Using print stylesheets are a nice way to enhance a user’s experience of a site. Our screen stylesheets don’t necessarily turn out that nicely when printed out, so using a few different CSS rules on our print stylesheet we can increase readability and usability. One of those nice features we can add is to display a link’s href directly after the link on our print-outs.

Internet 40

Internet Internet Testing 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 17, 2008

Utilizing branching in Javascript can allow us to create more efficient code. Branching essentially allows us to create “conditional” functions at run-time so we don’t have to keep running the same verifications each time a function is called. That last sentence is probably as clear as mud, so let’s take a look at an example.

Efficiency 40

Efficiency Code Performance 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 6, 2008

One very fundamental and integral part of CSS is understanding specificity. Understanding this basic concept can help to make your CSS development, and more specifically (no pun intended) your troubleshooting go more smoothly. Every rule in CSS has a specificity value that is calculated by the user agent (the web browser for most web development purposes), and assigned to the declaration.

Development 40

Development Processing 40

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 2, 2008

As mentioned in my previous post , I think using prototypes is powerful enough to deserve a more detailed explanation. To start off, let me say we are talking about the prototype method here, not the JavaScript library. Prototypes allow you to easily define methods to all instances of a particular object. The beauty is that the method is applied to the prototype, so it is only stored in the memory once, but every instance of the object has access to it.

Code 40

Code 40