My Blog

keeping track of what I’m learning

pauldewouters — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:22:38 +0000

As a freelance web developer, you need to keep learning new stuff to avoid becoming obsolete.
I just decided I’m going to make it my top priority to learn Javascript.
An excellemt reference post I found: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/the-best-way-to-learn-javascript/

I also enrolled in a few online CS classes that look pretty exciting, especially this one:

http://www.saas-class.org/

Another course that’s worth doing:

http://www.codecademy.com/

browsers suck

pauldewouters — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:27:36 +0000

I spend most of my day using a web browser, for work, for fun, for learning.
I’d really like to find a browser that’s fast, not bloated, that doesn’t crash or eat up all my memory, and that respects my privacy.
Unfortunately such a browser doesn’t seem to exist yet – at least on a PC running Windows, I can’t say about other OS, well maybe Ubuntu linux, but I do’nt have the time to spend half a day on the forums copy and pasting terminal commands each time I want to install a program.

Chrome: by default, it doesn’t respect privacy. It means you have to tweak the settings. Who wants to do that?

http://www.howtogeek.com/100361/how-to-optimize-google-chrome-for-maximum-privacy/

Comodo Dragon : built on chromium, but said to be optimizezd for privacy. Unfortunately, I can’t access localhost for development, the DNS servers block random websites, zooming with the mouse doesn’t work…

SRWare Iron, also built on chromium – but you have to update manually to new versions as in download the new installation package when you remember to check if it’s the latest version. Also, it will crash on you randlomly.

Firefox : love the Firebug, but when your computer starts slowing down and you check memory usage to see it’s using 700Mb of RAM – more than Photoshop, well…
Also, extensions keep getting disabled because of the version compatibility check.

Safari for Windows: don’t like it.

Opera: pretty fast but doesn’t have all the extensions I need.

Internet explorer: yeah, right.

So, if you know of a browser that uses just enough memory, that has awesome extensions, and respects my privacy and web standards, let me know!

or maybe I’m just being too paranoid about Chrome?

Paul Boag looks like Moby

pauldewouters — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:21:55 +0000

Just realized who Paul Boag made me think of. He’s the dead ringer of Moby (or vice-versa)

I’m addicted to a video game

pauldewouters — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:58:16 +0000

Steam like to remind me how many hours of my life I’ve wasted.
actually it would be cool if it said: “you’ve already wasted x hours of your life playing games, with nothing to show for it”

I was nearly emotional when I got married to Aela the huntress

some things I’d like to do in 2012 and beyond

pauldewouters — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:22:07 +0000

WordPress related:

release a plugin on WordPress.org that at least one other person will find useful
release a theme on WordPress.org repository
release a premium theme for sale

Learning related
get better at jQuery
learn javascript
get better at PHP
continue learning responsive design / CSS3 / HTML5 techniques

Personal life related:
move back to Europe ( probably not in 2012 )
get one of my children interested in web development or design
get my children to learn to play guitar and speak French to me
buy a new camera so I can post images here.