http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog Valid use of Null Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:26:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some facts and figures regarding the ancient city of Carthage (somewhere in present-day Tunisia), 814-146 BC, roughly 2,500 years ago: A population of 500,000 in a relatively small area, making it one of the largest cities in pre-industrial history Buildings made of stone Six-storey apartments Running water and a sewerage system conceptually not very ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/carthage/ Apparently this book, in the author's own words, has spawned a "cottage industry of articles with variations on the title 'The World Is Not Flat'". Well, saying the world is flat is definitely a provocative assertion. Mr. Friedman is putting forth that we are now entering an era of a ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/the-world-is-flat-the-globalized-world-in-the-twenty-first-century-by-thomas-l-friedman/ What makes a great programmer? In essence, a great programmer consistently writes good code, fast. Ok, begging the question. Good code is flexible, structured, configurable, succinct, easy to maintain, and free of obvious bugs. (As no one is perfect, no code produced by one person can be completely bug-free). So that's the ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/measuring-the-greatness-of-programmers/ No money to buy colouring books for your child? Go to Sesame Workshop Coloring Pages. But I'm sure I don't need to tell you to print them out at home and not at the office. http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/free-colouring-pages/ Jim Collins presents his findings on how some companies are able to transform themselves from mediocrity to sustained greatness. The following is not a summary of his book but excerpts that I find most interesting and relevant. Chapter 1: Good is the Enemy of Great The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/good-to-great-why-some-companies-make-the-leap-and-others-dont-by-jim-collins/ I tried out alternatives to Firefox 3.0 but it looks like Firefox is the only one for me, for now. Google Reader doesn't work on Opera 9.50, which is a shame. I hope Google fixes this soon. It's a great browser. Safari 3.1.2 for Windows doesn't have a new tab button, and ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/why-im-not-using-opera-or-safari/ It's not what you drive, it's how you drive it: http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/its-not-what-you-drive/ Parenting tips! You heard right. Instead of C#, ASP.NET, Javascript blah blah blah I'm wandering into a topic extensively covered by mommybloggers BabyBooned, Phantasma, Ummi Sa'eed and of course the one and only One Plus One Is Two. (Come on folks. Big round of applause for our mommybloggers!) So here goes. Your ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/parenting-tips/ A Seinfeld episode has already covered this, but here I'm offering a solution. Walking along the hallway at the office you see a colleague whom you don't know that well. Both of you smile and say hi. During lunchtime you see him again, and both of you smile and nod at ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/how-not-to-say-hi-repeatedly/ About 2 years ago I started experimenting with using divs instead of tables. The layout would look good in FF, but not in IE; and when I fix it for IE, it would break in FF. It drove me nuts. Since then I've picked up a few CSS hacks, but I ... http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/blog/cross-browser-compatibility/