My techie weekend

Heading into the weekend, I decided that I needed to get in touch with my techie side. ^^ I've been focused a lot on process and project planning at work recently and really needed to step away and let my mind concentrate on something else. I had a list of ideas that I wanted to do and I did get a good start on them.

I spent a lot of time this weekend reading about GAIM development as well as programming with Mozilla. GAIM is more straight forward but I really need to get a better grasp of GTK+ programming before I feel that I can make any headway. I played with the source a little and got the environment set up and I'm now working to understand how things work. I realize that GNOME have been working to establish a standard UI and best practices, but I still think the look of it is... not that great....

I also spent time looking at XUL programming and Mozilla. There's some interesting technologies associated with this, but the documentation on them is confusing. Part of it might be the terminology and also because projects are moving so fast that a lot of documentation are out-dated. Frankly, I wasn't sure where to start.

JavaScript have come a long way from when I first used it and the DOM specification have brought web development to a new level. It excited me as I was studying this to see how much more mature the field is and what it is capable of. Web development is now so far from just doing page layout with HTML and adding some roll-over images that everyone should recognize that web developers (truly good ones) requires the full set of software programming skills as any other software engineer. In fact, at work, I've stopped using the term "web developer" and more "frontend engineer" because the tasks these individuals are doing are programming projects. Traditional software engineers can also do these tasks but they would have to spent a considerable amout of time reading the many standards and specifications.

I've also spent a lot of time dealing with spammers. Man, I really dislike spammers. I'm ok with legitmate companies sending out emails, but spammers that tries to flood you and invade your privacy are parasites. Spam is one of the reason I changed email clients, upgraded this blog and spent part of my weekend changing my slickedit forum. When will spammers get that people don't read their crap?