2013-03-22 Friday - Responsive Web Design Resources

Hat tip to Brent Turner for mentioning a link to a treasure trove of links to Responsive Web Design Resources:
http://bradfrost.github.com/this-is-responsive/resources.html

2013-03-07 Thursday - On Creativity

I've been pondering the proceses of creativity and inspiration lately...and happened to stumble upon the excellent  brainpickings.org - where I found these two gems:


John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative [link]

...which ties in nicely with this quote...

"A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus?

If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play."

- Arthur C. Clarke [link]

Some of the 'triggers' I usually find helpful in stimulating my own creative thought processes:

• A long drive.  Some of my best thinking - and innovative breakthroughs to problems - have occured while driving along the coast, or through the countryside
• Walking through a museum or gallery.  When I lived in the Washington D.C. area - a favorite Sunday activity was to walk through the National Gallery of Art - where I fell in love with one particular painting [Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast], by Ludolf Backhuysen, a Dutch painter who lived from 1631-1708. 
• Quiet Contemplative Meditation after a vigorous workout or 
• A long run.
• A long hot shower
• A professional one hour massage, followed by a sauna
• Reading  deeply on a complex, subject completely unrelated to the problem at hand.  Somehow the mind finds the tangents and serendipity spreads her magic dust - and Viola! - inspiration arrives with a grand entrance.
• Music. Vivalidi's Four Seasons, for some reason, has the power to inspire me in ways that are hard to describe.

2013-03-03 Sunday - OAuth 2.0 ?

This post is a reminder for me to come back and do some additional reading on a few interesting things I found this weekend...

 hapi appears to be an interesting Node.js HTTP Server framework which is under development - led by Walmart Labs

This led me to Eran Hammer's personal web site [http://hueniverse.com]

...which led me to some interesting things he has said about OAuth 2.0
http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell/
http://hueniverse.com/2012/11/fuckoauth-realtimeconf/


 He's also written a series of articles about his experience working with Node.js
http://hueniverse.com/2011/06/6-months-with-node-js/
http://hueniverse.com/2011/06/the-style-of-non-blocking/
http://hueniverse.com/2011/06/node-js-from-couch-to-mongo/

2013-02-17 Sunday - JDK 8

link to the JDK 8 Milesstones
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones

2013-02-17 Sunday - Graphing in the Browser

I've been interested for a number of years in the Graphviz tool.

It seems to me that there are some interesting uses that this type of tool would lend itself to quite well...

Recently I wondered if a JavaScript implementation might have already been developed...and found the following that might be of interest to others:

http://code.google.com/p/canviz/

http://ushiroad.com/jsviz/

https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js

Another possibly interesting JavaScript library, along similar lines, might be jsPlumb

http://code.google.com/p/jsplumb/

https://github.com/sporritt/jsPlumb

http://jsplumb.org/doc/usage.html

Some blogs/articles that reference graphviz usage:

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/01/30/making-diagrams-with-graphviz/