My understanding of XML is that it's purely used to store data records, and we covered that in the course. What's more intersting is the way we used XML in the assignments:
As you can see, we went well beyond the basics of XML data structure definitions. Did I like the class? Many folks I talked to had a tough time with this course, however I thought it was interesting and gave me a better appreciation for XHTML and web standards. One big thing I got out of the course was a better understanding of the use of 'CDATA' within XML files.
I was quite happy with my final mark of 96%.
]]>My understanding of XML is that it's purely used to store data records, and we covered that in the course. What's more intersting is the way we used XML in the assignments:
As you can see, we went well beyond the basics of XML data structure definitions. Did I like the class? Many folks I talked to had a tough time with this course, however I thought it was interesting and gave me a better appreciation for XHTML and web standards. One big thing I got out of the course was a better understanding of the use of 'CDATA' within XML files.
I was quite happy with my final mark of 96%.
]]>My final mark for this course was 91%.
]]>My final mark for this course was 91%.
]]>On the downside, some of the information is a bit out of date (ie using Netscape Navigator 7 in the web browser comparison chart), however that's nothing new compared to the other courses in this program.
Some of the work in xml seems to be bleeding in that it only works on certain browsers. I do, however like the fact that in assignment #2, we're given xml and it's up to us to style it. Too bad it's xml and not xhtml though. Shades of the CSS Zen Garden. Great practice.
Unit 7 is using the XML DOM, and uses a proprietary Microsoft version. This is unsettling, as a standards based XML DOM does seem to be available. More research required. . .
Getting into the home stretch of this course, and it's getting a bit strange. Some assignments work with IE but not Firefox and vice versa.
I recommend this course, as it provides us with an introduction of some of the emerging web standards.
So far, the Instructor gets a B, course gets a C.
]]>On the downside, some of the information is a bit out of date (ie using Netscape Navigator 7 in the web browser comparison chart), however that's nothing new compared to the other courses in this program.
Some of the work in xml seems to be bleeding in that it only works on certain browsers. I do, however like the fact that in assignment #2, we're given xml and it's up to us to style it. Too bad it's xml and not xhtml though. Shades of the CSS Zen Garden. Great practice.
Unit 7 is using the XML DOM, and uses a proprietary Microsoft version. This is unsettling, as a standards based XML DOM does seem to be available. More research required. . .
Getting into the home stretch of this course, and it's getting a bit strange. Some assignments work with IE but not Firefox and vice versa.
I recommend this course, as it provides us with an introduction of some of the emerging web standards.
So far, the Instructor gets a B, course gets a C.
]]>The text used to support the course was 'PHP Third Edition' by Larry Ullman. The text provided background material for all of these topics, and was supplemented by course material (located at http://webapps.bcit.ca/mdia4325/).
To me, the course was marred by the mistakes in the course materials as well as examples that didn't work.
]]>The text used to support the course was 'PHP Third Edition' by Larry Ullman. The text provided background material for all of these topics, and was supplemented by course material (located at http://webapps.bcit.ca/mdia4325/).
To me, the course was marred by the mistakes in the course materials as well as examples that didn't work.
These included:
These issues would have been not too bad if the content was new. It's not. The content has been around for years, so there's not much of an excuse to have these issues.
It's a great course to offer web developers, however BCIT really needs to address the currency and accuracy of the course notes and examples. Then again, more than one of these courses has this problem. It doesn't help that there seem to be about 2 students enrolled per semester, thus making a course re-design financially not very viable.
I shouldn't complain though, as I received 98% on this course.
]]>Having been in the IT industry for over 20 years, I've been ingrained with more than a sense of trepidation when it comes to in place upgrades. It's just something I don't like to do.
Having only a single hard drive for my laptop, my choice was to either:
In fact, I chose option 3:
I wanted to ensure that I could continue using the laptop in case the upgrade wasn't successful. In addition, I keep all my data on a backup server, and perform regular backups which I test as well. With the backups in place, it was time to proceed with Windows 7.
