Now I not only own one, thanks to a certain someone who doesn’t want to be named (thanks D), I am making cool stuff to work on one.

All my previous arguments on why I shouldn’t get one have been nullified and my habits changed and refined.

Be pragmatic.

Ambiance

Chris is such a cool driver I napped 80% of the time on the way there and back. Accommodation did not disappoint and come to find out, Nashville is a wonderful destination any day of the week. The conference happened to be during the NHL playoffs and yes: where there is a Predator you find a dedicated fan/atic/s.  After hours we got to enjoy some of the best spots “Nashvegas” has to offer.

Content

The presentations I attended were well timed – long enough to be detailed and specific, yet broad enough to cater for the diverse audience.

• Lorna’s workshop on web services proved to be more than just a well prepped talk. She dived right into the grit of the whys and how-tos of various types of web services. Her slides and tutorial code have come in handy since .
• Helgi decided to go above and beyond with his Frontend Cashing workshop. I am sure I was not the only attendee who felt a descent dose of performance inducing intel injected painlessly.
• Rasmus‘ presence underlined the  need for participation in the community, his pointers on performance were great.
• Brian’s brilliantly told tale about Phorum  immersed one into the history of php, providing a clear path of how the language has evolved to what it is today. Nothing could be more fitting for a community gathering.
• The story of spaz hit home for me as Ed went through the ropes narrating his experience(s) developing and maintaining an open source app.  His “pick your own topic” style kept the audience entertained and engaged.
• Laura Beth brought out the colors and a toolbox worth of great stuff to efficiently manage and deploy your code.
• Andrei enlightened all of us with what happened to Unicode/PHP6,  ugly juicy bits included.
• Terry Chay wrapped it all up in neat bundle of serious humor, well done and delivered.

Takeaway

Apart from the great wealth of information I acquired from listening to the presenters, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and will definitely be in attendance next year.

Some of my personal highlights include :-

• Getting to interact with other attendees
• Rocking the mic with best of them (you know yourselves) at karaoke
• Ridding the bull literally!
• Scoring 3rd place at pechakucha (should be called “to hell and back every 20sec”).
• And of course, collecting all that sponsor shwag.

Thank you Ben, Lisa, Nick and all the sponsors for the ultimate community experience.

For a peek at the conference, check out Jeremy’s awesome shots on flickr :http://flic.kr/s/aHsjuziJsb

Well, for a 3rd time in a row I am baring it all in support of web standards. This years CSS Naked Day is on April 9th 2011, it is now the 9th somewhere.

Visit the official Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Here is the short list of the links,  resources, sample code used in the presentation at the Atlanta Web Designer Group April meet-up, with Aarron Walter and J Cornelius

Showcase Links

Resources:

• http://css3.info
• http://dev.opera.com
• http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
• http://delicious.com/jcornelius/html5
• http://delicious.com/jcornelius/css3
• http://adactio.com/extras/pocketbooks/html5/

Links to the actual slides and video are coming soon.

Thanks for attending.

So today happens to be the one day i’m willingly going naked stripping my CSS for web standards.
I am participating in the Annual CSS Naked Day, which means i get to say naked as many times as i want for a good cause
If the bare minimum still doesn’t look right to you, please let me know.
Visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information on how to join, and support the use of web standards and accessibility guidelines.

code free

But after going through the iPad can – do’s,  asking myself,  “what will iPad do that my notebook and phone can’t do ?”  I came up with this conclusion. Wait for it….. !nothing.
Apple Steve Jobs and Co have very well figured out how to gain the following of the rest of the folks who generally don’t use desktops/laptops for everything they are advertised to do and do not necessarily need an app device  when they just needed to receive a call.

So for those over gadget feature overloaded techies who anticipated a new device that will change habits for everyone this isn’t it, but it will surely change the regular Joe who doesn’t need all the gigs to check email, read the news, watch a video, stalk old flames on facebook without squinting or calling tech support to turn on the computer.

That said, my sole resolution this year is to put all my to-dos into to-done. Which means you will hear a whole lot from yours truly, hopefully most positive.
Here is to a good 2009 and a great 2010 full of bigger and better things.

Happy new year everyone

$(document).keydown(function(event){
  switch (event.keyCode) {
   //ctrl key
      case 17:
     alert("key: ctrl");
  //overide default event action
     return false;
  }
});

Note: The keycodes may be different across browsers and overiding the event action may did not work in ie8.
For a keycode reference and test tool check out http://is.gd/2mf9A

RewriteMap.

You can choose to implement RewriteMap in various ways but i choose the text file route because its relatively easier to implement, does not require external execution (prg : requires command line execution of your rewrite program),  and is easier to troubleshoot.

problem:

rewrite and redirect this old urls

http://example.com/shoes/item.php?id=1245&size=medium

to something descent like

 http://example.com/shoes/ladies/sandals/

Solution:

Create your rewrite map  map.txt

# old shoes urls
1245 	ladies/sandals
1024	mens/boots
5487    ladies/boots

Add the following to your httpd.conf inside your virtual host directive .

# if your path has spaces just place it in quotes
RewriteMap legacy "txt:c:/path to text file/map.txt"
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}   ^GET\ /([\w-]+)/(.*)\.php/\?id=([\d]+)(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$	${legacy:%3}/? [R=301,L]

Explanation:

The map.txt:

simple text file that has the value we are looking for (1245) and the value we want to replace it with (ladies/sandals)

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}

This will try and match the whole URL request sent to the server.
I used this instead of the more commonly touted RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} because %{THE_REQUEST} captures the whole URL including the query string and since i am well aware of the URL format i can do an exact query string match of my URL without incurring the overhead of a greedy check of whether the query string exists or not, while validating the value of the variable i need to rewrite

RewriteRule ^(.*)$	   ${legacy:%3}/? [R=301,L]

This will take the whole URL, replace it with my matched value (${legacy:%3}), remove the query string by adding a ‘?’ and permanently redirect the URL to the new one ‘[R=301,L]‘

magic .. don’t you think?

The actual images used in the presentation are from flickr and are all of the Notre Dame.
Enjoy

-watch the presentation->