kellishaver

It used to be this way, didn't it? It seems to me I remember people used to often ring in with an answer before Alex was done reading the question.

I think if I had to work in the Zappos office, I'd probably develop at least one nervous tic by about lunch time. I don't see how anyone could concentrate to get actual work done, with all the visual and likely auditory distraction of such a cluttered, bright, flashy space. I don't just get distracted if there's a lot of clutter around me, I actually get depressed, become extremely introverted and irritated, and the part of my brain that cares about stuff just shuts down. I'm the same way if I'm around a lot of noise. I probably have some sort of sensory issue there.

My home office is quiet and free of clutter, but still warm and inviting, with about 8 different adjustable levels of lighting, depending on my mood. It took me a while to get it the way I want it, and it is by no means fancy, but it's the most comfortable work environment I've had so far.

It's funny to see the first 3 comments are essentially "looks good, but I'll keep using X" where X is different each time. I was just thinking that it looks good, but I'll probably keep using XChat.

IRC Clients: They may not look pretty, but there are tons of 'em.

Congrats on the success of the site. I just wanted to say that this is one of my favorite projects from last year's Rumble (also the first RR I didn't compete in).

Ah, thanks.

I realize this is still in alpha and I expect bugs (though it looks incredibly polished), but is anyone else having problems changing the font/font size in the Linux 64bit version? I have changed it in the config file and restarted the program, but it seems to have no effect. I'm just wondering if this doesn't yet work or if I'm doing it wrong.

I'd love to use this, but I need to be able to see it first. :/

I don't agree with some of the things Oracle has done as of late, but that seems quite reasonable to me. If usage levels are quite low, then it is a waste of time to keep devoting resources to it.

Anecdotally, I don't know of a single RoR developer who uses Netbeans. Vim, Textmate and Emacs seem to be the editors of choice.

I used to work at a desk shoved into the corner of the guest bedroom. We recently moved the bed out and now it's a dedicated home office. I find it much easier to focus and be productive.

I agree, and good for them. It's a great little program. I use it in place of Photoshop oh my relatively low-end Macbook for light image editing, just because it performs so much faster.

Same here. I can't say that I've even read any of the content, but I do make regular use of the tools on the site and mobile app and like them a lot.

I agree, but as far as video presentations go, this one wasn't bad. There was some fairly basic, but good info there. Mr. Osmani seems pretty comfortable presenting, talking jQuery, and has a clear voice that's easy to listen to.

I do wish videos like this would come with some summary text that highlighted the main points and showed the example code used in the video, like the way Ryan does over at Railscasts.

I mean, you know it was all written up beforehand anyway, during the process of making the video, so it's not like it adds a lot of extra work.

I can't help but feel that all of that time and effort they spent criticizing and nitpicking could have been spent building something better. If this is something they really feel passionately about, rather than just a way to amuse themselves with angry rants, then all that energy could have been put to so much better use.

I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human nature in general, really.

W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The 'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code. The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable source.

I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they should be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.

I figure when you're worth $14bn you don't really have to try to impress anyone with fancy clothes and can pretty much do whatever you want.

And who knows, Zuckerberg's wardrobe decisions may have nothing all to do with a personal aesthetic and everything to do with comfort and practicality. He seems to me like the kind of person who probably doesn't care what others think, so why dress to impress?

I don't think he really has to prove anything to anyone at this point and I am guessing he probably never did care to associate/partner with business types who would rather make judgements about his business based on his clothing rather than the actual merits of the web site he was developing.

I've been waiting for the exact same thing, myself. I was just saying to a friend the other day how nice it would be to be able to style select boxes and file inputs with jQuery UI (and how I wish it had a color picker widget so I wouldn't have to use a separate one, but that's another post entirely).

From what I can gather just by looking at the site, it doesn't look like it supports jQuery UI themes, but the theme CSS for Uniforms looks fairly small and not too terribly involved, so it shouldn't be hard to modify it to match your chosen UI theme.

This is definitely one I'm going to keep my eye on.

It is, yes.

HTML ignores whitespace, unless it's inside a <pre> tag, or when IE randomly decides not to for in-line elements when rendering some CSS rules. ;)

We had a TI-99 with a tape drive-a standard tape player that you would set next to the Mic input on the computer, get the volume just right, and hit Play.

My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.

This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.

I'd say I do this more on an "as-needed" basis, which I doubt is every day.

I typically do sit down at the end of the day and go over a list of all the things that have been done and those still yet to do and prepare a plan of attack for the next day, which, from time to time, does include improvements in workflow.

