atxgeek 


just one more geek in a sea of austin techies

January 14, 2013

GOP versus OOP #HumorGeek

Just for fun... 
Politicizing Programming Languages: GOP versus OOP

January 10, 2013

Pebble Watch = Madness #HumorGeek

Along with CES 2013 comes news that the most-funded Kickstarter project to date, the Pebble E-Paper Watch, is nearing its goal of shipping actual product: the new devices are slated to hit the market January 23rd. The Pebble isn't the first wrist-based device to wirelessly link to a smart phone but it does appear to have the best chance for success of all such devices to date.

That said, a number of people take the view that it is a bit too much to expect someone to invest in a watch that tells you what is happening on the phone in your pocket. In that vein of thought ATXGeek presents you with the timeline graphic to the right:
Pebble Watch = Madness

Enjoy.
(Click image to view it full size.)

January 7, 2013

Hosted jQuery fallback plan #WebDevGeek

It's estimated that jQuery is employed by over half of all "major" websites. "Major" means highly-trafficked-sites such as NBC, Amazon, Twitter and ESPN. Close to one-in-four of these sites use Google's hosted jQuery library files (a.k.a. Google's "Content Delivery Network" or "CDN") rather than serving local copies of files. There are some great reasons to deliver jQuery via a CDN -- namely a better end-user experience and less server and network loads thanks to CDN content originating from localized source servers and end-user web browser caching of commonly-served files. Employing a CDN, however, introduces an external dependency that can cause sites to seriously malfunction if the CDN becomes unavailable.

The easy solution is to dual-source those critical jQuery files: attempt to load from a CDN and, if that fails, load from a local source instead. The code for this is super-simple and is being used more and more often as websites feel the bite of unexpected CDN service interruptions...