Blog from the Loft

Mount them everywhere: The price point is great. How about mount them around the house or office as informational display — works with any system that has a browser interface. Leave one in the bathroom for, browsing…
Education use: Again, at $499, and with a great intuitive touch UI, give them out to school children for [...]

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Turns out, 007’s new multi-touch comm device has nothing on the decades old index card. Index cards are a great communication tool. Use them to present website designs, create conceptual layouts for applications, and brainstorm ideas in general. These two pictures were taken from one of our client meetings, when we are trying to organize [...]

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Massachusetts department of transportation, Mass DOT, recently decided to
offer real time and other transit data on a trial basis to the public. I attended
their very first developer conference (official website). My Notes follow:
Open is Good – Don’t Build Apps like Bridges
The central message was voiced by many presenters: Open is good for everyone. The case [...]

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Being Chinese in Boston, I always hear positive stories about the late Senator Ted Kennedy helping immigrants. In addition, I agree with most of his political views, he seemed like a good Senator. After learning of his death, I felt we had lost a great man. I added one of his biographies to my Amazon [...]

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It has only been years, but I finally decided to install a syntax highlighter plugin for this blog. A quick search pointed me to SyntaxHighlighter 1.1.1., downloaded it, unzipped into the plugin directory, and activated it. Took all of 2 minutes. Should have done this earlier !
How watch out for some useful code samples in [...]

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Check out the NYTimes article on WilsonDailyPrep. We at Imperial Consulting did the application, using Django and Python. It is a great service and a lot of fun to work on (my own vocab and grammar has gotten better, the Math quizzes are too easy). I am glad it is getting the big time publicity [...]

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It’s happening. As expected, iRex announced their iRex Digital Reader 1000 and 1000S today. Larger screen, wireless connectivity and touch screen for annotation. A 10.2 inch screen makes a big difference. So demand for the e-ink display is raising, price will be dropping, while Amazon claims that they are not going to release a new [...]

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JQuery is useful, but it is built on top of the idiosyncratic javascript and DOM model. I find the whole environment lack consistency. So here are some quick cookbook style notes on how to do specific things:
Clear all checkboxes in a form
$(”:checkbox”).attr(”checked”,false)

Technorati Tags: jquery

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Yes. I got one. Spent total of six and a half hours. Worth it? Yes. Weather was nice, a little hot but not too much. Apple staff were very nice. Especially Alex — She worked the line. Gave out (free) water, candy, went to get sunblock and more candy, even picked up a pizza for [...]

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Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution in London – “The Chemical History of the Candle” :
A candle is beautiful. “Beauty means not the best-looking things, but the best-acting thing.” A candle is beautiful because its functioning elegantly and efficiently rests upon a wide range of universal laws. The heat of the flame melts the [...]

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