[tags]startups[/tags] A friend of mine directed me to Why to Not Not Start a Startup:

Like a good second generation Desi I saw The Namesake after recently completing the novel. Both are very good and I recommend reading the book and watching the movie, although not necessarily in that order.

The following should not spoil the movie much, but are some criticisms that Katie and I had.

• The numbers don’t add up. The ages mentioned in the movie do not make sense (i.e. the mother (Ashima) being nearly 45 and talking to her son (Gogol) who is at least 10 years older than her when she got married just doesn’t make much sense.
• In the movie he graduates in 1996, but his graduation gift is dated as June 1995.
• When Gogol is flying to India the first time, they have some placements of the Northwest Airline logo, you know… back when it was Northwest Orient Airlines and the logo looked more like this:
  
• Of course, it also seemed that a lot of parts of this movie would be hard to understand without reading the book (or for that matter having a vague understanding of Bengali).

The movie however, was very good overall. The book is much better, as books tend to be, because they convey things that movies cannot. It really struck a chord with me, making me want to be with my family more, and reflect on my life (albeit my life is not nearly as bittersweet as Gogol’s).

[tags]design,usability[/tags]

[tags]best practices, php[/tags]

[tags]programmers, hiring[/tags]

[tags]best practices,php,openID[/tags] [PHP]: http://php.net/ [openID]: http://openid.net/ [reviewsby.us]: http://reviewsby.us/ [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/

[tags]MarsEdit,software,blogs[/tags]

I recently read about the acquisition of MarsEdit by Red Sweater Software so I decided to check it out. I’m quite glad I did it does make my workflow a lot easier. What I had been doing up until today was this:

1. I’d come up with an idea.
2. Open up my writings project in TextMate
3. Open a new file and start typing ideas, etc.
4. Find the right blog to post it on (e.g. Spindrop, davedash.com, yumbo the reviewsBy.us blog or Metroblogging).
5. Login to the blog.
6. Cut and paste titles, categories, tags, etc.

It was easy to drop my blogging habbit ;)

Now, I can do this:

1. Come up with my idea.
2. Select which blog I want to post it in.
3. Write my idea.
4. When it’s ready to go live, just hit submit to blog.

The one slight problem I have is I use a tags feature of wordpress in addition to categories (not sure why I don’t just use categories, but that’s another story), currently there’s no easy way to deal with WordPress plugins’ custom fields that I know of. So there’s an optional 5th step of examining the post on the site and possibly adding tags.

Still, these 4 steps are easy and all done from one app. It also features a preview of your post that you can customize per blog with a custom HTML template. Which makes it easy to just drop your blog’s style sheet and see if your post looks right.

Definitely looks like a keeepr!

So I have a small bone to pick with Jacob Nielsen and his opinion on within-page links or anchor links^.1 There clearly is a benefit to not just linking to a specific page, but linking to a specific part of a page.

With a little help from script.aculo.us we can spice up our anchor links by highlighting them as well as linking to them.

For this article we’ll limit our scope to internal anchors only.² We’ll write the code using the symfony framework and in straight up XHTML. This is really dirt simple and is more of a design pattern with an example than a tutorial.

Let’s do the XHTML first:

Yup, that’s it… I told you it was dirt simple. You just need to include the proper prototype and script.aculo.us libraries.

In symfony we avoid repeating ourselves with a helper function:

and call it by doing:

That’s it.