ZenLinux Blog

I made it out to Blue Job Mountain this afternoon for the first time this year. I made it up in under 13 minutes, which really surprised me, because it’s a new personal record. I didn’t think I’d even come close to my numbers late last year without a few climbs to warm up.

The trees are just starting to bud again, the only green you’re seeing above is evergreens.

This is a review of the book Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional, by Simon Collison. Published by Apress. ISBN: 1-59059-689-7.

Let me start by saying I never really considered myself a CSS beginner when I picked up this book. I’ve successfully used CSS for text formatting comfortably for a couple of years. But when it came to using CSS for positioning and layouts, I’d run into frustrating problems immediately, and always found floats to be counter-intuitive. I’ve read many CSS positioning tutorials on the web and none of them ever fully resolved the conceptual blocks I’ve had. Given the fact that I’ve been entirely self-taught when it comes to web development, I figured a book with a title like Beginning CSS Web Development seemed appropriate to fill in the gaps of my understanding.

The first four chapters of this book covered the basics of CSS and went over text styling techniques I was already familiar with. Even so, I found the writing exceptionally clear and learned a few more subtle techniques that were immediately helpful in improving some of my web designs. Simon Collison isn’t just writing a series of lessons on CSS – he also offers general guidelines about web design issues, such as recommendations on how to organize your CSS files, and tips for picking an appropriate font. This I feel is especially useful for readers who want to get a good foundation in general, modern web development principles.

The chapter on styling forms was very handy, as it discussed three different ways forms are often laid out on the web, and answered questions I had on the pros and cons of each. By the time I had finished reading Part 1 of the book – which I had assumed would simply be a remedial overview of CSS – I had found numerous ways my practical, working knowledge of CSS had been improved.

The two most valuable chapters to me were chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 10 included concise and easy to understand explanations of float-based positioning, when it can be necessary to use spacer divs, and the way clearing floated elements should be done. This was the book I needed to clean up my spotty understanding of CSS positioning, and I immediately obtained results I applied in some of my web designs. Chapter 11 also provided a good reference for common two- and three-column layouts, and a short, but good explanation of the CSS box model.

The chapter on web accessibility was fairly minimal, which is to be expected in a beginner-oriented book, but I did find some of the tips on making CSS available to embedded devices insightful. The final chapter is a start-to-finish walkthrough of a CSS-based web page that brought together many of the lessons taught earlier. A CSS reference and good index round out the remainder of this 448-page book.

I could not find any significant copy editing errors in this book, and would highly recommend it for anyone with a background in CSS like my own. I also feel this is an excellent book for newcomers to CSS who want a good foundation in modern best practices from a book that is both practical and readable.

You can buy the book at Bookpool (this is not an affiliate link).

I recently upgraded the ClamAV mail virus scanner on my mail server, and discovered nearly a day later that email was being queued up but not delivered (oops!). The logs were pretty clear as to the cause:

ClamAV Perl module not found, did you install it?

It turns out that somewhere between version 0.88.4 and 0.90.2, the Mail::ClamAV perl module became a requirement. Fortunately I was all set a few minutes later with a quick invocation of cpan2rpm, and now I’m watching my mail spool slowly shrink from 10 MB.

Prepare for an electrifying event this coming Tuesday, as the NHRuby.org user group will be holding a series of Lightning Talks at the Portsmouth Public Library. I’ll be giving a demo of ProgpressPuppy, a Rails-based successor to my previous Thought2Action task manager. ProgressPuppy is still a scrappy side project that I haven’t done much on, but that makes it a perfect example to demonstrate how to do various things in Ruby on Rails.

For more details, see the NHRuby.org wiki.

In the book Agile Web Development with Rails, it is recommended that you move your HTTP session data from temp files (the default) into your database for speed and scalability. One problem this can create if you’re stuffing lots of data into your sessions is that database fields are of a limited size. MySQL uses text as the default type for the data column.

I ran into some limitations regarding this earlier this week, and the surefire symptom of it is the error “marshal data too short” in your logs. Fortunately, a quick Google search resulted in a few clear answers. I even found a migration example to change the column type from text to mediumtext (you can also use longtext if you’re really paranoid).

No, this has nothing to do with Adobe’s document format. I’m talking about the Personal Democracy Forum, being held at Pace University in New York City. I’ll be there on Friday, May 18. The theme of the conference is something I’m becoming significantly involved in – the impact of technology in politics, grassroots activism, and elections.

I’m particularly looking forward to attending the presentations by Seth Godin and Craig Newmark. Political blogging is certainly playing a huge role in politics these days, but I’m less interested in that than I am in the more general aspects of community building and the nuts-and-bolts methods of leveraging software to empower motivated grassroots groups. It should be really interesting.

For those of you updating your rails apps from v1.2.2 to v1.2.3 (released a couple of days ago), here’s all you need to change:

config/boot.rb, line 6:

unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /(:?mswin|mingw)/

config/environment.rb, line 8:

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.2.3' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION

That’s it.

Attention local Rubyists! The third meeting of the NHRuby.org user group is coming up soon. This month we’ll have Brian DeLacey speaking about using crypto algorithms in your Ruby code. He’ll be demonstrating the Crypt library, which is written entirely in Ruby.

The objective of this meeting is two-fold: to address some interesting Ruby techniques and also walk through the basic structure and operations of a Rails application. We’ll have some Ruby and Rails books to raffle off at the end of the meeting – special thanks to O’Reilly Media.

Brian is an excellent speaker and has been making the rounds giving talks at many user groups in the Boston area. Mark your calendars, you won’t want to miss this presentation!

WHEN: Tuesday, March 20, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: Portsmouth Public Library, Hilton Garden Inn Meeting Room (2nd floor), Portsmouth, NH.

For more details, including a map of the meeting location, see our upcoming meetings page on the wiki.