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50 Killer Apps for your USB

These free apps don't require any installation. With portable applications, all you have to do is plug in your USB and run the program without the hassle of installing the program or leaving traces behind. If you like these portable apps, many of them also have an installer allowing you to install the program on your computer for more speed and accessibility.

How to Choose a Computer

Buying a new computer can be an overwhelming task for anyone. But finding the computer that is right for you doesn't have to be hard. You just have to think about what you want the computer to do. Does it have to be portable? Is it just going to be used for homework? Are you a big gamer? This all factors into what type of computer suits you best.

Pirates In Space!

Recently, pirated software as well as the sites that host them have been receiving a lot of criticism for their "lack of morals." The entertainment industry is attempting to stop any and all of the countless torrent sites littering the internet, but to no avail. The most famous (or infamous) and well known website distributing pirated software is The Pirate Bay.

The entertainment industry has been chasing The Pirate Bay for a long time with little to show for their efforts. Although they have won numerous lawsuits opposing what the site is doing, the industry isn't even close to removing the site from existence. The Pirate Bay almost seems impervious to any attempts to get even close.

Tables != Layout

Tables exist in HTML for one reason and one reason only: To display tabular data. That's it. Then border="0" came along and made it possible to make a table to organize data without being able to see the table itself. Which then led to tables being used to lay everything out on all beginner websites and even some professional websites. The time has come for this to stop. Professional websites are now designed in a way that makes the website more flexible and more functional, not to mention the massive increase in the readability of the code. Still on the edge? Let me change that for you.

Qualities of Good Code

Although knowing how to program is obviously the most important quality of being a comptuer scientist, code architecture follows closely behind. The quality of underlying code will have a great impact on the reliability, scalability, security, extensibility, and maintainability of your program. Basically, without good code architecture, you will run into many problems down the road.

Self Repairing Solar Panels

With the goal of transferring the world's energy demands to renewable sources quickly becoming more and more essential to the existence of the human race, scientists at MIT are focusing on creating revolutionary, super-efficient solar panels to harness the sun's power. But there is something extraordinary about these solar panels. They have the uncanny ability to repair themselves.

Lingodroids

Its one thing for a robot to be programmed to understand Japanese or English or any other language that already exists. But it quite a feat for two robots to develop their own language and be able to communicate with each other like these two have.

Created by Ruth Shultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, each of these Lingodroids have developed a specialized language for the sole purpose of navigating their way around obstacles and recognizing where they are.

Less - CSS Preprocessor

Everyone who calls themselves a web designer has quite a bit of experience with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely simple, including only rulesets and declarations. The only reason CSS exists is to encapsulate the elements to style and how to style them. For the newcomer, it does everything it is supposed to do, but to an experienced developer managing a dynamic website, CSS is a massive limitation on how easily values can be changed and related to one another.

Why Linux (Still) Sucks

Over the past few months, there has been a great increase in the amount of interest in open source options and that isn't limited to software. It also applies to operating systems, specifically to Linux. To Linux activists, Linux is a gift from the gods, saving humanity from the evils of Bill Gates and his cursed Windows operating system. But to everyone else, it is just another attempt by less than 1% of the market to dethrone Windows as the most effective end user operating system currently available on the market.

Ninite: The Universal Installer

Getting a virus and having to reformat your computer wouldn't be so bad if you didn't lose all of your favorite programs. But it happens to everyone. Viruses and malware troll theinternet just waiting for some unexpecting user to come by. Then they attack and there isn't much you can do about it. The virus will ravage your computer until all hope is lost and your only hope of regaining use of your computer is to reformat the computer. And every program you ever installed is gone too.

Qualities of Good Code

LESS - CSS Preprocessor

By Daniel Taylor on March 30, 2011 07:11

The feature with the most support from the public is undoubtedly the ability to declare global variables for use throughout the stylesheet. And whenever you have variables, you must also be able to operate on those variables. How many times do you write the same CSS to center a div or apply a font or round the corners of a div? WAY TOO MUCH! So what can we do to fix this?

Web browsers are programmed to only understand the rules and selectors of CSS as it is currently and there are absolutely no plans to integrate these fundamental ideas of any programming language because CSS is markup, not a programming language. So no matter what we do, we must still output CSS. We have to use a preprocessor.

