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Featured Blog Posts – October 2009 Archive (6)

Howto manage Cron Jobs and Task Queues using Google AppEngine

In the process of discovering Google AppEngine's list of available features, I recently came across Cron Jobs and Task Queues. During my fairly extensive web development carrier, these terms always seemed like far away concepts that will not likely be a part of my average web development toolkit. At first, seeing these in AppEngine reminded me of those old mainframe systems that you read about in computer science manuals. One day I had some time to actually look into… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 26, 2009 at 5:00pm — No Comments

C# 4: Dynamic Types, Variance & Named Arguments

C# 4 adds some great features to what is already this language geek's favorite language. One of the overarching design goals of C# 4 is to be more dynamic. From the docs:

The major theme for C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Increasingly, objects are “dynamic” in the sense that their structure and behavior is not captured by a static type, or at least not one that the compiler knows about when compiling your program.

Lets take a quick look at C# 4's… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 24, 2009 at 11:00am — 5 Comments

Community dynamics at Wikipedia: research done by the PARC - Augmented Social Cognition group

There's an interesting

post about the community dynamics of Wikipedia on the

PARC - Augmented Social Cognition site with several interesting ideas about Wikipedia and the maturation of a website community. This post concludes a four part series by summarizing work presented in a to-be-published paper by Bongwon Suh,… Continue

Added by Dan Starr on October 23, 2009 at 1:29pm — 2 Comments

Optimizing CSS with a simple Groovy script and CssTidy

Recently I've been working on a web project that requires quite an extensive CSS markup. Keeping it all in one file became unmanageable pretty quickly, so we've designed a way to split our styles into logical subdirectories with import statements, which is quite easily done with a css

@import tag. Here is an example of what a main file might look like:

@import 'common.css'; @import 'base.css';… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 15, 2009 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments

Building a Native OS X Desktop App: First Impressions

Not content to let Pat and Sherwin have all the fun with Cocoa development, I decided to dive in today. I just finished my first application. Its a simple note organizer for personal use I built to learn about OS X desktop development. Given the fact I'm new to the entire stack including… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 10, 2009 at 8:30pm — 40 Comments

The Web & Indigenous Cultures in Developing Countries

A few years ago the title of this post would have sounded bizarre, but its happening. From Fiji to Madagascar, we are observing the affect of web access on indigenous cultures. 99% of web access in these countries is by the wealthy few, but in some villages children walk hours to schools lucky enough to have a web connection. Village chiefs in Fiji often have mobile phones, and last month Vodafone Fiji starting offering iPhone. This will undoubtedly make web access in villages more… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 1, 2009 at 10:00am — 9 Comments