From the category archives:

Programming

A Fabulous Resource for Online Learning

March 3, 2010

Academic Earth provides free online lectures from leading universities.
Courses are available from these universities:

Berkeley
Columbia
Harvard
Michigan
MIT
NYU
Princeton
Stanford
UCLA
Yale

I am particularly pleased to see Computer Science courses from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
The lectures are excellent (or, at least the ones I have seen). There is now no reason for anyone not to be exposed to material from top universities.

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Some Favorite Publishers

February 27, 2010

I collect books. While the Internet has many resources, printed books are still enormously valuable.
Most of the books I read are of a technical nature, and I am particularly fond of these publishers:

Microsoft Press (initially because of Steve McConnell’s books)
O’Reilly Media (tie for #1)
The MIT Press (tie for #1)
Wrox
The Pragmatic Bookshelf

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Google and Competition

February 19, 2010

Google is the world’s most important search engine.
Its search engine is without rival, and with good reason. Perhaps Bing will become that rival, but I doubt that it will.
Search is not the only avenue in which Google has excelled; it produces highly popular and usable web applications for various users.
Google is innovative and seems to [...]

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Software Development and Simplicity

February 16, 2010

Today I finally managed to resolve some significant technical challenges for a web project.
They involved working with custom logical processing and data transformation for a custom content type in a content management framework. The process of discovering the solutions to the problems was time consuming and frustrating at times. Now, the proper approach is readily [...]

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Why Web Developers are Still Necessary

February 11, 2010

Web content management systems (CMSs) are rapidly advancing. I am particularly fond of two prominent open-source CMSs: Wordpress and Drupal. They simplify many tasks pertaining to web design and development.
Content management systems do many things, including:

solve the challenge of user administration
provide permission control systems
maintain useful separations between user interface design and programmatic logic
provide extensible add-on [...]

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Announcing Computer Services in Tulsa, Oklahoma

February 5, 2010

I am expanding my involvement in the provision of computer services.

My skills are primarily in the areas of computer consulting and web development.
For more information on my services, please visit proithelp.com.

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Color Keywords or Hexadecimal Codes?

January 26, 2010

Colors used in HTML and CSS can be identified through color keywords and hexadecimal values. I was recently asked which approach is better, and here is my response.
First, style information should not be embedded in (X)HTML markup, as it is intended to describe information, not formatting. CSS stylesheets should be used to control the appearance [...]

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Drupal on LiteracyEvangelism.org

December 26, 2009

I have been working as the IT manager of Literacy & Evangelism International for almost 7 years. The opportunity to work with the organization has provided valuable learning experiences, and those experiences have included web development projects for the last several years.

The first database-driven version of literacyevangelism.org was a custom PHP/MySQL application. It was quite [...]

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A Simple Apache/PHP Security Enhancement

December 19, 2009

Web application development requires the consideration of various security issues.
SQL Injection and session hijacking are among the more popular attack methods and must be carefully battled by web developers.
I used a custom PHP/MySQL web application for a recent web development project and decided to use Apache’s mod_rewrite and some custom PHP code to reduce potential vulnerabilities.
I [...]

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Excerpt from Solid Code

November 4, 2009

From Solid Code: Optimizing the Software Development Lifecycle
Software engineering is not engineering. As a software developer, I would love nothing more than to say I am an engineer. Engineers think through and build things that are supposed to work the first time due to careful planning. So having the word “engineer” in my job title [...]

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