Mike Smullin
Personal Blog
Learning Dvorak
0643 days
My Dvorak stickers came in the mail. I mistakenly ordered ‘Programmer Dvorak’ which I thought was a sales term but actually no there is a keyboard layout called that. I meant to order just plain ‘Dvorak’, but was able to modify the stickers by cutting a few of them with razor blades. Now I have them on my home keyboard. I also have figured out a way toggle back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak using SHIFT+CAPSLOCK. I also use the Scroll Lock LED on my keyboard to indicate which keyboard layout I am in. These are all settings in the keyboard layout part of Gnome in Ubuntu. Very nice. I also found a dvorak keyboard training site where you go start with the home row keys and practice typing all these combinations until you get a high enough accuracy to move to the next level. It’s been fun. I am going to bring the stickers to work on monday and do the same setup. Then I can practice all the time and when I get frustrated just hit SHIFT+CAPSLOCK to toggle back to QWERTY.
CASHFLOW the Web Game
3691 days
The CASHFLOW game was designed by Robert and Kim Kiyosaki as a way for people to learn the keys to smart investing in a fun way, without risking any real money. The game is designed to teach you how to think like the rich and learn what it takes to get out of the rat race and live a financially independent life.
Lots of fun. I have played the board game, the CD-ROM version, as well as this latest online version. The online version is cool because there are new cards and you can find real people to play with online. Great way to meet like-minded. There are a few other subtle improvements to the game over the previous versions which I enjoy such as the comic book style introduction and the things that can happen in the game which make it feel quite true to modern life. Unlike Monopoly.
Check it out. I think during the Beta you can play for free. If not, the Rich Dad Insider membership is worth it! 
Gridded Layouts and Simplified Markup
0701 days
Really sold on gridded layouts lately. Loving the SASS version of 960.gs provided as a plugin for Compass. Albeit, have made some of my own improvements to it so my custom one is a little better. Will share that later.
For now, recommended you check out the following projects:
- Compass; specifically video demo
- SASS markup language; better than CSS
- HAML markup language; better than (X)HTML
- 960.gs, its sketch pdf, and its SASS Compass Plugin equivalent
- 960 Gridder javascript overlay bookmark
- A List Apart: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid article
- Text Gridder javascript overlay bookmark (my own)
- Sparkup markup language; specifically video demo
- Sparky my Compass-like compiler for Sparkup
Very cool combination for Rapid Application Development (RAD). Especially applied to web design.
IE Tester: Encapsulates Internet Explorer 5.5 to 8
1706 days
IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Runs on Windows. If you’re on Linux you can just run it in VirtualBox. Very nice tool to have.
Continuous Integration
0728 days
by Mike Smullin
in Development
On a daily basis, how many of you: Write unit tests? Perform unit tests? Check that code follows standards? Check that code is optimized with minimal repetition? Checkout, build, compile, release, and publish multiple builds (e.g. development, nightly, staging, production, training, etc.) in multiple formats (pushed live, tar.gz, .zip, etc.) Analyze results, produce, and share reports of all this?
Realize that if you are not, your presence is a high cost to the project in terms of the cascade of poor quality, and additional time you place as a burden on your customers and end-users. (see also: six sigma; cost of poor quality)
