Category: Coding

Classes Universities Should be Teaching in CS Programs

Dan Zambonini published an article on what he thought would be useful classes in computer science programs in colleges and universities.

To Mr. Zambonini’s credit, I can relate to most of this suggestions. My brother told me most of his CS classes at Purdue University are heavy on theory, light on practice. I had to really squeeze practicing PHP out of him. Fortunately the classes I am taking at UCSC are really market driven and practical (Java + XML, JavaScripting, Securing Java… etc). But being able to get into one of those classes is another story.

via [Slashdot]

WordPress Footer Problem

Kyung emailed and said he found an issue with the footer when going under any of the categories. The footer was pretty badly misaligned, making the page ugly as hell.

i checked out ur blog… pretty funny… but,
there’s a problem with the “Mac – OSX” section…
the footer is not aligned with the page…

At first I thought it must be his crazy Linux browser. But then, as always, he was right! Stupid footer…

WordPress footer alignment problems

After almost an hour of looking for the problem at all the wrong places (style.css, page.php, index.php… etc), I finally nailed it down and fixed it.

1. Go to “/wp-content/themes/_theme_of_choice/sidebar.php” (of all places!)
2. Added an end div tag back to the end of the file (where the sidebar.php file finishes and footer.php begins).

I must have deleted it by accident after I added the Google Ads a while back.

Applescripting and Blogging

I have been using Applescript to help me make my blogging easier. Everything from image resize and image format changes are done via my tiny scripts through Tiger’s Automator. And let me tell ya… it’s a godsend not having to keep memory-hogging Photoshop open all the time. Sure, I could have used third-party software that takes up smaller memory foot prints. But why bother when Applescript is so readily available?

Here is a good article to get started on Applescripting. But if you are on Tiger, don’t bother; Automator is all you need.

Editing CSS with Ease

Found this nice little app — Xyle Scope.

It’s a WYSIWYG application that makes editing CSS style sheets way easier than “edit-save-refresh browser” method. And because it’s got a built-in browser, you can see the changes as you go. This is also a good way for beginners to learn how other people utilize their CSS files on their sites.

Xyle Scope Screen Shot

Xyle Scope Icon

Styled Checkboxes

There hasn’t been a lot of changes on styling check boxes and radio buttons on HTML forms. But this article Styled Checkboxes took CSS to the next level.

With XHTML, some Javascript and a bit of creativity, form fields can look really nice with this example. Check it out!

And as usual, Slashdot has a flood of comments about this.