Archive for February, 2009

Job Applications – What not to do

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Applying for a job can be really hard. I can’t get the right words:

Hello,

When I read about your job opening for a software tester, I felt a miniscule palpitation in the bowels of my heart.
“This is for me,” I thought.

I really want to keep that, but I fear I’ll scare them off.

Emergence into Web Design

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

I got to bed late last night, because I was reading about how list elements can be turned into horizontal tabs or vertical link bars.
As it happened, I saw that used today. It was a much simpler design than what I’ve been learning, but the layout was the same.

It always seems that I’ll find some bit of information, and then I’ll need it in the next day or two. I sometimes keep track of whether I’m ‘late’ or ‘early’, by paying attention to these things and noting when I needed it. At this point in time, I was right at the edge. I learned about them by staying up far later than I should have, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed this other example if I hadn’t at least seen a cursory text covering it. I just wouldn’t have been looking for it.

OpenOffice is SLOW. No, I mean it’s SLOOOOOOOOOW.
It takes forever to load into memory, even though the main launcher or whatever loads into memory every time I start up. It takes at least five seconds or more to open a single file, and takes twice that long just to save. It’s pretty graphics-heavy, too; when I was using my graphics card without the drivers installed (read: emergency autopilot; maximum 1600×1200 16-bit), scrolling was a [hard thing to do]. I’d get to the bottom, and it would jump a row a second, and all those button clicks would go into a buffer, so I’d have to wait for a minute as it scrolled one line at a time.
Since taking out my card, and going back to onboard settings, the speed has been fine, but it’s still just generally slow. It can’t do things I could otherwise do with Office (resizing columns to exact pixels is extremely hard), and it looks like they tried to give it a fancy UI and failed. If I don’t use it, it unloads from memory, at takes half a minute to reload from paging files.
I SUPPOSE what’s taking so long in the save/load is that it goes through every single cell everywhere and changes all the ‘,’ in formulae to ‘;’, among other things.

I’m lazy. I could re-install Windows again and install Office (actually, I could install Office right now anyway), but I should only have this for another two months, when I get my new laptop.
Although, if I can’t get a job I won’t be able to afford spending half my money.
Lately, I got some job ads for jobs that ask for things I just can’t provide, as well as experience in the field, for something like $40,000 a year. That would be nice.
Someone else was looking for a website, so I really should have taken it. At that moment, though, I wasn’t nearly as confident in my webmaking abilities as I am right now.
As it is, my design skills are horribly entry-level. I haven’t taken any sort of schooling in design, but I’ve got a natural flair and I’m sure I can learn from looking at what professional designers, such as Douglas Bowman, have done.

There’s still so much to learn.

Addition:
Wow, I was really going at this in entirely the wrong manner.
I took Bowman’s page and stripped it of its CSS, after I noticed the manner in which the HTML was stacked. With all the styling stripped away, you get a very readable page with an image, lists of links, bolding and emphases and quotes where needed, and all in all a very flowing layout. The only problem, of course, is that you’ll end up with such un-styles as tall stacks of thumbnails where they’d otherwise be arranged in a grid.

My site, meanwhile, uses… well, I guess I use styles for headers. I never really had much use, because p and h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 etc always added extra whitespace, which I didn’t want.
Comparing the two pages now, though, my page is less readable and wouldn’t be viewable on a small screen, because the layout persists even without CSS.
As it is, I’ve already completely removed those part-specific classes and replaced them with ID tags. My reference seems to use a bunch of internested tags, so I’ll see what those do. I think the main thing is to name the largest, and then use child selectors to burrow downwards.
I’m excited, of course. It’s 4:00am.
I think, in light of my new ability to get things done, that I’ll stay up all night every night and wake up a good deal after noon. I seem to work best that way.

Old Selectors and New computers

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Is it wrong that I see the following

*:first-child+html p {font-size: 5em; }

And burst into laughter? I swear, I laugh every time I see it.

Also:

Early prototypes
At least three prototypes were unveiled for Android at the Mobile World Congress on 12 February 2008. One prototype at the ARM booth displayed several basic Google applications. A ‘d-pad’ controls zooming of items in the dock with a relatively quick response.[citation needed]
A prototype at the Google IO conference on May 28, 2008 had a 528 MHz Qualcomm processor and a Synaptics capacitive touchscreen and used the UMTS cellular standard. It had a 128 MB of RAM and 256 MB of flash.[citation needed]

I’m sure you know where I got the quote from. But take a look at those numbers: 528MHz? 128MB RAM? That’s as good as or better than computers ten years ago. I think the screens are getting to be VGA, now, too.
So there you go. I’d love to take one of those things back in time and casually pull it out as geeks are gushing about their latest-and-greatest 400MHz processors.

Oh, and another thing? Chrome has beaten out Opera in market share, and it’s only a few months old.