Posted on February 27th, 2009%
In the past, I implemented web page titles (i.e. the code in the <title> tag) the same way that one would implement a breadcrumb – that is, from the least-specific to most specific. For example:
Web Site Name: Category: Page Name
That is similar to how a breadcrumb would look:
Home > Category > Page Name
Note that I said this is how I did it “in the past.” Today, I read 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design over at Smashing Magazine, which states in mistake #3:
Putting the name of the website last puts more emphasis on what the page itself is about, rather than on website branding, which is still there.
This makes perfect sense, and the article illustrates the idea well with screenshots.
Needless to say, I’ll be refactoring web projects to invert titles at my earliest convenience.
. . .
→ Read More: Usability tip: Implement web page titles as inverted breadcrumbs
Posted on February 13th, 2009%
The Zombie Survival Guide
by Max Brooks
For a guy who spends most of his days commuting reading things like The Economist and Scientific American, it felt somewhat strange pulling out a book whose subtitle is Complete protection from the living dead. Yet here I was, reading just that book, on a recommendation by an old friend, Mr. Vikar (who knows a good book when he reads one)… and enjoying every minute of it.
The Zombie Survival Guide is the work of Max Brooks, son of comedian/writer/director Mel Brooks (the brains behind of one of my all-time favorite movies, Blazing Saddles). In it, the author takes us on a journey that describes, as only a self-help survival guide can, how to survive a zombie invasion.
Everything zombie-related is covered, including their physiology (they’re dead) and psychology (none); their source (a virus, Solanum); and, of course, an in-depth education on how to identify them, kill them, and . . .
→ Read More: Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
Posted on February 11th, 2009%
I’ve been doing a lot of work with NHibernate lately, particularly with named queries. It took a while to get it just right, so I figured it would be helpful to others (and to myself in the future) to note some of the gotchas and how-to steps to get it just right.
What is a named query?
An NHibernate named query is essentially a native SQL statement that can be invoked by NHibernate and can return strongly-typed object data. It allows you to leverage native SQL code — parametrized statements or stored procedures — to perform complex data manipulation and retrieval.
In other words, let’s say you’re writing a baseball game, and you have three objects in your domain model: a Player, a Team, and a DrugTestResult model. You write a stored procedure, spSelectPlayersByLastDrugTestDate, which returns all players who haven’t had a drug test since a given date.
Now that you have a domain model and a SQL statement, how do you execute . . .
→ Read More: Executing native SQL using NHibernate named queries
Posted on February 5th, 2009%
I’ve been developing (and operating) CSFBL, my multiplayer, web-based baseball game, for over eight years. After mulling for quite some time as to the future of the game, I’m seriously considering the transition of the game to an open source project. That being said, finding the right open source license is important.
After doing my reading, I’m thinking of going the route taken by MySQL – i.e., open-source under the GPL, but the potential for closed-source and commercial options available with a separate license.
Realistically, I highly doubt people would come to license the software for commercial use, but I do want to protect the product, intellectual property, and my sweat equity (I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy on it over 8+ years). My interest is in sharing it (and getting help from others), not letting others profit off it. (Hence I am avoiding licenses such . . .
→ Read More: Looking for advice on open source licenses
Posted on February 5th, 2009%
From The Wall Street Journal, via Cato.org:
The December unemployment rate was only 2.3% for government workers and 3.8% in education and health. Unemployment rates in manufacturing and construction, by contrast, were 8.3% and 15.2% respectively. Yet 39% of the $550 billion in the bill would go to state and local governments. Another 17.3% would go to health and education — sectors where relatively secure government jobs are also prevalent.
If the intent of the plan is to alleviate unemployment, why spend over half of the money on sectors where unemployment is lowest?
… [O]nly a fifth of the original $550 billion is left for notoriously slow infrastructure projects, such as rebuilding highways and the electricity grid.
What a disaster. Government picking winners and losers with our money (after all, it’s taxpayer money they spend reallocate) is a recipe for disaster. This time, they want the recipe in order of some $800 billion, with no real guarantee that it’ll help anyone aside from . . .
→ Read More: $646,214 Per Government Job, or $2,000 per citizen?
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