My wife and a developer co-worker were working on a client Plone site the other day when they ran into an anomaly. Melody was checking whether search results showed an icon to indicate pages which should only be available to registered users (using custom code for the site which is different than what normally happens in Plone, private content not showing up at all in the search results). She wasn’t seeing the lock icon, but the developer saw it on his own local copy of the same site. They then proceeded to look for find differences between the two sites.
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My wife was working on a project where in some cases it was taking several minutes for a web page to appear. The project is pretty complicated and involves many pieces. I remembered that I had a book which talked about performance tuning so I pulled down my copy of Programming Pearls from the bookshelf. While it’s more geared towards writing code than integrating pieces together (which is closer to her project), the methodology still applies. Most of what I was able to cite from the book ends up sounding like common sense but is a good reminder: if you need a small speedup, consider all the levels and work at the one which will give the most gain for the least effort; if you need a large speedup, work at many levels since in some cases those speedups can multiply.
I did a little research so I could write this post about the book and to my surprise, a second edition has been released. While I haven’t had a chance to take a look at the new edition, I’m definitely going to seek it out. Although it doesn’t appear in the actual book, Jon posted a section from a draft preface which explains why he wrote the second edition; from that you can get a feel for his style.
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Using different computers is nice since I still like a desktop system, yet a laptop is definitely handy. Add a home desktop system into the mix and that means I have three systems I try to keep in sync. My wife also has her own laptop, so she has two systems to sync. There is unfortunately no silver bullet which will take care of all the syncing needs, so I try to deal with the pain points as they come.
I’ve already discussed calendar syncing, and since all my email is accessed via IMAP there aren’t syncing issues (at least not for the messages themselves). I’m a MobileMe (nee .Mac) subscriber so many other things are taken care of for me, even though I only really sync Safari bookmarks and contacts. I use NetNewsWire which already syncs over iDisk, so I’m good there as long as I somehow force a sync before going somewhere else, but I can always use screen sharing to do that if I forget.
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After a bit of playing around, I think I’m near enough to my goal state with calendaring to call it good enough. I was trying to get as close as I could to how I had things configured with Oracle Calendar, so it’s very possible there would be an easier way to set things up if I were to change my workflow (at least more than it already has by switching to Exchange). It doesn’t stray too far what I had before, but there is another piece or two to make things fit together.
FLOSS Weekly isn’t about limiting one’s dental hygiene, since for this podcast FLOSS stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. It’s only one of the shows on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network, but as interesting as roundtable discussions can be, the guest list makes this podcast (or netcast) compelling. Many times I hadn’t heard of the interviewee (let alone the product) but there’s always something interesting. The co-host started out being Chris DiBona (open source program manager at Google), but since he ended up not having enough time to do a weekly show, Randal Schwartz (author of many Perl books) took his place and the quality of the guests hasn’t changed at all.
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A friend was asking about a Firebug-like plugin for Internet Explorer, and that got me thinking about the importance of being able to see how a particular browser is interpreting one’s CSS. While there are many good tools for developing CSS, there’s nothing better than actually trying things on multiple browsers. Fortunately, at least some developer tools are available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
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If you’re looking to learn CSS, Eric Meyer on CSS is a great place to start. Eric Meyer has long been considered one of the top CSS gurus on the web and while he’s been known to have strong opinions, he’s also very practical without being dogmatic about the use of CSS. He’s got a deep curiosity of how different browsers implement CSS and every now and then finds something which surprises him; I find the browser blog entries his most interesting.
This book is based around ten CSS projects for which you can download the files. You change the project’s file throughout the chapter and can check your work against final versions which are included. This book was popular enough that a follow-on book was released, More Eric Meyer on CSS.
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I’ve uploaded the trip reports which I had online. They’re available from the toolbar.