Despite some initial installation issues, I managed to get Windows 7 installed on my new 500G 2.5" drive. Once the system was in reasonable shape, I decided to start restoring data from the server using a program called Syncback. This allows me to schedule up several restoration jobs in the background and continue working. Initially, the performance was slow and it turned out this was due to the fact I was using wireless. I then changed over to the 100BaseT wired connection and the performance increased dramatically. The problem now is that the server started to crash. I then reverted to manual copying over of directories but had to reset the server as it kept crashing after copying a few gigabytes of data (sometimes less). After a while, I decided enough was enough and took out the data drive and placed it in an external drive enclosure and connected it via USB to my laptop. Well, that was that. The backup drive gave up the ghost and all my backups were gone.
It scares me to think that if I had chosen either of the first two options when installing Windows 7, my data could have been gone. If an in place upgrade had failed, I would have lost the original data as well as the backups and that would have been catastrophic for my small business. In reality, I also keep at least 1 other set of backups, however it is a few months old and there still would have been some pain. As it stands, I have re-installed the drive containing Windows Vista and am backing it up to another drive.
It turns out that my years of IT experience have paid off. In leaving the original drive alone and taking multiple backups, I am still able to restore my data despite the loss of my primary backups. I also had a fallback with the secondary backups.
The lesson learned, however is to keep those secondary backups a little fresher and to maybe keep a set offsite like I used to at my previous employers.
Update: I went out aand bought an external eSata drive enclosure and a 1TB drive. Am backing up to this thing at light speed. It supports 2.5" as well as 3.5" and the drives are pop-out, so offsites will be much easier to create.
]]>The challenge that I have, is that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets often don't translate well when being cut and pasted into a HTML based WYSIWYG editor and then published to the Internet. I have seen things like:
]]>The challenge that I have, is that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets often don't translate well when being cut and pasted into a HTML based WYSIWYG editor and then published to the Internet. I have seen things like:
As a result, I've tried different techniques in order to resolve this; none of which are perfect. These incude:
I usually need to update the spreadsheet with some additional formatting and information and return it to the author. Hopefully, they'll use that as the 'master' copy and update it and resend it to me with updates in the future.
If this works, great. Count yourself lucky. The drawback is that your email addresses may harvestable by spammers.
This seems to be promising, but again, your email addresses may harvestable by spammers.
This ensures that your spreadsheet looks the way you want and that your email addresses are not harvestable. It does add significantly to the size of your page, and people can't cut and paste any information from it. It also adds time to the process.
This makes for the best looking list, but is very time consuming to create and maintain. This has the distinct advantage of being able to obfuscate email addresses while allowing them to be clickable.
I currently use all of these techniques, depending on the situation. It would be nice to hear what others do about this issue.
]]>This article provides a brief review of BCIT's MDIA program for aspiring web designers and developers as well as their new Desire 2 Learn to support online classrooms.
The new Desire 2 Learn environment provides features to simulate a classroom environment such as:
This environment looks a lot like Microsoft Sharepoint and is configurable for each class. There's also an overall Portfolio section as well a a blog. One thing I appreciated is that they can keep your previous classes online long after they have ended.
Rating: A
]]>
This article provides a brief review of BCIT's MDIA program for aspiring web designers and developers as well as their new Desire 2 Learn to support online classrooms.
The new Desire 2 Learn environment provides features to simulate a classroom environment such as:
This environment looks a lot like Microsoft Sharepoint and is configurable for each class. There's also an overall Portfolio section as well a a blog. One thing I appreciated is that they can keep your previous classes online long after they have ended.
Rating: A
I've found that the course material has lots of examples and contains more depth than many of the books I've seen on these topics. On the other hand, this material has been updated over the years, often in a haphazard fashion and with examples that no longer work. Much of the 'legacy' content remains and looks outdated as does the presentation. It looks to me that the instructors need to spend more time in order to be on top of the currency, relevancy and quality of their materials.
Rating: C (B for quantity, D for quality, currency)
The D2L environment provides a threaded discussion area for students and their instructor in order create an online classroom. The problem is that the instructors aren't leading the classroom discussion. In some cases, they aren't even posting. This is unfortunate, as this is where BCIT could set themselves apart from their online competitors. In addition, very few of the students are using the discussion areas and thus aren't making much use of the environment.
Rating: D (B for the technology, F for the instructors, D for the students)
BCIT provides an FTP/web server so that students can upload their presentations so as to be viewable by others. One problem is that the instructors only provide basic instructions on how to upload files to their presentation area. This seems to be offered as an optional item rather than the educational tool it can be. Students are rarely encouraged to structure their presentation area by course or assignment and thus this cool resource goes underutilized. We don't get a Control Panel either, so functionality is limited to text files.
