Welcome
The Nomad blog is where we share news of our projects, thoughts on web development and a weekly round up of things on the Internet that have caught our eye - Tales from the Internet
Tag Cloud
2011 accessibility adobe shadow agencies amazon apple arduino backups bears blog boo book review browsers business cablegate captcha charity clients code igniter code snippets community conference contracting cooperation csharp css css3 development dojo dyson eeuk expression engine free full frontal gaming git honey pots html5 installation internet internet explorer ipad iphone java javascript jquery linux little printer ludum dare micro frameworks mobile mono monotouch multi-touch mvc news nomad opengl organic osx passwords performance php process pseudo selectors rdf recovery remote repository responsive design review s3 security seo silverstripe spam spime sublime text 2 svn technology tfi tools trust truth underscore url shortening usability version control wii wikileaks windows
Latest posts
Ludum Dare
It's supposed to be a new TFI this week (and last week (and the week before)) but I've been a little too busy of late to put it together. My excuse this week is that I'm doing Ludum Dare this weekend and have been mainly focusing on prep work for that - by that I mean making sure I've got the tools for the job, the fuel for the job and enough rations that I don't have to leave the house until monday. Everything is ready and I'm all set to get started. I've set up a new Tumblr account so you can follow my progress.
MonoTouch and OpenGL: Part 2 Rendering Images
Last time I talked about MonoTouch and getting started with OpenGL development on the iPhone. We got as far as preparing OpenGL for 2D development by setting up our view port size and co-ordinate space.
MonoTouch and OpenGL
Recently I've been working a lot with MonoTouch from Xamarin and OpenGL ES, or rather the OpenTK bindings that come with MonoTouch.
Full Frontal 2011
There was a contest after Full Frontal to write a blog post about the conference and be in with a chance to win a couple of tickets for next year's event. The deadline was the end of November so I may have missed that… Full Frontal had an interesting line up and venue – the ever good Duke of Yorks cinema in Brighton who provided free coffee and pastry treats throughout the day. Fruit was provided by Prem at Dharma Fly which is a nice touch for a conference of geeks. Prem also hosts the fortnightly AsyncJS meet up, which is worth checking out if you're ever in Brighton.
Blocking Spam Comments Using a Honey Pot
Everyone who uses the internet is familiar with spam and the problems it causes. Most people's familiarity is through its intrusion on email, but since running the Nomad site we've had to deal with a lot of comment spam. It goes in phases but we receive something like 10 to 20 spam comments per week all of which get flagged so don't appear on the site.
OO Programming
Recently at Nomad we were talking about Object Oriented Programming and I ended up going on for a bit. So what follows is an expansion of the email conversation we had, including the crab and sheep related example. It's mostly in C# with some PHP thrown in and a brief splash of Java. If you squint hard enough they all look the same.
An MVC Approach to Table Sorting
Sorting data is a useful feature for tabular data in any web app. This is much easier to do if you separate the underlying data from the HTML of the table. The simplest way to achieve this is to take an Model View Controller approach (or MV in our case as we won't need a controller) utilising the observer programming pattern. This will allow us to decouple the data (model) from the table (view). All the view really needs to know is what the data contains and when it changes, not how it was changed.
Looping for Performance in JavaScript
Recently for a project I've been working on I came across some JavaScript code written like this:
Dojo and Micro Frameworks
Recently I've been doing a lot of JavaScript, which has been a nice change from PHP. I've taken a new interest in the outbreak of the myriad Micro JS formats which have become available but I've mainly been working with Dojo.
Open Data and the Semantic Web
Lately I've been looking at the semantic web and the different approaches being taken. I firmly believe that not only is the web improved by every person on it (YouTube commenters not withstanding) but it is improved by every single computer which understands what we're saying about ourselves.
