Today is the day!

It’s my first day in LearnHub. Pretty exciting! Time to have fun with Ruby on Rails fulltime!

Here is our development team at March 17, 2008:

• John Phlip Green
• Carsten Nielsen
• Wesley Moxam
• Me Me

Want to know more?

• LearnHub.com
• Savvica.com
• World’s Best Rails Hiring Process

http://learnhub.com/lesson/videos/36-one-minute-facebook-application

I’ve created my first video lesson on LearnHub.com.

This video is 1 minute and 5 seconds long. The first minute shows how to create a Facebook Application, followed by 5 seconds showing the app in action!

Credits:

ScreenFlow 1.1 from Vara Software

Music is cut from Jazz in GarageBand

Application is on: http://apps.facebook.com/learnhubdemo/

Planning on the next one: 5 minutes Facebook Application by RFacebook and HAML. Stay tuned, please.

read more | digg story

Savvica Inc announced today the public launch of their e-learning destination, LearnHub.com.

Pretty exciting news for me. Why I am so excited? Well, here is a little secret:

I will start to work for Savvica as a Ruby or Rails developer in less than two weeks.

What is LearnHub.com?

http://learnhub.com/about

LearnHub is for people who love learning and sharing knowledge with others. It is a set of tools that make learning online fun and engaging, and teaching online easy and effective.

Why should you care?

• If you want to learn something:

LearnHub not only helps you learn, but it helps you connect with other students and teachers. A comprehensive reputation system, authority, helps you find reputable teachers, who you can trust.

• If you want to share something:

Communities offer a showcase for your content, and a way to attract attention to your courses and tutoring. Courses allow you to sell your expertise. Tutoring allows you to sell your time. If you’re an expert teacher, LearnHub is the place to go to put up your content and let students find you.

By all means, LearnHub.com will become a new community for all of us, one of a kind community for learning and sharing.

People come to LearnHub.com everyday, but not the same people when they come out.

Want to know more?

• www.learnhub.com
• www.savvica.com
• LearnHub.com launches - Teach and Learn Online
• LearnHub Support

1. Democamp Toronto 17

Democamp Toronto 17 is absolutely another great event again! More than 300 people have attended.

Only want to highlight two here:

• AskItOnline is a online survey system created by Kaitlyn MacLachlan totally on her own. It is a pretty beautiful and useful application. Kaitlyn wins the best demo prize.
• Ignite presentation “The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks” from Tom Purves could be the best ignite presentation in the history of Democamp Toronto so far. Well done, Tom!

Joey Devilla had a very detail post on the schedules, please check it out here. I believe he will post some more tonight soon.

Check out the official site of Democamp Toronto too: http://democamp.info/

2. Adobe Flex 3.0 and Air 1.0

Finally, its On - Flex 3.0 and Adobe AIR 1.0 Are Here!

3. Haxies updated! It works on Leopard!

Haxies - Love it or hate it!

In computing, a Haxie is a term which was coined by developer Unsanity to describe their products. It is a blend of “hack” and “Mac OS X”. Unsanity uses it to refer to “hacks” that are specifically designed for use with its Application Enhancer (APE) software. These are typically small interface and functionality tweaks to the system or existing applications by injecting code into programs as they load.

Until yesterday, all the haxies which come from Unsanity or other companies didn’t work on Leopard, all of them. It is a real pain for somebody who loves these little, cute and useful hack tools, such as me.

After several months hard work, the development team in Unsanity finally bring them back to Leopard today: Enthusiastic Trepidation!

Here are some of them what I use all the time:

WindowShade X. It minimizes your windows on desktop, or shades them.

FontCard. It shows a WYSIWYG font menu for your applications.

FruitMenu. It helps you easily access everything from your menu.

Menu Master. It helps you to create shortcut keys for any menu items of any your applications.

Big day today, by all means!

Sometime life is very frustrating at the beginning of you presentation. You have some awesome slides in your computer, after you connect to a projector, nothing happened. Pull off and plug in again, still nothing happened. Suddenly the room becomes very quite and everybody is looking at you.

You may start to look at your laptop keyboard and try to find the magic keys which can help you out. But which one is the right one?

Here is a picture what I have taken at the beginning of a presentation today in PodCamp Toronto. This is the best projector standby screen I have ever seen!

It simply tell you which keys can help you share your screen with projector:

• Panasonic and NEC laptop uses Fn + F3
• HP, Sharp and Toshiba laptop uses Fn + F5
• IBM and Sony laptop uses Fn + F7
• Dell and Epson laptop uses Fn + F8
• Fujitsu laptop uses Fn + F10
• Apple laptop uses F7

Pretty cool!

I am using iPhoto to manage all my pictures as I don’t think I am a photographer or a shutterbug in any way. And iPhoto does have all the features what I really need. So I didn’t pay any attention on Aperture before.

One of my friend was coming to me and asked a question about Aperture 2.0 today. He said he was trying it in another day, but it crashed all the time when he want to export pictures out, even click “Export” preference tab would crash too.

This is really unusual for a software which is came from Apple.

Before ask google, I did a quick look on his log file. Interestingly, before crashing there was one line said something about color pickers. So I opened his ~/Library/ColorPickers and found he has installed pretty much every color pickers what I have mentioned in another post - “Choose your right colors on Mac is not easy - My Mac Serial 1“.

