How to

Fascinating -- from www.edwardtufte.com, in the section where he criticizes the PowerPoint culture at NASA that contributed to the Columbia disaster in 2001.

"How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

-- William A. Wood (email), September 8, 2005"

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs: "With all of the attention that monads get, why am I writing yet another explanation of monads?� Not to compare them to some everyday occurrence or to chronicle my journey to understanding.� I explain monads because I need monads.� They elegantly solve programming problems in a number of languages and contexts."

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts

Looks a little complicated, but they claim it'll be easy peasy by the end of the article.

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts: "We’re already familiar with the 12- and 16-column variants of 960.gs, but did you know that a 24-column alternative exists too? In this article, you’ll master the 960 grid system by dissecting the 24-column version demo. If you’ve only used 960gs before for Photoshop mockups, consider this your lucky day. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to convert your designs to HTML and CSS in no time at all."

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia: "... what if $(document).ready() is slowing you down? In this post, I’m going show you specific instances where postponing startup code until the document’s ready event slows perceived page load time, could leave your UI needlessly unresponsive, and even causes initialization code to run slower than necessary."

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald

Who knew? Fiddler Web Debugger - Useful Extensions

This one is particularly cool:

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald: "This Fiddler extension generates C# or VB.NET code to duplicate a web request. �You simply drag one or more Fiddler sessions into the newly created “Code” tab and the extension will produce appropriate code that you can copy and paste into your program that reproduces those requests."

There's also this: JSON Viewer

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments: "If you've got a programming blog, chances are you'll want to post some code snippets. Posting code sounds easy but it's surprisingly tricky if you consider all the ways that people will be reading your blog. There's a number of ways. Here's a few and their pros and cons."

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery: "The explosion of JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as jQuery onto the front-end development scene has opened up the power of JavaScript to a far wider audience than ever before. It was born of the need — expressed by a crescendo of screaming by front-end developers who were fast running out of hair to pull out — to improve JavaScript’s somewhat primitive API, to make up for the lack of unified implementation across browsers and to make it more compact in its syntax."