Only Nerds Allowed

I’m in the “music production” for the highschool.  It’s Beauty and the Beast.  I’m the candlestick man (which means I’m part of the chorus) as well as Mousier D’arque.  I’m surprised at how big my part is, consider this is my first ever musical.  I did have stage fright previously, but I’ve seem to have gotten over it.  (Or at least I hope so)

Well now I’m going to drama camp to learn the play and everything.  We have to do dancing - I did 4 hours of it today - and I’m really bad at it.  It doesn’t help that I’m in the front row for most of the 1st scene.  :O

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Many people don’t think server side scripting is consider part of Web 2.0.  But I do.  The better you make your code, the easier it is to updating, the less prone it is to errors due to server changes, etc.  It definitely needs to be remembered.

The most important part of Web 2.0 SSS (Server Side Scripting) is DRY.  Don’t Repeat Yourself.  If you use the same few lines of code in a script, put them into a function.  That way if you need to update those few lines, it’ll be updated throughout the script.

Then theres OOP scripting.  A lot of people don’t bother to learn this, but its really important.  OOP can increase the organization in your script by a huge amount as well as its DRYness.

An MVC (Model View Controller) framework is also important.  I’ve always called it MVCH, because helpers are important.  In my opinion, there gods gift to DRY.  But MVC(H) frameworks allow you to do things you could never do before.  The ease of changing a part of a code is amazing.  Ever try adding or removing a column in a MySQL table?  You have to go throughout the entire script changing every MySQL query.  With MVC(H), you just have to edit a line or two in the model, and you’re ready to go.

But these improvements come at a price.  All of them (excluding DRY) increase CPU cycles and RAM needed to run the site.  This is no problem if your on a VPS or dedicated server, but it has led to overcrowding on shared servers.

But, despite the disadvantages, Web 2.0 SSS is not something to be ignored.  Cheers!

Movie ratings.  How I hate them.  Just in case your a little bit rusty, lets review them:

• G - Anybody can watch
• PG - Anybody can watch, but younger kids are recommended to have parental supervision
• PG-13 - Anybody 13 and up, but teenagers should have parental supervision
• R - Only 17 year olds and up

Now, lets start at the bottom.  The last G movie I’ve seen was a Winnie the Pooh movie.  Disney animations such as Cinderella or Little Mermaid are PGs.  I think young kids can watch those without their parents hover over their shoulders; these movies should be G.

Quite a lot of PG-13 movies don’t deserve the rating they get.  A new rating, such as PG-9, would be nice, something to put all those movies that are to much for PG but not enough for PG-13.

Onto R.  This is the most unfair rating.  If the F word is mentioned in the movie more than 3 times, its an R movie.  I think 13 year olds can handle swearing.  Obviously the people who invented the rating have forgotten what a middle school locker room is like.

Also, to much violence and gore shoots a movie up to an R rating.  Likewise:  13+ year olds can handle it.  Teenagers are mature enough.

Funnily enough though, PG-13 movies will allow a huge amount of sexuality, but not much gore and swearing.

Yep, the rating system is messed up.  And I can apply the same argument to video game ratings too.

I was shuffling through the newspaper today, saw a short article about McCain and Obama.  Guess what?  They both have plans to cut taxes.

What’s wrong with these people?  When will they learn that cutting taxes is not the answer?  Cutting taxes means cutting budgets.  Cutting budgets means reducing or eliminating several government programs.  And doing that will make many people working with the government lose their jobs.  And McCain thinks that cutting taxes will help the economy.  (If you don’t happen to live in the US, we’re in a economic slump at the moment.)  It doesn’t work.  People may not like higher taxes, but its whats best for them.

During the great depression, what did Roosevelt do?  He created government projects to give people jobs: dams, parks, etc.  And it worked.  We managed to get ourselves out of that.  But now instead of giving people jobs to start the economy - we have a pretty bad unemployment rate, and 2 million jobs are minimum wage - we cut taxes, no doubt increasing the national debt of 9.5 trillion dollars and getting rid of jobs at the same time

When will one of the candidates understand?  Being president is more than just a popularity stunt.  You have to help the nation.  And lowering taxes is not going to do it.

Being 14, I may not have a vote.  But if I did, McCain and Obama just lost it.

I’m off to a resort in northern Minnesota for a week, so I’ll be gone.   Post some photos when I get back.

Somehow - I don’t know how - I managed to lock myself out of Ubuntu while screwing with folder permissions.  Now I can only log on using a “failsafe session,” which basically means the barebones linux kernal.  I’ve tried to get help, but all the commands they tell me to type in don’t do anything.  Even though they should.  So now I have to reinstall Ubuntu.  That sucks.  At least all of my valuable data is in an entire different partition. Phew.

This is the second installment of my Web 2.0 series.  The topic of this one, javascript and AJAX.  Now javascript and AJAX are good things; they allow user interface and functionality to be improved a great deal.  But if used wrongly, it can do the exact opposit.

The biggest rule about javascript and AJAX is to make sure everything works without it.  More and more people have javascript disabled.  Take GoDaddy for example.  Biggest domain registrar on the web.  Ever try using the site with javascript disabled?  It becomes completely broken.  Half of the links don’t work.

Secondly is AJAX log in.  It is nice, I’ll admit, to be able to log in without having to reload the page.  But this breaks most browsers password saving systems.  And some people - me included - use that heavily.  Especially if they only use the site occasionally its easy to forget the password.  And also having the browser enter it in for you is rather nice.

This one should go without saying: cheesy javascript eye-candy.  Nobody wants to rainbow-colored text follow the mouse around doing loop-de-loops.  Its annoying.  Don’t do it.  Although nice, small effects offered by javascript libraries such as JQuery I do recommend.  For example, if I click “close” on a notice that appears, its rather appealing to see it fade out.  Just don’t overdo it.

One thing that you must remember to include when using javascript and AJAX is feedback.  Often times I’ll submit something and AJAX will do its stuff behind the curtains.  I can’t see it do that.  You have to tell me “Post successful” or “Success!”

Javascript and AJAX are great things.  They’ve revolutionized user interface.  But remember: use it wisely.

The website of my most recent client is being uploaded as we speak.  That means I should be able to get started on ResourceFish.  Yay!

I learned a lot from WebForumz.  Just a list:

• Good SEO
• <ul> navigation
• Good web design (Couldn’t of done it without all that harsh - but honest - critique)
• Good CSS
• Validating pages!
• OOP PHP (Wasn’t that hard, already knew OOP C++)
• That JQuery is better than mootools (Will be learning JQuery too)

All that stuff in just a months.  What was I doing before? lol

I just discovered the photoshop slice tool.  Before this I was manually cropping each image I needed from the layout.  To think how much time i wasted……..