One day each year we celebrate Mother Earth! (but the rest of the year…)
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<picture> but <img srcset> too, which is a close cousin and useful when swapping sources with media queries alone would suck.Direct Link to Article — Permalink
Picturefill 2 is a post from CSS-Tricks
]]>This past December Alex St. Pe was admitted to the 2014 Duke University Global Policy and Governance Program in the Environment, Energy, and Economics track. As part of the program, Alex will participate in a five-day intensive course this summer in Geneva and placed in an environment, energy, and economic policy-related internship.
Given her experience and research interests in offshore wind energy science and policy, Alex has been selected to intern with the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe (UNECE) Sustainable Energy Division. This June - August, Alex will be interning at their office in Geneva, assisting with preparation for the 2014 meetings of the Committee on Sustainable Energy, particularly with the Group of Experts on Renewable Energy. Alex will also conduct research and draft studies related to sustainable energy sources, particularly offshore wind. Alex is looking forward to gaining international insight for her Ph.D. research and working amongst inspiring renewable energy leaders from around the world!
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One day each year we celebrate Mother Earth! (but the rest of the year…)
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First it was the tragic loss of Malaysian flight 370 that spawned a marathon of media madness and speculation.
Now, the news is filled with another disaster: a South Korean ferry with 476 people on board sunk into the ocean last week.
Around the globe people are gripped by these stories of woe. Why?
Matt Lewis ponders the primal attraction of such disasters.
When large scale tragedies happen, how do we react? What does how we react say about us?
Using the Malaysia Flight 370 story he suggests it is natural that disasters would fascinate us. What is of concern is when they are presented like a box office hit rather than a sad reality.
With weeks of airtime to fill, the media has gone on flights of fancy…entertaining wild speculation to explain the mystery of its disappearance.
And people seem to be eating it up.
Unlike Malaysian airplane saga, the media covering the ferry disaster have living actors to blame.
The captain and crew have been accused of crimes “akin to murder” in the words of South Korean President Park Geun-hye. A serious charge.
The captain apologized to the whole nation for his actions. He will still face justice, and rightfully so. But are the captain and crew really “murderers,” and how productive is it use this language when there was no malicious intent?
There are things to learn from such events: how to improve our transportation infrastructure, how to decrease the ability for human error.
However, we’d prefer our news reports to be without wild speculation and unfounded language…with the privacy of the victims’ families being a central concern.
Unfortunately, it seems sober analysis is often a casualty of disaster coverage.
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Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector.
UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.
Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector.
UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.
If you're building an icon system for a site, you have some options. If you know the icons need to be raster images, then you'll likely be using CSS sprites. If the icons will be vector images (much more common these days), you have some options. Two of those options are using inline SVG and using icon fonts.
Let's compare.
There are big advantages to vector icons: resizable up and down without losing quality, extra sharp on retina displays, and small file size among them.
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
| Browsers consider it text, so the icons are anti-aliased as such. Can lead to icons not being as sharp as you might expect. | Straight up vector |
In a recent personal example, while converting some icons from fonts to SVG on CodePen, some of the font icons were noticeably less sharp than the ones I converted over.
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
You can control the size (via font-size), color, shadows, rotation, etc. via CSS.
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You have all the same CSS control as with a font, but better, because you can 1) control individual parts of a multi-part icon and 2) use SVG-specific CSS like stroke properties. |
The big win for inline SVG here is probably multi-color icons.
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
It can be frustrating to position a font icon. The icons are inserted via pseudo element, and it depends on line-height, vertical-align, letter-spacing, word-spacing, how the font glyph is designed (does it naturally have space around it? does it have kerning information?). Then the pseudo elements display type affects if those properties have an effect or not.
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SVG just is the size that it is. |
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
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An icon font might fail because 1) it's being loaded cross-domain without the proper CORS headers and Firefox doesn't like that 2) for any reason, the font file fails to load (network hiccup, server failure, etc) 3) There is some weird Chrome bug that dumps the @font-face and shows a fallback font instead 4) Surprising browser doesn't support @font-face. Font failures are pretty common for a variety of reasons. |
Inline SVG is right in the document. If the browser supports it, it displays it. |
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
To use responsibly, you're injecting the icon via a pseudo element on an (empty) <span>. Either bad or no semantics, depending on how you feel about that kind of thing.
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Icons are little images. The semantics of <svg> says "I'm an image." Seems better to me.
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| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
| You have to be quite careful with icon fonts to make sure you do it in an accessible way. You should basically do everything in this article. You're always fighting to make sure that the icon itself isn't read (but something else is) and that hard-to-detect fail states are handled. |
I'm no expert, but research suggests using the proper combination of elements and attributes (<title>, <desc>, and aria-labelledby) you can convey good information across the browser specturm. Plus no weird fail states.
