Bearfruit

Last week, around May 2nd or 3rd, my daughter learned to crawl. It’s been a week so now she’s officially at that stage referred to as, “no really, don’t take your eyes off of her!”

So now I’ve got this challenge that so many people before me have faced. How to get her to be stationary for a little bit. This is my brief and whimsical diary of a few experiments.

I have a theory and so far it has worked out correctly. There are three ways to complete a web application project. The wrong way is to skip the planning step and just start designing and coding. This greatly decreases the chance of finishing your project. However there are two ways that I’ve used to complete projects:

I was talking to a good friend of mine - one of the most elite graphic designers I know - and he made a simple comment that, as often happens when speaking to someone of great wisdom, communicated something with tremendous meaning in only a few words. It was something I knew but would have been hard pressed to describe or communicate to others.

It was about using graphics on websites but has a far broader scope than that. I’ll reword his statement somewhat to remove the context of the original conversation. He said that if you notice the drop shadows then the designer has failed.

OK, I’ve been trying to think of a way to report this problem for a while. Who does it go to, GNOME HIG, Ubuntu, Usability, Art team? I’ll probably send it to all of them but in order to simplify my explanation, this blog post exists.

In brief: GTK dialogs are way too big and they tend to waste a lot of screen space. To demonstrate my point I’m comparing the File Save dialog from Gedit and Windows XP Notepad. You’ll see that the Windows XP dialog is far smaller and yet communicates significantly more useful information. This is accomplished because it makes more efficient use of the screen space. It does this without being any less usable, and actually, because of it communicates more useful information can be more usable under some circumstances.

My class last night seemed to enjoy an illustration I gave so I decided to share it here. The class is the first of 5 I will teach called “Getting a better spouse,” which is a poor name, but the goal is to make our families stronger by improving the husband and wife relationship. The common denominator of all the people in the class is that we all have kids and as any parent knows, sometimes life seems incredibly busy. Also at times it can feel like our kids are the center of our families and all life revolves around them.

As parents its critical to admit that one of our most important job is to raise our children properly (cf Proverbs 22:6, Deuteronomy 6:6-7). But that doesn’t mean the children become the center of the family. They need to learn that the world does not revolve around them. Therefore the class’s goal will hopefully help draw the mom and dad together. Doing this helps the whole family.

But… the husband/wife relationship is not the most important relationship in the family. The most important is the parent/God relationship. God invented the family and He

PHP web applications tend to be very easy to deploy. You simply upload the application and it works. Maybe your application needs to have an install.php that creates the database tables but that’s hardly difficult.

The next easiest applications are cgi apps. In addition to uploading, users need to know if they have a special cgi-bin folder that they upload to and ensure they upload to it. They also need to know how to make a file executable. However no server configuration needs to be done.

Javascript is cool and things we only dreamed of 8 years ago are now common. However, the trends are leaning towards writing tremendous amounts of application code for web sites and web applications that run client-side in the web-browser. Sites are using more and more animation and effects. Now [people are contemplating][0] how to do cpu intensive computations in web browsers.

Cats and Toilets

I think I’ve figured out why cats drink from the toilet. You see, when you feed a dog, he’ll clean the dish. Therefore you must feed him proper portions. Cats tend to be thrifty by nature. If you feed a cat, he’ll eat when he wants to, and just enough to satisfy himself. Therefore I’ve surmised that cats, being thrifty, drink from the toilet because they see it as a bountiful supply of water and are merely rationing their water bowl for that day that the toilet runs out. Quite brilliant.

OK, so I’ve been walking often, not every day, but most. When I walk its at least 1 mile, but I’ve been walking some days 2.5. Plus, I went to the Iowa State Fair twice, each day involving quite a bit more than 2 miles of walking. Unfortunately, the healthy walking was offset significantly by the unhealthy fair food. :-(

The cool thing about baby shoes is that they only have to look nice, they don’t have to be functional, since the babies can’t walk, nor do they have to be durable, since they out grow them in 4 weeks or less (and shoes that you don’t walk in take far longer than 4 weeks to wear out).

Oh crud, I think I forgot to blog about my new baby!