Sam’s random musings

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p>Your Teaching Skills: Worse Than You Think?:

Here’s something not on DV but squarely aimed at teachers: how effective is your presentation style? if you haven’t thought about it recently, it’s probably worse than you think.

How to Stand and Deliver (signal vs. Noise) recaps this November 2003 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about effective methods for presenting to classes or groups: public speaking, in other words. The site with the first link, 37Signals, also posts notes on a lecture by Edward Tufte, the star of information design.

All too often students watch their instructors read their PowerPoint slides, an unconscious, implicit, and unacknowledged insult to their intelligence. I highly recommend these links and the thoughtful information within them to any one who speaks to more than two people at a time.

READ these.

(Via DV For Teachers News.)

BBEdit 8.0:

Multi-document interface, vastly improved Unicode support (including ATSUI text rendering), revamped Find dialog, and 100 or so other new features.

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WOO HOO

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

With all of the recent news about new trojan programs that can delete a user’s home folder, I thought I might share my backup routine, especially since many of the pieces I have assembeled came from knowledge picked up here. …

O’Reilly PHP Dev Center: Forms and Graphs:

“New from the O’Reilly PHP Dev Center, there are two articles covering two prety different subjects. One talks about the automation of forms and the other covers the use of JpGraph and PHP/MySQL to do statistical graphing.”

Good read and must save for me

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

CubeSolver

This robot solves the 3×3x3 Rubik’s Cube®. I started to think about this problem in about August of 2000. In Jan 2001 fellow Mindstorms forums user ‘agiecco’ announced his intention to work on a robotic solution and, simultaneously, I saw that Rubik’s Cubes were on sale at www.target.com. So I bought a couple of cubes and started getting down to business… I produced a ‘late beta’ version in mid-April 2001 that was a little clunky. The final version (presented here) is smooth and fairly reliable.

Amazing.

via Brian

Dynamic HTML Lab: Pop-up Calendar 1.0:

In a much anticipated article, Peter Belesis returns with this piece on a DHTML Lab Popup Calendar. Among its many features: No knowledge of JavaScript is necessary; only a beginner’s aquaintance with HTML and CSS syntax is all that’s needed. 0809

Very platform limited but a nice start I guess…

(Via WebReference News.)

SimpleBits | The Anatomy of an Icon:

Since releasing some icons of my own, I’ve received quite a few messages asking “how do you create an icon?”. Well, I can’t tell you how to create an icon — but I can tell you the steps I take to create an icon. There may be easier ways. There may be better ways. Here’s a quick look at the methods and techniques I used to create an icon from the Overcast set.

Good hints on a process for small icon creation, wish I was better at this…

(Via Alex King.)

News:

Former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes said he is “more ashamed at myself than I’ve ever been” because he helped President Bush and the sons of other wealthy families get into the Texas National Guard so they could avoid serving in Vietnam.