terrill.ca

Posts from May, 2007

May 30, 2007

Good day to be a CSer

Some days just warm your heart. If you are a computer science student today you should be feeling the heat. If you write code for anything that runs on a mobile, it should be getting down right hot!

The NASDAQ is at a 6 year high. Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and HTC all have new and exciting products coming down the line. CEOs globally are crying "talent shortage". Tech blogs everywhere are upgrading their servers to handle the ctrl+r abuse they're recieving on a regular basis. CS enrollment rates continue to decline, defying all reason. Once again anything that ends in .com and is in the black is being bought for millions billions of dollars. The near future looks good.

Investors Money
+ Big Corporate Support
+ Insane Consumer Appeal
+ Talent Shortage
+ Decline in Graduates
= the Perfect Job Market

P.S. The grand masters spoke today. Incase you missed what they said, you can view it here, here and here.

6 Comments
May 27, 2007

Then and Now –No.1– The Victory Nickel

The Victory Nickel was first created first in 1943, as part of Canada's Allied war effort. This nickel, or more appropriately "5 cent piece", was created for a number of reasons. Foremost, a severe lack of the metal Nickel – a much needed resource for war production, led the mint to use other less useful metals (hence its Copper/Zinc construction). It was produced each subsequent year until the Great War ended and again in 2005 for the 50th Anniversary of Victory in Europe.

Periodic Element Ni Nickel 28

Hidden in the coins design are a number of interesting items. The inner edge of the coin is bordered with a serious of dots and lines - Morse Code. When read it says "We Win When We Work Willingly" – enough W's for you? Well we're not done with the letter W quite yet. It turns out that Winston Churchill used a V shaped double finger salute as his salute to Victory.






An original 1945 Victory Nickel next to the 2005 commemorative edition.

Victory Nickels, 1954 and 2005

Additional Resources

12 Comments
May 05, 2007

Stats tracking software

What follows? An analysis of 4 web stats programs. They've been reviewed before, but not by me. If I could do it all over again I would install ShortStat, try it out for a couple months, then take a long hard look at Mint. It doesn't give you that much more.

Google Analytics

This was the first stats program that I pursued. It does a lot of things; some well, but most of them poorly.

The Good: It's free. You don't have to install the viewing environment. Just put a JavaScript <script> tag in the <head> of each of the pages you wish to track.

The Bad: The viewing environment is u.g.l.y. (and slow). It almost exclusively uses Flash. You also can't easily share a view of your page stats with others. There have been no major updates or upgrades since it's public launch under Google. Why isn't this integrated with their 'webmaster' dashboard yet? It doesn't show real time statistics

Shortstat

I dumped GAnalytics for ShortStat, a free PHP based tracking program that is hosted entirely on your site. Shortstat was created by Shaun Inman and is a pre-cursor to Mint. You can view a sample Shortstat installation over at houseonahill.ca.

The Good: It's lightweight, extensible, easily customizable, and all in real time! Ample control is given to the user. It's actually kinda fun just to be able to hack at it to make your own stuff.

The Bad: If you get a lot of traffic your database may become super large, and impede performance. Pages you wish to track must be .php (This ain't really that bad though).

SlimStat

Based on ShortStat, SlimStat is big (free) re-write courtesy of Stephen Wettone. It's not short any more, but it still retains the lightweight feel. A sample installation is viewable atsubletr.com.

The Good: It's being actively developed! The UI is clean. It makes an attempt to give statistics over time, something that Mint and ShortStat fall ... short of.

The Bad: I feel lost in the UI, but not nearly as lost as in GOOG Analytics.

Mint

Shaun's legendary successor to ShortStat. It is the most recent stats program I have installed, and currently it's running behind the scenes on this blog. I am incredibly impressed with it so far. The "Pepper" (read: extensions) are what really bring Mint to life for me. It costs $30.00 US. It was worth it. We'll likely never know the hours that have been invested into this project. If nothing else, it's great just to look at the CSS + JavaScript trickery. This time the sample installation is right here at terrill.ca.

The Good: It's beautiful, and extensible. Similarly to Google Analytics it uses a JavaScript include inside the page header to record hits. Oh, did I mention it has some uber-cool graphs in it too?

The Bad: It's not free, and that might be a barrier to some. The code is growing, and it is more complicated (in my mind) than ShortStat. I think that is one of the reasons why I haven't tried extending it yet.

Know of any others? Leave a recommendation.

4 Comments
May 05, 2007

HTML Resume Templates

Classes have started again, job postings will be up soon, and co-op interviews will follow with midterms. Each and every one of us co-op types must dust off the old resume, add to it what we think we've learned over the last 8 months, and submit it into the clutches of Jobmine. To help make the process a bit easier this time around I'm going to re-code Jobmine publish a series of articles detailing how to build a Killer HTML Resume.

First up we have the easy way out. HTML Resume Templates! Below are a bunch of templates that I've created for free use. I don't need credit, but you can if you'd like. Tested in IE7 and Firefox 2.

In Template #5 you'll see the use of a subtle background image (there are more background images available too). Don't hurt me for not using micro formats on these. They'll be updated to coincide with another post, but thats a story for another day. It's too bad that we have to go through Jobmine. A little sIFR would go a long way on these things.

If you have an HTML resume that you'd like to share as a template please let me know. I will add it to the list. Enjoy!

Resume/CV templates from others

  • Submission 1 | Serif titles, sans-serif content, single column, courtesy of Mike
8 Comments