Over the last year or two, I've taken to thorough note-taking. Every time I'm on a phone call, I take notes. Whenever I'm working on some bit of code and happen to see something that needs improved later, make an improvement, get an idea about a feature, etc. I take notes. Whenever I review things with a client, I take notes.

They're all handwritten, with a good pen, in Mead notebooks I get for $0.15/each during "back to school" sales. Each project gets its own (labelled) notebook, and I have another one for miscellaneous notes.

This all sounds very simple and obvious, but the act of physically writing things down in a book I can flip through, mark things out of, and scribble on (vs. typing them in a text file to get lost somewhere on the hard drive, or in an application I have to open amongst other windows) has done wonders for my productivity.

I voted 11-16, but I started dabbling around 7 with TI-BASIC on a TI-99. It was mostly playing, though, at that age. Then in HS, I started writing simple games in GWBASIC. We didn't have Internet access at home then, so it was about all that was easily accessible to me. When I got to college, I started getting into web dev languages and that's when I started getting serious about it.

CB: Do you like the Rolling Stones?

Me: Not particularly.

CB: How about 3 Doors Down?

Me: Meh.

<insert about 3 more bands here, all with negative responses from me>

CB: You don't have many friends, do you?

Ouch.

Thanks!

Do you have a link to that by chance? I'd be interested in reading/listening (whichever the case may be).

My husband's just starting to get into web development in the hopes of being able to do it with me in a few months. He's a C programmer from years back and has a great head for sorting out and designing how an app should run. His theory is solid, and he has real programming experience to back it up.

I've been bringing him up to speed on the web stuff, though, and he's said the main thing that gets him is that he can't just learn a language and build an app. He's got to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript (the DOM, jQuery), SQL, PHP/Ruby/Python and any accompanying framework we choose to use, etc. and piece it all together.

It's not that he finds any one of them particularly difficult (he's picking up on them quickly), it's just that there are so many pieces to the puzzle that all need to be understood and fitted together (and they often inter-mingle so much that you can't always separate them out and do one, then the other). It's just a large and varied volume of things to process.

The majority of the work I do, I do alone, and Git has become invaluable. Sure, it's possible to work without source control, but I really, really don't want to.

Thanks! That's quite handy.

The main thing that turns me off of Chrome is that there is no way to zoom text only. If I want to zoom in, I have to resize the entire layout. That means that column of text I wanted to read that fit nicely in the browser window, but was simply too small, now requires a lot of horizontal scrolling to read.

Sure, sometimes text-only zoom breaks the layout, but usually only if you zoom in a very large amount, and often times, it is still preferable and easier to work with.

I surf the web with my text zoomed in 4-6x.

John,

This is great. I love the simplicity of it. That said, while drag and drop is super easy, I think you should still offer a more traditional upload method in addition to it.

Often times, I have several windows open, none of which is a folder full of images and no desire to re-purpose one or open more. Drag and drop is great if you want to share a bunch of images, but if you're just uploading a screen shot for someone to quickly review or what have you, having to stop what you're doing, open yet another window, browse to the folder, drag browser windows around so that you can then select the photo and drag it into the browser is significantly slower than just clicking a browse button, selecting the image, and clicking upload.

Drag and drop is pretty idiot-proof, and for bulk uploads, it's faster, but for single images and multi-tasking users, it can actually be a lot slower.

Having both options would be ideal.

I can already ask my friends if I want information that they may have. More over, there are at least a dozen ways I can do so in a medium that's not littered with daily horoscopes, stupid quizzes, Farm Mafia Mob Zombie Fish Wars, and photos of pets from people I barely knew in high school. Search engines are for things my friends don't know, or for those times when I don't want to bother those friends, because I know they're busy with more important things to do than sit on Facebook all day long.

It depends a lot on the context. If I'm talking to a good friend and start off something with "I hate to say it but..." or "I don't mean to offend, but..." then chances are, yeah, I'm not lying. I really don't want to have to say it, but they're my friend and there's something I think needs to be said because they need to hear it. It doesn't mean I secretly want to offend them. It means "the truth hurts sometimes, and I don't want to hurt you because you're my friend, but because you are my friend, I feel I have a responsibility to tell you." It's nothing less than I would expect from them.

Notable things I'm proud to have achieved/hacked/made, in no particular order of importance:

- Built a HAM radio-vacuum tubes were involved.

- Developed a useful library of JavaScript tools

- Developed my own MVC web framework

- Collaborated on the design of, developed and launched custom child-still tweaking that one for performance

- Started a successful business

- Be a part of a popular Open Source project

- Wired a house

- Participated in the saving of a few lives

I can and do anyway, just because it's just more convenient and faster. Poor vision or not, I do so dearly love keyboard shortcuts.