OK, So I’ve just gotten done with my Algebraic Structures (Part 1) final exam. Yes, Part 1. It was supposedly designed to help us in that the in-class portion does not contain any proofs. The result is instead of having one normal sized test taking up just 2 hours, we have one in-class portion that was really difficult and took one and a half hours; and one take-home portion that is full of proofs that is going to take about eight hours. Yaaaaayyy. That’s what I always wanted.

Tomorrow I have Contemporary Programming Languages and I need to hand up my Numerical Analysis take home exam. That should be simple enough. On Wednesday I have to hand up Part 2 of Algebraic Structures and then that’s it. Did you hear me? That’s it. Well, that is after I graduate on Saturday. And I’ll be done with school for a while; a very long while. After this I have about one month before work starts. Yes, that’s a whole other story on it’s own, I got a JOB. I got to move and all that stuff. But hey, I’m just so psyched about finishing with school that I can barely contain myself. Again, this is a 10 minute break from my studies and I got to get back to it. I don’t want my GPA to take any other unnecessary dips before I’m all done. Rumor has it I’ll be graduating with honors. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

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OK, so things have been a little bit hectic so I haven’t gotten around to posting for a while. Here is a basic run down of what has been going on so far (much more detail to come later):

• Finals start today. Yes, this struggling college student is about to go into finals week and obviously I’m going a bit crazy.
• We’ve had end of semester project dues. One project, Software Engineering, was proving to be a major pain. Not the project itself, but the process by which it was to be delivered. Let’s just say, this whole “group work” thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
• I’ll also be graduating. Yep, it’s finally over. In one week I’ll be putting on that gown and walking through those doors. Wait a minute, where’s my gown. Whoops, mental note: “Need to check on gown at the bookstore”. We’ve been having graduation practice and all this good stuff.

So basically, I’m about ready to pull my hair out from the roots. But I’m trying my best to hold on to what little sanity I have left. Things should be back in full swing on Thursday.

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• HeliPad: The Flexible Web Notepad - Not sure about this one. I’ve used it and I must say it’s pretty, but I still rather the feel of Writely. It’s a person thing though.
• CSS Bubble Tooltips - Why pull out all that JavaScript for a simple tool tip. Nice and clean.
• Learn HTML and CSS with another Sam’s Teach Yourself Book.
• Sometimes you need an email address for just about 5, maybe 10 minutes.
• Developing in Linux, Part 1 and Part 2.
• Snap Preview Anywhere Install Tutorial - Interesting lil’ tool. Gives a web page preview of the site when you hover over the link.

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I’ve sort of been fighting it for a while now. I must say I’ve been stuck in the past and I apologize for that. I was stuck in the whole “It’s gotta be less that 800 pixels” things. That’s just a basic rule of accessibility, which I’ve carried from years ago. Back them a significant number of Internet surfers still had relatively small monitors and used the 800×600 resolution. Therefore, if you wanted your content accessible to the highest majority of visitors you had to ensure that your site can be viewed relatively well in at least 800 pixels. Although the number of visitors using this resolution was in the minority, it was still not small enough to ignore.

Now comes another problem. Rather a solution that causes a problem. Most people fixed this resolution issue by slapping on a fixed layout. Now fixed layouts have their pros and cons. The pros are, you know exactly how it will look every time. You know where every thing will be on the website. One major con, I experienced at a friend’s house. He had just gotten a brand new 21″ flat panel monitor and everything looked so crisp. After a couple hours of playing, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we were just browsing the Internet and I just asked him to check out my latest post at the time. When he did I was horrified. My beautiful fixed width 787 pixel layout, which looks just brilliant on my 17″ at home, still looked brilliant here, but it was so bloody small. I mean the thing was tiny and scrolling took forever. Yeah, we would have had to scroll a lot on a smaller monitor but since we have this huge one, why should we. There was just so much wasted screen space it annoyed me. You could almost fit a whole other site right next to mine.

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By the kind folks over at ESwat:

1. Unnecessary use of splash pages
2. Forcing a browser window to resize
3. Single-digit sized fonts and the pixel perfect layout
4. Using icons that make no sense
5. Preventing certain browsers from accessing your content

Nothing really new right? Splash screens. When last have I seen a splash screen? I remember in the mid to late 90’s, how everyone who was anyone had a fancy lil’ splash screen running at index.htm and a link: skip, pointing the the main site at enter.html or main.html or even index2.html. Lol, those were the good old days. Now let’s leave them dead and buried people. Those were for the days when developers were first flexing their Flash muscles. Right now, it’s more important to get visitors on the site and keep them there with what they came for.

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What are you going to be doing on January 15th and 16th? Will you per chance be in the Miami Beach area? Well, there is going to be Social Networking Conference. This is being held for the Social Networking and Online Personals industry. Speakers include Yahoo Personals, Cupid, Plenty of Fish and others.

Past conferences have brought together over 300 executives. This would highly benefit anyone who has started or is thinking about starting up an Online Dating or Personals website. I actually know of someone that has recently started WichitaFallsCupid.com. I doubt he’ll be making to the conference though, but I will definitely mention it to him. New technology will also be discussed along with methods of increasing traffic and conversions. Attendees who are new to the market also have a great chance to network. And did I mention, they’ll be minutes from the beach?

Registration is about $800 if you get it done before January 10th. That is kind of steep, but if this is your industry you should definitely make an effort to attend.

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Now I know we’ve all had this problem. Starting up a new website and waiting for the visitors to come rolling in. With blogs it’s one thing. There are many services for blogs that do pings every time you submit an article and stuff like that. Technorati is a great one of these services. There are also blogrolls, blog searches, etc.

But what about normal websites? What if you have a business website and need some promotion? What are you supposed to do? Enter DiscountClick.

First of all there is their Internet Marketing Starter Service

Perfect for websites and business just getting started and need guidance and assistance in online search engine marketing. With this service we will analyze which keywords would best fit for your website. We then get your ads appearing on google, yahoo and msn, as sponsored listings which appear on the top and right hand side of the search results

For a one time charge of $500.00 you get listed in the sponsored link section of Yahoo, Google and MSN. But that’s not all. Before this you get a website analysis. Basic SEO, a keyword analysis, a sponsored listing and a set up for basic bidding.

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Now I’ve heard pros and cons and pros and cons for this topic. Read the article and tell me what you guys think. Here is a basic rundown:

1. C is lower level then other programming languages
2. Device drivers and operating systems are written exclusively in C
3. What if you ever want to get a job programming micro controllers?
4. C programs are smaller and faster than any other program created in a different language.
5. If you have learned C, you can learn any modern programming language.
6. Because C has been around for many years, it has a large community and collective code base.
7. C is the language of the Open Source community.
8. C is the only language that teaches you what pointers really are.
9. C is still the most commonly required language for programming jobs.
10. Anything that has a microprocessor in it has support for C.

I understand their arguments, well at least some of them. But, to me, all these are also arguments against this point. I personally think people should start off with C++. I do believe, however, that when used right C in no way compares to C++ in terms of speed and many of the above points. But the amount of time and code needed for this efficiency sometimes isn’t worth it.

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