Matt Renquist

Why Django?

2009-12-02T00:00:00-08:00

Because, all the cool kids are doing it.

Real Reasons:

Documentation. The documentation is exceedingly good.
Consistency.
Good enough for google.
Good enough for NASA
Django

A Thousand Dollars an Hour?

2008-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

I recently signed up for the Client-Side Web Programming Certificate Series from The O’Reilly School of Technology. However, I decided to cancel about an hour after enrolling. What happened? Well, the idea was that I wanted to formalize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that I’ve picked up over the last few years. Plus, in the end I would end up with a certificate that I could put on my resume. But, things went downhill rapidly.

In the first lesson, header tags were used to render text in different sizes. There was absolutely no discussion of their semantic meaning, as in, they are really section headers in documents.

Following that, the <center> tag was used to graphically center some text on the page. This was the same lesson that introduced me to the bgcolor and text attributes of the <body> tag. Next up was the <font> tag. Apparently, they didn’t bother to take their own advice and look at the linked reference. If they had, they would have known that were trying to teach me deprecated tags!

And then, it was on to learn about how to layout pages using tables.

I also couldn’t find any mention of doctypes or quirksmode.

The javascript course wasn’t much better. They tried to tell me that javascript isn’t really an object oriented language. Don’t tell that to Douglas Crockford, who is pretty familiar with javascript.

It’s apparently a good idea to use the javascript: protocol, and I also need to enclose all of my inline scripts inside of html comments (even though it hasn’t been necessary since Navigator 3).

The user interface wasn’t very functional; I had a hard time navigating between courses and had to clear text authenticate multiple times just to use different portions of the site. I couldn’t figure out how to cancel. The site was also ugly, but that’s both a minor and personal problem.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the rest of the content is bad. However, it does say to me that the folks at O’Reilly School of Technology haven’t been paying attention to web development for the last few years. I wanted to start from first principles. I wanted to solidify the knowledge that I’ve picked up on my own from the web and various books (many from O’Reilly.) I know that the HTML/CSS course is meant for absolute beginners, but they are teaching ‘best practices’ that haven’t been best practices for years! And, if they try and start me out with things that I know are either bad form, or just flat out wrong, then I’m done.

All in all, I was very disappointed in both the content and the site used to present it. I have always found O’Reilly’s books to be very good, but, at least for the courses that I looked at, they fell well short of the quality that I was expecting.

There are plenty of other places on the web to get better information about modern web development and front end engineering.

The certificate would have been nice though.

Learning to Fly

2008-09-14T00:00:00-07:00

Paddle, really. But, fly just sounded better. So, Kim and I took the canoe out this past weekend to Cosumnes River Preserve for a bit of a paddle. It was quite fun, even though I can’t quite remember how to steer efficiently. We are both sore, but I think it hit Kim a little worse than it hit me. Pictures should show up shortly on my flickr page and hopefully you will hear more about our ongoing boating adventures.

Critical Mass

2008-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

My sad and pathetic compost pile has reached critical mass. It is generating heat! Of course, it smells a little, and had little ‘people’ living in it, but the heat should take care of that. Alas, this means that I have to stop adding to this one, and start a new pile. I don’t know if my luck will hold out.

Pollen!

2008-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

I blame the Sacramento valley. I also blame my lawn. And, I blame the dogs. The dogs where rowdy this morning, so we took them out to the river. It was nice, but the breeze came up, and with it so did my allergies. I then made the mistake of mowing the lawn. Oops. And, as this article from the Bee points out, pollen counts are way up.

POLLEN! (said in the manner that Kirk yells Kahn’s name.)

New Site

2008-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

After a few tries, I’ve finally got the new Django powered site going. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pull in the posts from my old site and get ‘blogging’.

If I had a million dollars...

2007-08-28T00:00:00-07:00

The only reason I’m posting this is because Kim made fun of me (What’s the point of having a blog if you never post? I’m not subscribed to my own husbands blog because there’s no point!).

So if I had a million dollars, I’d buy a neat new camera from Nikon. So, there. I’ve posted. Now subscribe to me in your feed reader.

Yes, I know it’s not a million dollars, but the D300 is still a little pricey.

Time to Practice

2007-01-21T00:00:00-08:00

There And Back Again

2006-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

So, I had this great plan to move our web hosting to Dreamhost since they have a sale going and it turned out to be something like $20 for a year of hosting with 200Gigs (yes‚Ä¶gigs!) of space. That‚Äôs hard to turn down! Well, it turns out that you get what you pay for. In this case, a not so great mail system, and web servers that felt very, very slow. The amount of spam that Kim and I started seeing in our inboxes tripled, and they don‚Äôt have a smart way of configuring SpamAssasin. So, after moving everything over (both sites, and all mail), I moved it all back. Lots of SCP and DNS changes later‚Ä¶we are now back at GeekISP. Hopefully, for quite a while.

Windows Live Writer?

2006-10-31T00:00:00-08:00

So, I thought that I would give this a try, per Brian’s blog. Let’s give it a shot and see if we likes it. UPDATE: It’s ok, but it doesn’t have anything that Wordpress’s backend doesn‚t have. I’ll stick with WP and Flock. They seem to work ok.

Back to the Grind

2006-09-09T00:00:00-07:00

Well, back from the wedding (for quite a few weeks actually), and back to school for Kim. I’ll try and post pictures of the wedding soon, and hopefully be able to integrate a photoalbum page into the site. Not much else.

My new toy

2006-07-30T00:00:00-07:00

Kim decided that she “needed” another greyhound, so I decided that I “needed” a Subaru Outback to haul said hound. It’s a pretty cool car, though Kim doesn’t like it as much as she did her Corolla. That’s ok though, as I like it much more. And we picked it up just in time for the wedding! T-minus 1 week!

A Study in Texture

2006-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

Not Too Bad

2006-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

A MacKerricher Sunset

2006-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Introducing the second half of The Fighting Mongooses

2006-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

Flickr

2006-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been uploading lots of photos recently to my Flickr account.

Edited on 9/24/08 to reflect new flickr account - msr