Brent Sordyl’s blog

(Link: Starter - Jumpstart Your jQuery Plugin Development)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized jQuery

The more important the project, the less effective the team: Excessive performance pressure results in the team reverting to less effective ways of divvying up influence over its end product, in turn leading to lower performance ratings for the whole team.
(Link: HBS: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams’ Knowledge Use and Performance)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized management, teams

For example, the Blackboard family of learning management system products are often seen as creepy treehouses, as they provide e-learning tools in a very rigid, closed environment that is institutionally controlled in an attempt to “engage” students through technological novelty or mimicry of existing Web-based tools for social engagement. Increasingly, learning management systems are incorporating what educators assess as being potentially valuable learning tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, etc., not recognizing that these tools may be seen as artificial, meaningless, tiresome, temporary, or simply another aspect of The Man by the institution’s target participant group: the students.
(Link: “Creepy Treehouse” - Jared Stein on Education and Technology)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized e-learning, Education, Technology

So, this method looks to be a pretty good way of typing in passwords, and that is why tried to use it on web forms. It comes as a jQuery plugin which works unobtrusive. Non-JS users get the common masked password fields.
(Link: iPhone-like password fields using jQuery)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized jQuery, password

Keep whackin’ away on that Pareto Principle and let us all know how it turns out. In the meantime, I’m going to go play a few rounds of Counterstrike on my Windows-based PC, because the best that my browser can do is Tetris. I’m sure that HTML5 will bridge that gap any day now.
(Link: TechCrunch dubs Linux a ‘big ol’ bag of drivers’ • The Register)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized techcrunch

“”have you ever met anyone who said they’d really like to try out that Interwebs thing, but they’re just put off by the low-quality operating systems and browsers that are available at this time, so they’re sitting it out for now? ”
(Link: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: on Chrome OS)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized fakestevejobs, google, humor

Here is our collection of interactive SMART Board games for educators on PBS KIDS. Students will enjoy participating in these collaborative, fun and engaging experiences, while exploring curriculum from trusted programs such as Curious George, Super Why and Arthur. Like our programs, all of our games are age-appropriate and vetted by educators.
(Link: SMART Board Games from PBS KIDS)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized games, SMARTBoard

Wireframing brings the following key benefits:
* It gives the client an early, close-up view of the site design (or re-design).
* It can inspire the designer, resulting in a more fluid creative process.
* It gives the developer a clear picture of the elements that they will need to code.
* It makes the call to action on each page clear.
* It is easy to adapt and can show the layout of many sections of the website.
(Link: Using Wireframes to Streamline Your Development Process)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized usability, webdesign, wireframe

JIRA Studio is a hosted offering combining JIRA, FishEye, Crucible, Confluence and Subversion.
(Link: JIRA Studio - Agile Software Development Suite $250/mth)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized atlassian, jira, programming, saas, software, tweet

* Better support of code completion/proposal for classes and models.
* When starting, RoRED asks if you want to reload the last workspace.
* RoRED detects if a file is changed/deleted by an external application, prompting for reloading/closing editor.
* Added “Save all changes (SHIFT+CTRL+S)” to save all changed files in a shot.
* The hints for parameters, usually triggered when opening brackets “(”, can now be disabled from “Properties”->”Preferences”->”Disable inline code hints”
* If you have jruby, now you can launch it from RoRED by selecting “jruby script/server” in the top left combo (eventually create your jruby.bat file and add it to Windows’ search path)

3 Comments more…
(Link: RoRED - The world’s best Ruby on Rails IDE)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized ide, rubyonrails

“PayPal offers support for Micropayments to merchants for US to US, GB to GB, AU to AU, and EU to EU transactions for Business and Premier accounts. This feature is offered at a special rate of 5% + $0.05 per transaction.”

How micro can a payment be if paypal is taking 5c on each one? Maybe I’ll set up a service charging 4c and make money on the volume? http://www.bestviral.com/video/6520/snl_change_bank_2
(Link: Paypal offers Micropayments but charges 5c per?)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized micropayments

The next step in the innovator’s dilemma script is predictable. The existing participants will ignore Chrome (they may fuss, but they aren’t going to introduce something even simpler, even better, even cheaper–that’s just not how they think). Chrome OS will grow better and better, and be attractive on bigger and bigger hardware. More and more of the necessary apps will migrate to the browser or be replaced by inferior-but-good-enough entrants (do you hear that, Skype?) Since Chrome OS is genuinely better along some dimensions, the motivation is there for users, for application developers, and for Google to continue the march.
(Link: Chrome OS is Worse, That’s the Point - Kent Beck)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized chromeos

The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.
The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device.
(Link: ready.mobi - dotMobi compliance & mobileOK checker)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized mobile, testing, usability

Anyone know where to get stock data in a standard API format (XML, JSON, etc)? Just looking for hi/lo/close data, not real-time.
(Link: Online financial data APIs and resources)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized api, finance, stocks

Crumble - It’s like breadcrumbs for your Rails application!
It’s a tiny combination of a helper and a simple configuration class to make breadcrumbs cool, because they’re not.
(Link: RailsLodge - Crumble plugin)

BrentSordyl Uncategorized breadcrumbs, rubyonrails