Note: If you're enrolled in the PHP course, you can get access to a database and PHPMyAdmin.
Rating: C (B for the technology, D for the instructors, D for the students)
My understanding of the marking system is that you are deducted marks for the mistakes that you make. On a few assignments, I stretched myself technically as well as artistically and then ran the code through the online W3C validators, which validated the code. The instructor's validation software, however, flagged some warnings, and I lost several marks as a result. My lessons learned were to:
It was disappointing not to get any marks for trying cool stuff and to lose marks on warnings that the online validators didn't even detect.
Rating: C
When looking at the course material, it seems to me that these courses peaked around 2005 and have been in 'maintenance' mode ever since. For example, as of early 2010, both the beginner and advanced Flash courses are still taught using Actionscript 2, despite the introduction of Actionscript 3 in 2006. In addition, many of the links in the course material are no longer working. Finally, current technologies, such as Flex, Silverlight and CMS's are nowhere to be found.
What could set BCIT apart is the (very excellent) D2L classroom environment with instructors assigned to assist/lead the class. The only problem is, the instructors do not seem to be doing this. They aren't leading the class in discussion, posing interesting challenges and rarely join in the discussion threads (few as they are). Many instructors don't appear to be encouraging students to post their assignments and share with the others. They really aren’t creating a classroom environment at all. I don't believe the BCIT program will reach its potential until the instructors really engage themselves and their students in this online program. That being said, it's a two way street, and the students really need to engage themselves in order to take advantage of the the networking potential offered by this program. Check out Sitepoint's forums for an example of a vibrant online community.
In the meantime, online resources such as lynda.com, smashingmagazine.com, tutsplus.com and interact.webstandards.org provide better and more current material. They just don't seem to offer the structured classroom environment that BCIT does.
Overall Rating: C
Feel free to send any comments to atuline at gmail dot com.
There were 5 assignments in this course, each building upon the knowledge gained in the previous assignments. Your first assignment starts off with a knowledge of just a few HTML tags and NO CSS. From there, you add more tags, but you are NOT allowed to go beyond the material you have taken. It's not until assignment 5, that you are allowed to use CSS at all.
The good:
This was a good course to get introduced to the way they do things in the MDIA series of courses. You are supplied with reading material, online forums, publishing capabilities. You need to submit assignments that get marked and so on.
]]>There were 5 assignments in this course, each building upon the knowledge gained in the previous assignments. Your first assignment starts off with a knowledge of just a few HTML tags and NO CSS. From there, you add more tags, but you are NOT allowed to go beyond the material you have taken. It's not until assignment 5, that you are allowed to use CSS at all.
The good:
This was a good course to get introduced to the way they do things in the MDIA series of courses. You are supplied with reading material, online forums, publishing capabilities. You need to submit assignments that get marked and so on.
The bad:
Most of the MDIA 1206 assignments required that the users NOT use CSS for styling, but rather to use HTML tags. This was acceptable, however it was also a Dreamweaver course, and the design mode of CS4 doesn't easily permit this.
The marking:
If you want to maximize your marks (for any of these courses), you'll stick with the course material and get it PERFECT. That is, no HTML errors or warnings, no CSS errors or warnings. The W3C checkers are not adequate. You need something with additional checking power, such as the CSE Validator. Validate everything! Although you can declare transitional xhtml in your header, you had better code as if it's strict. You will be marked as such.
Adding cool functionality to your assignments doesn't amount to much. Make a mistake anywhere and you'll lose marks quickly. If your goal is to stretch yourself technically, then be prepared to lose some marks unless everything is absolutely perfect.
Make sure you know exactly what the instructor wants. Has (s)he provided any examples? Are your classmates publishing their work? If not, it should be strongly encouraged.
I've experienced this marking style in later courses as well, so be prepared.
Recommendation:
Considering that many of the remaining courses are about programming HTML/CSS/Javascript and so on for the web, I would recommend dropping the Dreamweaver Design mode early on and focus on coding right off the bat. As a matter of fact, the students may be better off using another tool, such as Webuilder, Notepad++ or BBEdit so as to completely avoid the temptation to use Dreamweaver's Design mode. I would just offer MDIA 1205 and drop 1206 entirely.
