Friday, June 29, 2007

My box.net Account....Now Active

I finally got around to get my box.net account active after leaving it dormant for quite a while.

I first got wind of box.net on a blog somewhere and later when i saw the sharing widget integrated on yet another blog, my interest was piqued.

So now i have some of my files already uploaded and also have the sharing widget on this blog; you can't miss it, it is on the right side just below the 'About Me' section, right on top of the 'Links' section. Right now, you will only see a Jpeg file available to be shared. Its a design i did for a friend on her birthday.

With this i would now be able to share some of my interesting stuffs...Guess i can now even start thinking of doing some graphics designing tutorials too and make them available via the widget right here on geekabyte.

Just hearing about box.net and wondering what it is? here are some interesting reads for you:
technologyevangelist
Siliconbeat
Seattletimes
Mashable
WordPress

Friday, June 22, 2007

Technology. Entertainment. Design...TED




O.k. it’s true. There are some sites you discover that makes you wonder out loud: “where the heck have I being all this while? How come I’m only just finding out?”

Ted.com is such a website that, funny enough, I just got to know about some couple of weeks back.

Now what is TED? Ted is an annual conference that used to take place only in Monterey California but now is held in other cities around the world.

It features a bunch of smart and innovative folks (also of remarkable reputation) talking about the cool stuffs that they are working on, that one day, would change the world or already is changing the world. It’s simply an event where ideas are exchanged.

To get a feel of the quality of the lectures, check out the caliber of folks that have featured on TED; people like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, larry & Sergey, Malcom Gladwell, Bono, Jeff Bezos, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jeff Hawkins, Rick Warren and the list goes on.

And at Ted.com you get to watch or download these lectures.

If you have quite an amount of bandwidth to play with, you can sit back and watch the lecture right there on line. But if you are like me, then you just download to watch.

My thanks to Neo for letting me on this site and for spending time ripping the videos off the sites. How much again did you say you have now Neo? Over 100?

Monday, June 11, 2007

Ditching Mootools For Jquery



Having arrived at the conclusion that I might have to start using a JavaScript Framework to speed up my coding time and at the same time to be more productive, the next thing was to decide which one to choose, out of the plethora of frameworks out there?

Since all I wanted was a tool kit that will make creating a web user interface a lot easier I decided to settle for something lightweight. Something not too bloated with features I will end up not using but a toolkit that makes manipulating the DOM possible with as little code as possible.

The contenders for my attention were jquery and mootools. But now, having played around with the two frameworks, it is jquery that has emerged the framework of choice.

Why I settled for Jquery? Well…

Syntax:


I personally prefer jquery’s syntax over mootools. I think it is more intuitive and leaner. The chain-ability feature of the syntax is also cool. You will easily get accustom to it if you have spent time with object oriented programming.

Selectors:


I wanted to have the DOM at my fingertips. I wanted to be able to get a hold on a node, without having to be too verbose. And this is what Jquery offers. Compared to mootools, Jquery’s Selectors makes accessing the Dom such a breeze. Borrowing syntax from CSS and Xpath you can burrow all the way down or climb all the way up the DOM with a succinct amount of code.

Community


Jquery boast of a much more vibrant community. This is evident in the abundance of plugins that has been written to extend its core functionality. The same thing can’t be said of mootools.

Adoption


Wordpress recently announced that it will be switching over to jquery. A whole lot of other people have already adopted it. So I figured out that if it is good enough for these guys then it would be good enough for me. Really adoption says a lot about a product. I can safely assume that great adoption = great product. Check out those already on Jquery.


I’m right now an advocate of Jquery. And I won’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

You can download it and see for yourself.

Yet Another Talking gig @ MindScape Resource Seminar

By 9.00am prompt on Saturday, 9 June, 2007, Mr. Peter Alabi the CEO of Mindscape Consulting mounted the podium at the Law Lecture Theater to give a talk on Strategy and its importance; both for personal development and also as a business tool.

Right after that, I came up and spoke about the web as a business platform: talking about the different business models that can be built on it. I talked about startups. Gave examples of successful startups and discussed some of the factors that accounts for the success of a startup. In the talk I briefly highlighted the difference in a business model built for the web and the models built for a brick and mortar enterprise.

Mr Peter Alabi came up again and concluded the seminar with a discussion on EQ ‘Emotional Intelligence Quotient’.

After that, I had exchange of pleasantries, chitchat and phone numbers with some of the attendees.

It was fun.