Digital Bridge

I’ve created a new blog, Outside the Box, to replace this one.

I’m going to retire this blog and post to my main blog, Top of the Mountains, instead, effective immediately.

Well, it’s not that bad — just a huge headache, really achy bones, and loss of balance — but it’s keeping me in bed. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be able to get anything done today or if I’ll have to give in and sleep it all away. I hate wasting a whole day. ~sigh~ But as I don’t have much choice in the matter, I may as well accept my fate.

I haven’t really mentioned my programming goals for 2006 yet, so here they are:

1. Learn Ruby on Rails (and rewrite Blank Slate with it).

2. Learn Ajax. I know Ruby on Rails gives it to you “for free,” and that’ll be quite nice, but I’d like to know how to do it myself as well.

3. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa. (Specifically, write Beyond. And yes, I’ll have a website up for Beyond pretty soon.)

4. Learn XQuery.

5. Re-learn Perl and get it to stick. (I’m in a text processing class and we do cover Perl — at least the text processing side of it — so that should help.)

6. Re-learn XSLT and schemas. I use XML every day at work, but I haven’t done much with XSLT lately (long enough that I’ve forgotten some of the syntax).

7. Master SQL. I use it every day at work as well and have got a pretty good handle on it, but it’d be nice to learn how to write stored procedures and get better acquainted with the whole gamut of available functions.

8. Master CSS. I’ve got a good working knowledge of the main features, but there’s a lot of extended stuff (positioning, z-indexes, etc.) that I rarely use.

9. Become a better programmer. This is a vague goal because I’m not sure where to begin, other than finding books on good programming practices and reading them and applying them. The Pragmatic Programmer comes to mind as the top book on my coding to-read list.

10. Ending with just nine wouldn’t be proper, so…um…well…write an app so good that my site will get Slashdotted.

So, these are the sort of things you can expect to see mentioned here. I’ll also be writing about software design and usability. And lots more. Stay tuned till next time.

Technorati Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, Cocoa, Ajax, XQuery, Perl, XSLT, XML Schema, SQL, CSS, Slashdot

So here we go. Since I’ll be posting a lot about computers and programming and stuff like that, I figured it’d be best to start a separate blog. More to come soon.