Snippets from Geekmas
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-11-28 06:18:48 - Graham EllisI slept well last night! A big thank you to all those old friends who came by over the weekend and helped make this year's Geekmas celebration an event to remember ... and remember in a very positive way. I always knew that it took special people to give up their weekends to the technology and the last couple of days have confirmed it.
Paddy and Roy were Pythoning away ... a whole host of interesting discussions in which we seemed to talk a lot about sorting and some of the new 2.4 stuff - the sorted method and sorting with named parameters such as key. Paddy was showing us how he transforms data just once if he has an awkward sort to do - clean, efficient, and with shades of Randal Schwartz's Perl transform but much easier to read. Example.
Bruce's Ajax demo is on line on his own web space - many thanks for this introduction, Bruce. You and 'Lina missed a great curry on Saturday night, by the way. Oh - Ajax. It's Javascript running in the browser, and using XML to pick up data on the fly from the server. Where you've got an interactive requirement to update a browser's display and don't want to send over complete pages it's a great option. A viable alternative, for example, to my framed PHP example but because of Javascript differences between browsers, it's probably best used on an a uniformly set up intranet rather than on the Internet as a whole.
I was inspired yesterday to write two other Horse's Mouth contributions based on Geekmas on Saturday - there's a piece on DHCP and DNS answering a question from Julian, and Leah challenged me to write a few sentences describing what Object Oriented Programming is about. Now that last one is a toughie - it's the "few sentences" part that I find hard to adhere to.
We also covered many interesting aspects of site design - how we're using Style Sheets through PHP in order to generate a flexibility of look and feel on the new Well House Consultants web site, and we had a fascinating discussion concerning the "mining" on a site - how to present relevant information based on the arrival country and subjects of interest to a new visitor, and yet provide tools so that these preferences can be easily changed. You'll read and see much more of these subjects coming up here later on The Horse's Mouth
Finally, Lisa and I announced "Well House Manor". Separate post, I think.