Simon G's Blog

I had yet another excellent time at Barcamp Auckland 4 #bcak4. This is an unconference run each year that brings together developers, designers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others for discussion about topics of interest.  The sessions are always thought provoking and there are lots of super knowledgeable people and hence great discussions. My notes from the sessions are below. Building client side libraries in the enterprise Simon Lieschke, @slieschke Build on top of Yahoo! User Interface library YUI doc tool for generating source code notes Developer declares dependencies and this will then determine what libraies to use Have generated tag library docs When building javacript libraries, use a functional test page (e.g. if change CSS then show all different buttons) #regressiontesting currently build page manually Selenium mentioned as a...

I had an oversized Powerpoint 2003 presentation even after doing the tips and tricks I was aware of.  After a bit of searching I came across two excellent resources: Why are my PowerPoint files so big? What can I do about it? Bill's SizeMe Add-in The first link contains myriad information that is useful.  Bill's SizeMe Add-in (works with PowerPoint 2002 (XP) and PowerPoint 2003) is easy to install with the excellent documentation on the website and the amount of information generated about each slide surprised me. It does take a while to churn through the slides (and it's a good idea to use a copy of your original presentation), however it does result it a break down of each component on a slide.  The information can be viewed from within the Powerpoint itself or within Excel where it is easy to see where the bloat is coming from through the sorted raw data and graphs.

I tend to always use my calendar at work (MS Outlook with Exchange at the backend) as my core calendar and then synchronise this with my mobile phone.  This works well for me but I thought I should check out the Online calendar scene. My requirements for an Online Calendar are pretty simple, but the caliber of the different tools was quite significant: Has a nice look and feel and is fast enough Works! Can handle recurring appointments Can synchronise with iPhone, Android and ideally Symbian OS Can synchronise / provide data to other calendar based mashups The company is highly likely to still be around in five years Reasonable availability, stability, data integrity and security Online Calendars  Google Calendar None of the other Online calendar came close to matching the slick usability of Google Calendar .  The look & feel of this calendar is excellent.  Nice stand out features also include having both public and private URLS (supporting XML, iCa...