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Why Giving Away Your Code Is Not Dangerous

One of the things that the beginners learn is that coding is important, and that code is an important artifact. Which makes it difficult to convince them why giving away code is not dangerous. The philosophy of open source is usually met with raised eyebrows and skepticism in classrooms, especially if they have come to read how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs built companies and made money.

So here is yet another analogy, to explain why giving away the code only helps.

Imagine you run a transport service, ferrying passengers to destinations they want. A part of your job is to follow maps, find out new routes and build your knowledge about them so that you can take your passengers to the right destination. Now, if someone asks you for directions for going from one place to another, would you hesitate? In fact you would only be helping that person out by giving out the directions. Someone else comes too for them, and so you just make them available to everyone. Would that be a problem? It will hardly be, since your job is to enable your passengers to reach their destination, which is more than just directions. They might have a time-limit, they might want some intermediate hops or they might even have some weird baggage to be carried. You can help the passenger plan their travel, and even help them decide whether they want to travel by air, water or road. You try your best to provide a safe and convenient travel for your passengers within their constraints and that is what you get paid for.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

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Tips For Creating Great Web Forms

1. Use Labels

You don’t need labels for your form to work, but as one CSS-Tricks reader once put it, it is an accessibility crime not to use them. Labels are what signify what the input box is for and associate them together. The use of the <label> tag is not only semantically correct, but it gives you the opportunity to style them uniquely with CSS.

2. Float Your Labels

This is how you achieve that table-like structure on forms without having to actually use a table. Just set a static width, float it the left, align the text to the right, and give it a little right-margin. Beautiful.

label {
float: left;
text-align: right;
margin-right: 15px;
width: 100px;
}

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Popularity: 21% [?]

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Excel: Extracting numbers from alphanumeric strings

This article was written by Ashish Mathur, a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Visit the Microsoft MVP Web site for more information.

In the following article I explain a formula that extracts numbers from strings in the following types of situations:

• When alphabetic and number characters are clustered together, such as abc123 or 678sfr.
• When alphabetic and number characters are not clustered together, such as abc15tni.

Problem

How to extract the numeric portion of an alphanumeric string. For example: If cell A1 contains the string “abc123″, return the value 123 in cell B1.

Solution

The underlying logic here is to search for and return the first number in the alphanumeric string, and then return only the numbers that follow.

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Popularity: 43% [?]

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Excel: Conditional formatting: Considering the fourth option

This article was adapted from MrExcel.com. Visit the MrExcel.com Web site for more tips and information.

Conditional formatting in Excel allows for three conditions. However, by setting up conditions correctly — from least to most restrictive — you can really allow for four conditions, when the default formatting of the cell is considered. For example, say you want to add color to your data like so:

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Popularity: 18% [?]

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Still wondering which javascript library to use?

If you are still wondering which javascript library (Prototype, MooTools, JQuery) to use, you can run the speed/validity selectors test for frameworks from Slickspeed.

http://mootools.net/slickspeed/

Every framework runs in its own iFrame, thus no conflicts can happen. Tests are run selector by selector, with an interval to prevent the browser from freeezing.

Tests are run in a neutral environment, no library or framework is included in the main javascript test, to avoid favoritism.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Posted in Javascript | 1 Comment »