Rémy Giard’s blog

Recently, I’ve been reading and discovering many technologies, but I stayed at the observation level. Having more spare time since few days, I decided to crunch into those technologies by reading the APIs, blogs, forums, reviews and listening to podcasts. Now, it\’s time to start test projects for this new stuff.

First, in the open source world, my next targets are jQuery, blueprintcss, Drupal 6, JRuby and Git.

Well known in the Ajax world, jQuery seems to be very light, easy and efficient to find, create and update DOM element. More, it now has UI controls. For blueprintcss, it seems an excellent platform to build a multi-browser compatible site without having to use CSS hacks for this and that. A plus, I know two CSS gurus, Eric Meyer and Jeff Croft, have been working on this framework. In the PHP world, Drupal 6 seems to be the platform I was expected from the beginning. Having work in Drupal 4.7, I was disappointed for the number of bugs and difficulties to have a clear cut between the UI and the code. Since the upgrade to version 6, the installation process is easier and multi-language templates are more easy to create and maintain. Compared to Joomla, Drupal is really a completely CSS themable product.

Next, being a Java and an open source guy, I still worked on ASP.Net projects since a year. I have to admit that the Microsoft world interest me more than never. In fact, it’s not ASP.Net which interest me, but the new products that are coming soon. I am talking about the MVC framework, Entities Framework and Silverlight. I have not read or seen code for now, my sources being co-workers and the podcast from http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com/. At first, MVC architecture seems a lot similar to Struts in the Java world. I guess I will feel more comfortable in a MVC architecture than with postbacks, view states, controls tree, etc. I mean, I wish MVC is more like the other MVC web frameworks instead of being completely different with its own philosophy … like ASP.Net is.

On the other side, the Entities framework used in pair with LINQ is a ORM. The product seems to be really well thought and designed. With these new products, it seems feasible to have a complete efficient and testable application architecture with only Microsoft products.

Since I switch all my mail hosting to Google, I started to use Google Docs. I just discovered that using Google Docs, we can write a post and publish it to our blog as easy as two clicks. Just write the post, click “Publish” and then “Post to blog”. I love it !

* Note that I had to use the MetaWeblog API to have a blog title

I’ve just found the following post on Digg : “How to Make the Time for Your Personal Goals“. I am sure many people will recognize themself in that post. Here the proposed “steps” to augment the achievement chances of your personal goals.  In resume, know and understand why you want to achieve the goal and commit completely to it.

• One goal at a time
• Make sure you really want it
• Make it your top priority
• Reduce your commitments
• Keep it simple
• Stay focused
• Block off time
• Make it your most important appointment
• Show that your are serious
• Find your time wasters
• Make it a part of your daily or weekly routine