All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 19, 2007

I wrote a first version of this posting on consistency models in December 2007, but I was never happy with it as it was written in haste and the topic is important enough to receive a more thorough treatment. ACM Queue asked me to revise it for use in their magazine and I took the opportunity to improve the article.

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The Agile Manager

DECEMBER 28, 2007

With the cost of capital on the rise, the need to focus on returns is much more acute. Unfortunately, IT has not traditionally excelled at maximising returns. Industry surveys consistently show that a third to a half of all IT projects fail outright or significantly exceed their cost estimate. 1 Delays are costly: IRR craters 25% if a $5mm / 12 month project with an estimated annual yield of $30mm is 4 months late.

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Government Retail Best Practices Technology 40

Tim Kadlec

DECEMBER 28, 2007

Let me first tell you the why and then I will explain the what. By using classes in Javascript, you will notice a couple immediate benefits: Custom classes make your code more reusable. If many of your applications use a similar functionality, you can define a class to help and facilitate that functionality. Now you can just use your new class in multiple projects to provide the common functionality.

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All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 6, 2007

Today we had a wonderful day with the finalists of the 900 contestants in the AWS Startup Challenge, all seven proved themselves worthy of winning the ultimate price. The finalists were: Brainscape Commerce360 Justin.tv Milemeter Ooyala WeoGeo Go to the startup challenge vote page to see videos of each of these companies and to see the voting results.

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All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 9, 2007

Sadness. Marc Orchant, the ulimate optimist, is no longer with us.

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Tim Kadlec

DECEMBER 23, 2007

CSS can be a tricky little fellow. It’s easy to learn, but difficult to master. There are, after all, 122 CSS Level 2 Properties. Add to that pseudo-classes, selectors, inheritance, and specificity, and you have yourselves quite a bit of information to try and remember. Here are a few things that have made CSS development a little smoother for me, and hopefully they can do the same for you.

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Design Development Code 40

Tim Kadlec

DECEMBER 20, 2007

Just in time for the holiday season, Microsoft has let it be known that IE8 (due out sometime in 2008) passes the Acid 2 test in standards mode. This is excellent news for web developers, and quite refreshing to hear coming from the same people who said passing the Acid 2 test simply wasn’t a priority for IE7. For those of you who may be unaware, Acid 2 is a test page for web browser vendors set up by the Web Standards Project (WASP).

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Testing Development 40

Tim Kadlec

DECEMBER 12, 2007

One really common situation for web developers to run into is how to properly clear their floats. There are numerous approaches that have been discussed and used, but only recently have I come across a method that I believe is superior to the rest of the ones I had used up to now. In this post, we will first take a look at the problem caused by floats, and then we will look at some of the ways of fixing that problem.

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Internet Internet Development 40

Tim Kadlec

DECEMBER 6, 2007

Most of us who are just starting in Javascript and more specifically working with the DOM, can probably write some simple scripts using event handlers. However, there is a more memory efficient method that someone relatively new to Javascript (heck, even some people who have been doing this awhile) might not be aware of - event delegation. Lucky for us, event delegation is not overly complex, and the jump from using event handlers to using event delegation can be made relatively easily.

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All Things Distributed

DECEMBER 20, 2007

North Shore. 10 Days. See you next year.

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