]]>To me, the trick for this assignment was to come up a cool temperature generator. Most of the rest was image and innerhtml updates which we did a lot of in assignment 2. Rather than use links to select cities, I used a 'select' field in conjunction with some Javascript and then modified the DOM to place images and text. Much more interactive that way.
I continued to work on layout techniques and tried out Layer Comps in Photoshop with limited success. Will continue to press on.
Finished. Wow! What an assignment. There are better looking ones out there in the class, but mine was the only one that used the select field to select a city. That took a bit of work in Firefox, and much more so to make it IE compatible.
Update: I was the only one in the class that used the select field. In addition, the temperature generator was really cool. The instructor found a mistake in my timezone calculations and I lost marks big time there. Maybe I should have spent less time learning the cool stuff in order to get the basics right. :(
]]>To me, the trick for this assignment was to come up a cool temperature generator. Most of the rest was image and innerhtml updates which we did a lot of in assignment 2. Rather than use links to select cities, I used a 'select' field in conjunction with some Javascript and then modified the DOM to place images and text. Much more interactive that way.
I continued to work on layout techniques and tried out Layer Comps in Photoshop with limited success. Will continue to press on.
Finished. Wow! What an assignment. There are better looking ones out there in the class, but mine was the only one that used the select field to select a city. That took a bit of work in Firefox, and much more so to make it IE compatible.
Update: I was the only one in the class that used the select field. In addition, the temperature generator was really cool. The instructor found a mistake in my timezone calculations and I lost marks big time there. Maybe I should have spent less time learning the cool stuff in order to get the basics right. :(
]]>Here's how I'm (currently) going about laying out this assignment:
PSD template:
Update:
- Playing with Photoshop built-in grid sizes & colour contrast
- Turning off template once I am happy with overall layout
- Printing out pages of the inspiration sites
- Lay out major sections first, then work on detail
- Using Photoshop folders and name them
- Using shape layers drawing mode and not fill pixels and using masks for rounded corners
- www.sxc.hu has a LOT of free stock images and graphics
- I'm developing core HTML/CSS first, then adding Javscript later
- Yikes! Don't forget cross browser testing. Sure wish there was a Firebug for all browsers.
Update 2:
- Most of the HTML/CSS is done
- The key to most of the Javascript effects are found in the examples,
I'm thinking 6-3, 6-11, 6-5, 6-8 and 8-8 (for a random image on the
main page).
- Using 'mod' or '%' saves some lines of code when going through a slideshow
Finished. I was really happy with how this looked in the end. Sure it could have done with some more polish, but the image management was really cool.
]]>Here's how I'm (currently) going about laying out this assignment:
PSD template:
Update:
- Playing with Photoshop built-in grid sizes & colour contrast
- Turning off template once I am happy with overall layout
- Printing out pages of the inspiration sites
- Lay out major sections first, then work on detail
- Using Photoshop folders and name them
- Using shape layers drawing mode and not fill pixels and using masks for rounded corners
- www.sxc.hu has a LOT of free stock images and graphics
- I'm developing core HTML/CSS first, then adding Javscript later
- Yikes! Don't forget cross browser testing. Sure wish there was a Firebug for all browsers.
Update 2:
- Most of the HTML/CSS is done
- The key to most of the Javascript effects are found in the examples,
I'm thinking 6-3, 6-11, 6-5, 6-8 and 8-8 (for a random image on the
main page).
- Using 'mod' or '%' saves some lines of code when going through a slideshow
Finished. I was really happy with how this looked in the end. Sure it could have done with some more polish, but the image management was really cool.
]]>I received 10/30 on my final assignment. The instructor didn't seem to like the fact that I deviated from the course and delved into Actionscript 3 programming. He really wanted his tweens, and my mark suffered when I zagged from what was expected. My final mark for this course was 67% and would have been much higher if I stayed within the lines. Despite the above issue, I learned a LOT in this course.
Oh, and his advanced course covers some basic Actionscript 2.
]]>I received 10/30 on my final assignment. The instructor didn't seem to like the fact that I deviated from the course and delved into Actionscript 3 programming. He really wanted his tweens, and my mark suffered when I zagged from what was expected. My final mark for this course was 67% and would have been much higher if I stayed within the lines. Despite the above issue, I learned a LOT in this course.
Oh, and his advanced course covers some basic Actionscript 2.
]]>