1. Jquery’s Draggable and Droppable classes don’t work on iOS devices. Obviously this is because the browser uses this drag/drop motion to scroll and pan around the screen. There is one JS library that I found that provides drag and drop abilities to iOS, though. It can be found here. I’m considering taking the code and turning it into a JQuery plugin.

2. The account of the Gracchus brother (Tiberius and Gaius) in “Plutarch’s Lives” is fascinating. In fact, the entire document is surprisingly readable. Tiberius, and after his death, Caius led sort of a sudo-revolution in Rome through the office of tribune of the people – cut short by the senate. The effects of which, one could argue, led to the downfall of Rome.

3. When Hitler implemented the ‘Final Solution’, he asked Jozeph Tiso, then President of the Slovak State (a satellite state of Nazi Germany) and a Catholic Priest, to send all the Jews in Slovakia state to Nazi Germany / Poland for ‘processing’. Although Tiso was anti-semetic, he also knew that (some of) the Jewish population of Slovakia was crucial to the economy. He ended up sending Jews anyway, to maintain an alliance with Nazi Germany, but not all of them. He personally allowed about 25,000 out of 200,000 to remain. After the war Tiso was tried and executed for war crimes – but many Slovaks maintain that he was a good guy because he saved so many Jews.

4. Isaac Casaubon was a Genevan born Humanist and Scholar in the Renaissance. He wrote a commentary on “Theophrastus’s Characteres”, which contained an unusual note on the front cover. It was unusual because it wasn’t written in Greek or Latin, but rather, in Hebrew – not a language you expect to find on a book about Theophrastus, an Athenian writer. It said “Praise be to God, creator of the universe”. One of the discoveries you make when you look into the life of Casaubon is that a prominent Jewish element exists. He copied and annotated many Hebrew texts (including books of the bible) that now reside in the Library of London.

5. To add an Arduino library (such as WiShield) to Arduino for Mac, you need to right click the Arduino application and choose Show Package Contents. From there, navigate to Contents -> Resources -> Java -> libraries and copy the library to this folder.

I appreciate that image optimisation and download times are extremely important, however, a 200kb limit is far too small.

For example:
The facebook front page (logged out) loads 507kb
The Amazon.com homepage loads 877kb.
The Ebay.com.au homepage loads 861kb
The ABC.net.au homepage loads 1.26 MB
The ninemsn.com.au homepage loads 1.458MB (I think this is the default IE homepage?)
THE WEB DESIGN COURSE MOODLE PAGE loads 589kb!

And even the W3C.org homepage is 203kb!
(These stats were taken from the firebug firefox extension)

In 2008, only 14% of Australians had dial up. If we extrapolate this data based on previous years decline, in 2010, only approx. 4.3% of Australians use dial up. (see http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/8153.0Main+Features1Dec%202008?OpenDocument). I would personally believe this to be a generous estimate.

Dial up support is an interesting topic. Do we continue to develop pages that support the minority of the population at the expense of good design and UI? If so, we should stop using Jquery and other JS libraries, as well as any CMS systems which are typically bulky (read: wordpress, joomla), CSS3 fonts and some great things that are happening with HTML5 and SVGs.

As an <aside> (get it? That was my first HTML5 joke), the course also requires that your page supports an 800×600 display – the industry has clearly moved to 1024 minimum support. The disconnection between uni and reality really annoys me!

I’d appreciate thoughts from other developers on this.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t__njtrdxttvetJznTvRiWQ&single=true&gid=0&output=html

Step 1 – Update and Upgrade your existing software repositories
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2 – Add some extra repositories so you can get the latest version
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the following to that file, and save it:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable all
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org/ stable all

Step 3: Update your new repositories
sudo apt-get update

(I got some 404 errors with this step, but you can ignore them)

Step 4: Install the latest version of php
sudo apt-get install php5-cli

Step 5: Restart Apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

A quick look at the source for install.php reveals this on line 489:

$version_fail = (version_compare(phpversion(), “5.2.8″) < 0);

If you just change 5.2.8 to your version (in my case, 5.2.6), it will install. There aren’t heaps of changes between these two versions, so I’m hoping there won’t be any major side effects!

Please buy this for me. You don’t need an excuse, it’s just because you love me. Or Christmas. Whichever makes me get it faster.

Logitech® Performance Mouse MX™

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices/5845&cl=us,en

And as much as I love my Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, the wireless USB dongle which comes with the mouse supports a wireless logitech keyboard too, so I might have to borrow your keyboard to test it out (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices/6040&cl=us,en).

Don’t get me wrong, I love our house, but I love travelling and change and culture more.

So, here’s a short Google Earth placemark movie of 10 places I would live. Google Earth required. See if you can spot some recurring themes.

The Places I Would Live

So far I’ve been having fun with:

• Pulling a cross domain JSON file (can’t do it with XML I discovered) into my app
• Experimenting with jQuery and $.ajax
• Using some of HTML 5’s cool new features like LOCAL SQL STORAGE! (Can you believe it???!! Very handy)

I’m hoping to use Phone Gap to compile all my hardwork into a native app, so hopefully Apple doesn’t mind. I’m going to probably submit it by this time next week.

Stay tuned for more updates! Maybe even a sneak preview – email me if you want one.