Comments for After Hours

Comment on o’reilly school of technology by David Pietz

David Pietz — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:01:18 +0000

Thanks for your output. I am new to Python and looking for the right path. I will stick with Head First for now and might move on to their text. Their are so many books out there and, like teachers, which one makes a difference.

Comment on o’reilly school of technology by hal

hal — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:59:26 +0000

Sorry, Rob. I didn’t get a notice that a comment appeared – or perhaps I got a bit delete happy. So, this might be a bit dated. [As it turns out I just received an email with notice that you commented. I guess it wasn't a matter of getting delete happy.]

“Learning Python” seems good. I used it as a reference but didn’t particularly read it. What I did use of it I found better that “Programming Python” which I picked up a year or so earlier.

The book was an eBook which probably is why I didn’t use it as much. I haven’t quite reached the point where programming-oriented books work well for me in digital format. I have come to really like and appreciate the Kindle for other types of reading – and pretty useful when I picked up the latest version of the PMBoK – but with code it just doesn’t seem to cut it.

In December it appears the launched Python 3. I contemplated taking it but decided it wasn’t a worthwhile. The topic list just doesn’t interest me at this point. Looking at the proposed Python 4 course, that might be something to consider when it’s available.

– Hal

Comment on o’reilly school of technology by Rob Grabowski

Rob Grabowski — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:13:14 +0000

Thanks for the writeup. I’ve been contemplating some online courses but have been wondering what the marketing-to-content ratio was nowadays.

I see from the course syllabus that O’Reilly supplied you with the latest version of their “Learning Python” book. Do you have any opinion on the text? I was thinking about picking up a Python book, and I wondered if that one was as good as their “Learning Java”.

–Rob G.

Comment on kindle – and the eLibrary concept by digital + physical « After Hours

digital + physical « After Hours — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:52:08 +0000

[...] Amazon first launched its Kindle, I put together a handful of thoughts on the idea. I also commented towards the end that bundling the digital and physical would be a [...]

Comment on more on web tools by hal

hal — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:24:45 +0000

I had Firebug when I had Firefox. Since my reimage I haven’t reinstalled. It was pretty useful. IE has been decent enough with the tabbed browsing and the add-on that enables gesturing. This isn’t a religious statement. More about my laziness to spend the five minutes to install it. Really, it’s more about having to go grab the tool and all of the extensions that I used regularly. I do miss my Hammer time button. Plus, there is a real void of add-ons for IE and many of the ones they have cost something. There would be rare plug-in I would pony up the dough for. Though I’ve made my share of donations to the cause for Firefox plugins now and again.

There were two other features buit in to Firefox that I miss and haven’t seen them in IE (yeah, I know… download Firefox already): “View source selection…” and spell-check. The former was great to isolate areas on a page and see what code got it there. I recall it had a couple hiccups with it’s interaction with Firebug but nothing that was really all that bad. The latter was sweet for forms like this. Here, to spell check, I would have to copy the text and paste it into a tool that had a checker.

Comment on more on web tools by Tonsil

Tonsil — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:57:43 +0000

If you want to be able to examine a web page and make changes to your local copy, I think the best thing going right now is Firefox and a wonderful addon, Firebug. It is really helpful to see at a glance what bits of CSS are affecting any element. A number of times I have had a troublesome page that had elements floating to unexpected places or margins that weren't playing nice. Firebug really helped me nail down the offending styles. It's also great for javascript issues, including AJAX.

Comment on know any good web authoring tools? by more on web tools at After Hours

more on web tools at After Hours — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:49:45 +0000

[...] A little over a month ago I had a short post about web authoring tools. Mike offered a few suggestions in the comments but said his main tool is plain text editor – mostly because he would have to clean up the auto-generated code. Even when I did use tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, I found myself doing the same thing. The generated code was never that smart. Aside from inefficiencies, as in span tags that defined styles already in place for a given paragraph, the generated code tended to cause more complications when editing later. For example, because of the poor code structure it can be near impossible to unwind styling. [...]

Comment on Contact Me by my other clock is custom at After Hours

my other clock is custom at After Hours — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:48:14 +0000

[...] In any event, that’s my discussion on creating a custom clock. I’d be happy to share the code – so drop me a line if you want. I won’t warranty the code or even suggest its implemented as cleanly as it could be. I’m still tinkering with it. [...]

Comment on the ‘id’ attribute by Tonsil

Tonsil — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:53:43 +0000

Okay, I see more clearly what you’re getting at now. I will say that the database analogy doesn’t exactly hold true. More recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards using simply “id” as a primary key for tables. This is definitely true in databases for web applications, and is a convention in the Rails world. Instead of using ‘orderId’, you typically specify it as ‘orders.id’ in order to distinguish it from, say, ‘order_lines.id’.

Aaaannnyway, the reason I mention all that is to bring it back to what you were saying about the document. If I wanted to retrieve an order and its order_lines from the database and display it in a document, I couldn’t just map the database ids to element ids. Why? Because they would not necessarily be unique. If the order has an id of 1, and the first order_line also has an id of 1, you’d end up with two elements fighting over the same id like vampire bats over a used tampon. I mean, that ain’t cool. So it is that you’d have to add in something to make each id unique, typically the table name. That way, you would end up with ids of “order1″ and “order_line1″.

As you have stated, the id is meant be used by the document as a whole in order to index the elements it contains, and not as a descriptor of the elements themselves. So yeah, right on!

Comment on the ‘id’ attribute by hal

hal — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:43:14 +0000

What I was trying to assert is that the id is really meta-data at the document level than meta-data at the element level. If the id is describing the data element, then it seems to me that its uniqueness should extend beyond the document. For example, if I was modeling an order for a store, there might be an id, orderId, that makes the order to be unique from all other orders. If we were talking databases, I think this would be akin to the primary key (but I'm not really a database guy). On the other hand, the id attribute has a different interpretataion and has a semi-reserved status a la the DOM. That is, I can locate an element using getElementById(). In order to locate the element by its unique order id, I would have to parse the tree and look for the element that has that particular order id. So, the id's context is really the document, not the data.