There are several preprocessors available on the market, but SASS and LESS are the most notable. The purpose of these two preprocessors is to compile modified CSS into true CSS readable by browsers. This is often accomplished by either Javascript or PHP, but we will get to that later. This compiling process does take time, but can easily be well worth the few hundred milliseconds to improve both the readability and maintainability of your CSS.

So which one is right for you? Well, there is really no right answer. SASS was designed to minify current CSS by removing unnecessary markup like curly braces. LESS was designed to provide a very quick migration by keeping an extremely similar syntax to CSS. While SASS modifies CSS, LESS extends CSS. So if you are looking for a quick turnover for your website, I would recommend LESS. Because I believe LESS is more applicable to beginners, this article will focus solely on the integration of LESS into your website.

Installation

So how do you install LESS into your website? Well, there are actually several different ways to install a preprocessor like LESS. The two most frequently used variations are through PHP and Javascript. Unless you are maintaining your own server, you will most likely use Javascript. All you have to do to install LESS into any webpage is use a simple link in your head tag:

You can even use the version of LESS on the Google Code Server by replacing "scripts/less" with http://lesscss.googlecode.com/files/less-1.0.30.min.js. And that's all there is to it. Now we can convert our CSS files into LESS files by simply changing the extension to .less.

So, now that we have LESS installed, let's take a look at how LESS makes our lives simpler.

Variables

Variables are used in every single programming language ever made for a reason. They eliminate repeated values by storing them in a single place. To change a value throughout the code, you only have to change the value of that variable. In CSS, you will often see complex and length selectors just to set the color of the text.

#header, #navbar h3, #footer h3, .aside h3, #content h3 { color: red; }

This is incredibly difficult to follow, especially when you have multiple places where these long selectors occur. But this can be made much more readable using a simple variable in LESS.

@text-color: #ff0000;
#header { color: @text-color; }
#footer { color: @text-color; }
h3 { color: @text-color; }

Now, not only can you easily separate this into readable selectors, but you can now add more styles to each selector individually.

Operators

Anytime you have variables, you can bet you will also see operators or another way to relate variables to one another. Instead of adding more variables for simple variations on a single value, we can operate on that value.

@main-margin: 10px;
body { margin: @main-margin; margin-top: @main-margin + 10px; }

You can also subtract, multiply and divide values as well as colors.

Nested Rules

Nested rules can be useful for small styles, but it can easily get messy. Some people prefer to see all styles applying to a selector at once, while others would rather have everything separated out. It is all a matter of preference. Using nested rules also makes inheritance very clear and there is no scrolling up and down to find parent selectors.

#header
{
    h1
    {
        font-size: 26px;
        font-weight: bold;
    }
    p
    {
        font-size: 12px;
        a
        {
            text-decoration: none;
            &:hover { border-width: 1px }
        }
    }
}

This LESS code compiles to:

#header h1
{
    font-size: 26px;
    font-weight: bold;
}
#header p
{
    font-size: 12px;
}
#header p a
{
    text-decoration: none;
}
#header p a:hover
{
    border-width: 1px;
}

Mixins

Mixins are just a fancy way of reusing a process. They can be related closely to functions or methods in most programming languages. One of the most repeated snippets of code in any CSS3 webpage is the three lines required for rounded corners. Because not every box has corners of the same radius, these three lines are often duplicated into several classes with just the radius changed.

#header
{
    -border-radius: 5px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
    -moz-border-radius: 5px;
}
#content
{
    -border-radius: 15px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 15px;
    -moz-border-radius: 15px;
}

This example is extremely inefficient when it is duplicated just because the radius changed, but it can be improved with a little bit of LESS magic.

.rounded-corners (@radius)
{
    -border-radius: @radius;
    -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
    -moz-border-radius: @radius;
}
#header { .rounded-corners(5px); }
#content { .rounded-corners(15px); }

And this format can be applied to any set of values that refer to many different selectors.

Summary

Now you should be off and running with the new knowledge you have gathered. Hopefully you learned what preprocessors are and what they do. The Javascript version of LESS is by far the easiest version to implement. You learned how to implement variables, functions, operators, and nested rules in LESS. Take a bit of time to practice what I have shown you, then move on to the advanced topics of LESS.