Links & Thoughts & Stuff

Programmieren lernen einmal anders: „AntMe!“ ist ein kleines, aber feines Spiel, bei dem die Programmierung von künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) das zentrale Spieleprinzip ist. Eine prima Möglichkeit, die Sprachen C# oder Visual Basic .NET zu lernen, nebenher etwas über die „eingebaute Intelligenz“ von Computerspielen zu erfahren und dabei jede Menge Spaß zu haben.

AntMe! – Die Ameisensimulation

Sogar die Programmierer werden immer bequemer. Mittlerweile gibt es sogar Video-Tutorials für die OpenGL Programmierung. Es gab mal Zeiten, da war das als die hohe Kunst des Speicher schubsens bekannt.

As time goes by …

benjismith.net » Blog Archive » Why I Hate Frameworks

A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.

This is so long, but also sooo true!

The problem: a number of people are working on the same (set of) CSS file(s) for a web site, and strict class and id naming standards have not been created and enforced. This has led to a proliferation of somewhat meaningful but overall ambiguous labels for CSS ids and classes and selectors. Some of the selectors conflict with each other, and these overlapping declarations are causing unexpected results in the page rendering. Your task is two fold:

• create a list of the selectors of all CSS rules from every CSS file
• find out which declarations possibly conflict with each other so they can be examined manually to see if the conflict can be resolved and/or the CSS file can be optimized by consolidating declarations

This sounds very simple at first, but the article is really hard stuff. Read the complete article Optimizing CSS definitions at thwartedefforts and be prepared to meet some exotic regular expressions and linux commands you may never have heard of

Considering the “big four” dynamic, procedural languages; Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby, to an extent they’re much of a muchness, offering only small variations on the same theme (ignoring PHP’s lack of support for functional-style programming). But sometimes little things make a big difference, and perhaps most of all when your code is given input to handle which it wasn’t designed for. Knocked up a simple example to compare them in this area…

What is your opinion?

http://www.sitepoint.com/

Ah, hindsight: like foresight, but without a future! I hate articles that being with „in hindsight…“ on principle, but it’s sometimes useful to take a look at the past to map out a better future.

Five Top PHP Mistakes — a/r/t by php|architect

Codefetch’s mission is to connect programmers and authors so that programmers get the information they need, and the work of authors is supported and encouraged.

codefetch

Yes, we’ve all been waiting for this: client side sortable tables in an unobtrusive way!

Here’s what the author has to say:

Standardista Table Sorting is a JavaScript module that lets you sort an HTML data table by any column. The module has the following advantages:

1. It works. The codebase has been tested across a large number of web browsers, and in the few that won’t allow the sorting to occur, the module degrades gracefully. In these cases the original table is not altered in any way, shape or form.
2. It’s unobtrusive. You add a reference to the Standardista Table Sorting JavaScript files in the head of your webpage, add a class of “sortable” to the tables in your page that should be sorted and you’re done.
3. It’s fast. Sorting a column in an eight column, one hundred row, table takes on average between 100 and 200 milliSeconds in my testing. That’s just a tenth of a second for a bigger table than you’re often likely to put on a webpage.
4. It knows about different data types. The current version of Standardista Table Sorting will sort IP Addresses, Currency, Number, Plain Text and Dates, and the best bit is it works out what type of sorting to do without you having to tell it. If you know a small amount of JavaScript it’s also trivial to add new data types to sort by.

Now go an get Standardista Table Sorting!

Ed Burnette wrote two interresting articles about available software licenses and their differences over at ZDNet. This is no 100% waterproof solution to all license problems you might stumble upon in your hacker life, but it’s a really nice introduction.

Read
HOWTO: Pick an open source license (part 1)
and
HOWTO: Pick an open source license (part 2).

What about you? Have you ever thought about what license to choose for your private or even work projects?

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use it’s recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.

Features:

• Easy record and playback
• Intelligent field selection will use IDs, names, or XPath as needed
• Autocomplete for all common Selenium commands
• Walk through tests
• Debug and set breakpoints
• Save tests as HTML, Ruby scripts, or any other format
• Support for Selenium user-extensions.js file
• Option to automatically assert the title of every page

Get Silenium IDE now and test your web applications easier than ever!

Have you already worked with it? What are your experiences?