Simply moving color pickers out really solved the Aperture crashing problem. So it is the issue resource then.

Well, we still need some color pickers, right? I put every color pickers back one by one and found “RCWebColorPicker” is the one who breaks Aperture this time.

Anyway, here are some more information:

• Crash while trying to export on Leopard (New bug)
• Export Pref tab causes crash

What’s XPToronto?

The XPToronto/Agile Users Group is a dedicated community of software development specialists located in the Toronto, Canada area. The members of XPToronto are committed to the acceptance of Agile development methodologies, such as Extreme Programming, Scrum and many others.

We usually have discussion meetings on the third Tuesday of every month, except for the months of July and August when we break for the summer. From “Previous Presentations” page you can find a lot of Agile experts and book authors. Such as:

• JB Rainsberge, author of “JUnit Recipes“
• Scott Ambler, author of “Refactoring Databases“
• Mike Bowler
• B.C. Holmes
• Miskin Berteig
• Dmitri Zimine
• Reg Braithwaite
• Barry Gervin
• ……

Yesterday’s meeting is about “Agile Requirements and Planning Using Stories”, presented by Lawrence Ludlow who is current leading the XPToronto community.

Lawrence gave a presentation that he developed in the past to introduce new clients to agile development and how Intelliware approach project scoping and plannin. There was a lot of information and experience sharing.

Anyway, if you missed the workshop, there is one quote from Mr. Ludlow you shouldn’t miss:

How to do Agile planning?

1. Make it work
2. Make it right
3. Make it faster

Want to know more:

• Official website
• XPToronto Facebook group

Google has just released their newest collaboration application. This time is different. Google put four of their exist applications together and named it “Google Apps Team Edition“. And the target market is “groups at work or school“.

Here is the PR press: Team Up With Google Apps

Here is the insruction video from Google:

Here are the applications have been included:

• Google Docs™ to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations
• Google Calendar™ to arrange meetings, set schedules, and publish event information
• Google Talk™ for instant messaging and free PC-to-PC voice calls
• Start Page where users can access their Google Apps services and customized content

Google claims that the purpose of Team Edition is to allow users to “share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support,” are more likely to be greeted by raised eyebrows from the IT department.

So, what is our IT department busy doing now? Manage network, Exchange or even Sharepoint?

Base on the M$ recent Quarter Results, Microsoft Business Division (MBD) made $4.8 Billion in total, up 37% than last quarter. Those money is coming from selling office suite and selling, consulting SharePoint. Cmswire said only SharePoint itself made $1 Billion for M$. Big deal, really.

Let’s see what SharePoint can do?

What’s missing in Google Apps Team Edition? Maybe not that much.

• Collaboration

Google already has GDoc, GCal and GTalk. And if you subscribe Premier Edition, you will have 25GB GMail too.

• Portals

Google Start Page allows you put all kinds of widgets on it so you can easily access inbox, calendar, docs and all the others in your widgets.

• Enterprise search

Google Search + Google Desktop Search isn’t enough?

• Enterprise content Management

GDoc?

• Business process and form

GDoc again?

• Business intelligence

Still GDoc?

What Google Apps Team Edition has but not in SharePoint?

• Free for Team Edition and cheap for Premier Edition
• Easy to use, easy to manage

What’s next?

• Put Google Apps Team Edition onto your desktop by Prism
• Invite your colleague to use it
• Convince IT Department to use it
• Create some serious widgets work with exist systems in your company? You could sell them to other companies too.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Computer monitors are getting bigger and bigger, so do the html pages. People start to add more columns into the layout.
To create a three columns layout, in a very traditional way you can do it in a table, like this:

<table>
  <tr><td>Left</td><td>Main</td><td>Right</td><tr>
</table>

There are some obvious downside on this:

• Mix data and presentation
• Not browser friendly, try to browser this use a mobile phone? I am not saying iPhone or iPod Touch.

So how to fix it? You can use css with “position: absolute;” or “Float”:

<div id="wrapper">
  <div id="main">
    <div id="sideleft">Left column</div>
    <div id="sideright">Right column</div>
    <div id="content">Content</div>
  </div>
</div>

#wrapper {width: 800px;}
#main {margin-top: 10px;}
#sideleft {float: left; width: 200px; border: 1px solid black; background-color: #dddddd;}
#sideright {float: right; width: 200px; border: 1px solid green; background-color: #99ff99;}
#content {border: 1px solid blue; background-color: #9999ff; margin: 0 20px 0 10px;}

Want to know more?

• Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
• Three column layout, without tables
• Book: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS

An ideal career is a sweet dream for most of us, well, maybe all of us.

Changethis.com posted a very interesting manifesto from Jessica Hagy: Indexing a Career: A Career Path in Pictures. You can download the free e-book from Changethis.com and can buy a print version too.

Jessica Hagy has a very unique blog called  Indexed. She posts a picture of her draw on a 3” by 5” index card pretty much everyday. Those pictures are all very simple but inspirational.

Some cards from her manifesto:

Always. Everyone. Everywhere.

Time to what?

I remember I collected a interesting one for ideal career too, so I find it out and put it here:

(Click on it to get the full size version)