“The new zone is always challenging for everybody”. This sentence might be an exact impression that I can say about my new profession as a Project Manager. Having 10 year experience in software programming and development, I’m not new actually in a professional world of company businesses. Approaching my second year of project manager, I’m still considered still green for this position. Never mind. It is not an obstacle for me anyway to share what I had learned from this job during my first days. I would like to share about tools, processes, principles, and best practices that were proven useful to support the position as a project manager. Those elements may not be an absolute model by which everybody can apply effectively for their different situation of work. Yet, my personal experience would be an enriching idea from which individual project manager could take one or two inspiring lessons to carry out their jobs.

My first debut as a project manager was begun by a question on how to decide on the best method to carry out my projects successfully. Consulting companies came to me with the suggestion of applying their powerful method to bring a success for my project. I wasn’t really assured that the advice would help much as there is no definite method of success that works for different forms of projects. Finally, I decide to neglect the suggestions and tried to find my own method of making a project a success instead.

Perfect planning was my first concern to set up besides several factors that I thought they would help contribute to the success of project management. A perfect plan, in my opinion at that time, would bring a good direction of the project. Yet, the plan given was still away from what my developers understood about the project. I missed an importance of goal setting that signified principal ground of working with the developers on the same track of success. An idea of perfect plan eventually left nothing but a waste of energy to my project.

Being challenged to work together with a few developers, I got to realize that project team are the soul of a project success. They need the best conditions whereby they can focus on jobs and carry out well the tasks given on schedule. The best conditions that enable comfort nuance of work exactly. Since then, I knew that project management is not simply about the accuracy of minds and perfectness of plan on paper. It is more about how to work in team with a clear cut direction and comfort environment to bring a success for a project.

In conclusion of my brief experience to be a project manager, the following lesson might be useful and valuable

“Leave to me everything that makes you difficult to carry out this project. I will handle it. So that, you don’t need to worry anymore”

I've got an admission to make: I've never used any of the Microsoft Ajax Toolkit. But recently I've been adding some mapping functionality to the project I'm working on. We wanted users to be able to pull a marker to a position on a map and have the new position updated on the server. Obviously we were going to have to use Ajax of some kind to do that. What I want to show today is how trivially easy it's proved to be to use MVC Framework on the server and jQuery on the browser to do Ajax requests and updates. JQuery is now included in the default project for the MVC Framework, so there's no excuse not to use it.

Here's a very simple scenario. I've got a a page where I want to show a list of people when I click 'Get People'. I also want to add a person to the database when I type their name into a text box and click 'Add Person'. Here's what it looks like:




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I made a tongue-in-cheek comment in another question thread calling PHP a terrible language and it got down-voted like crazy. Apparently there are lots of people here who love PHP.

So I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing? Why makes PHP a good language?

Here are my reasons for disliking it:

PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in and library functions. Predictable naming patterns are important in any design.

The PHP developers constantly deprecate built-in functions and lower-level functionality. A good example is when they deprecated pass-by-reference for functions. This created a nightmare for anyone doing, say, function callbacks.

A lack of consideration in redesign. The above deprecation eliminated the ability to, in many cases, provide default keyword values for functions. They fixed this in PHP 5, but they deprecated the pass-by-reference in PHP 4!

Poor execution of name spaces (formerly no name spaces at all). Now that name spaces exist, what do we use as the dereference character? Backslash! The character used universally for escaping, even in PHP!


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CSS tooltips are very popular in modern web design and contrary to popular belief it is really easy to create them, especially with one of the all so popular javascript frameworks.

Before I started to delve deeper into this topic, I thought you have to use at least a plugin, but to get some basic tooltips all you need are about 10 lines of CSS and jQuery Code.

This Tutorial will teach you how to create such tooltips with some basic CSS and jQuery.

Creating jQuery Tooltips: the CSS

First of all take a look of what we are going to create (hover over the link block and don’t care about the background, it’s only for better demonstration of the tooltip transparency)


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Overview

This jQuery plugin aims to replace the basic functionality provided by the standard JavaScript alert(), confirm(), and prompt() functions. What is the benefit of using custom methods? Well, a few good reasons, really:
These are completely customizable via CSS (which can make your apps look much more professional)
You can set a custom title for each dialog
IE7 users get an ugly warning and usually have to reload the page if you use a regular prompt()

These methods simulate a true modal dialog box. They will automatically re-position themselves if you resize the browser window (unlike many existing dialog/lightbox-style plugins). If you include the jQuery UI Draggable plugin, the dialogs can be moved by dragging their title bars. Everything you need to produce the dialogs in the demonstration is included in the download.
Requires jQuery 1.2.6 or above.

Implementation


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After reading an article some time ago entitled “40 Tips for optimizing your php Code” (and some others that are suspiciously similar), I decided to redo it, but properly this time with more accurate tips, providing references and citations for each and every one.

The result is this list of over 50 PHP optimisation tips…

Update: The list is more like 50+ PHP tips and tricks these days.

Enjoy!

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