Video Scrubbing in iTunes

For years, I’ve used college course websites to help supplement my learning. If you poke around, you’ll find a lot of sites with lecture notes, code samples, and assignments all posted online. You don’t need to enroll in the course, or even attend college, to benefit from these little nuggets of learning. Sometimes it beats bashing your head against a new topic, without any sort of plan.

iTunes U

My only real problem with this method has been lack of access to the lecture itself. iTunes U has been around for a while, with many schools offering access to videos and notes classroom lectures. Its been gaining steady traction, to the point where I’m pretty sure you could do an entire undergraduate degree online.

Read the rest of this entry »

Strings in Java

At my first big programming job, we were building web applications using Servlets and EJBs. This is before Java web application frameworks had been invented, Servlets and EJBs were still in their infancy, and JSP were not even on the map. Everybody was feeling out how to use the technology properly, and a lot of mistakes were made along the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

HTML Meta Tags

When I created this website, I decided that I would use custom and unique description and keywords meta for each blog post. The idea here was to make each page a bit more individual in the eyes of search engines. I realize that search engines no longer place much (if any) weight on these factors, but it doesn’t hurt to be thorough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalinks

Linking to from one document to another is basically the foundation of the internet. The URL of a document is the address you point your browser at to retrieve some content. Content on the internet is meant to be read. You drive readers to your content by publishing the URL. Ideally you want your content to be available to readers not only now, but for years hence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Input Driven

I seem to chew through and spit out peripherals yearly. I suppose when you spend as much time as I do in front of a computer, you feel compelled to have the perfect input devices.

Read the rest of this entry »