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| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
| Using a pre-created icon font was never particularly responsible (too many unused icons). Creating your own icon font was never overly comfortable. I think the best were Pictos Server (limited to Pictos icons) and IcoMoon (free login to save projects). Fontello has an API I didn't see it used to make a good build tool. | The inline SVG system is easier because you can do it all by hand if needed. Or use a tool like IcoMoon (exports either way). Or use a build tool. |
| Icon Font | Inline SVG |
|---|---|
| Very deep. Even IE 6. | Decent, but problems are IE 8- and Android 2.3-. Fallbacks doable but not wonderful. |
It all comes down to browser support. If you can go IE 9+ / Android 3+, inline SVG is better at pretty much everything than icon fonts. If you need the deeper browser support, I feel like an inline SVG fallback would be too big of a pain to be worth it (maintaining a PNG copy, inserting an additional element to display PNG version, hiding SVG element... it's weighty).
Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts [CAGEMATCH] is a post from CSS-Tricks
]]>I try to learn something new every day. It might relate to personal finances, physical health, computer programming, or any other topic — and the learning might take place for a few minutes or from sunrise to sunset. Every time I learn something, I typically observe a corresponding increase in my quality of life. This is why I believe it’s so critical to establish learning as a lifelong skill.
Everyone has a natural fear of the unknown, which can be a huge driver of stress: Am I saving enough money? Should my car be making that noise? Am I doing this exercise correctly? Is there a better way to write this code I’m working on?
A lack of information can make the world feel like it’s closing in.
Free trial on Treehouse: Do you want to learn more about web design and development? Click here to try a free 14-day trial on Treehouse.
A few years ago I had a fairly thin physique, I ate terribly, and I lived a very sedentary lifestyle. I decided I needed to take control of my health, but the idea of a signing up for a gym membership and completely changing my diet was extremely overwhelming.
When I started exercising, I didn’t even know the difference between a rep and a set. It sounds absurd to be afraid of entering a building that contains exercise equipment, but I was terrified. My total lack of knowledge made me feel like I would either embarrass myself, hurt myself, or both. It’s two years later, and I’m now in the best physical shape of my life. I’ve gained about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) in muscle mass, I eat a much better diet, and I lift weights three days a week.
The first year I wasted a lot of time and didn’t see any real results. I decided to take the “head first” approach and just start running on a treadmill at the gym. The running wasn’t all bad; it helped me get over some anxiety and get used to going to the gym consistently. Looking back, though, I should have started my journey with a few weeks of learning. As soon as I picked up a book, read some blog posts, and watched some videos about working out, I finally started to see real change.
Lifting weights at the gym for the first time was scary, but I was able to conquer my fear by learning how to do it properly. (Photo from Flickr user midiman)
Now, before I go to the gym, I’ll spend about 10 minutes reading or watching videos on the web. Just six months ago, I was doing squats and deadlifts in cushioned running shoes. I would have thought that somewhere along the way a book would have pointed out this common mistake to me.
Instead, it was during one of my 10-minute learning sessions that a video emphasized the importance of keeping your feet as close to the ground as possible by wearing the proper shoes. This simple change increased my balance and helped me break through a plateau almost immediately. It seems so obvious in hindsight. But you don’t know what you don’t know, which is why it’s so important to always continue learning.
I’ve always been a huge fan of video games. I love this hobby so much that I decided to start a big multi-year side project to make a game of my own. If you’re not familiar, writing game code (I’m using C# in Unity) is very different from writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and many of the other web languages we teach on Treehouse. It’s a different programming environment with different paradigms.
I keep this small plaque hanging in my kitchen. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still have left to learn.
I also want to make my game work with VR (virtual reality) hardware like the Oculus Rift, which adds a time pressure: The clock is ticking, and I need to work quickly before the market is saturated. At first glance, it seems crazy to spend any of that time learning. Why hit the books when I can instead draw upon my previous programming experience and dive right into the work?
Wasting time at the gym made me learn an important lesson: Learning is not a luxury. Rather, learning is a necessity that should be built in from the onset of any project. Learning is work, just like other seemingly ancillary prototypical project phases, like testing and QA. If you don’t continuously spend time sharpening your skills, then eventually they will become dull, and other competition in the tech jungle will eat you for lunch.
In a previous post about coding tips, I touched on this idea briefly:
When you’re crunching between one deadline and the next, learning can feel like a luxury. A programmer who isn’t learning, however, is just treading water. Almost every time I learn something new, it helps me work faster and more efficiently.
This idea has carried over into my game development hobby. For the first two months, almost all my free time was spent learning about game development. I absorbed as much as I could about best programming practices, how to build a solid asset pipeline, how to create engaging gameplay, and more.
Just like when I go to the gym, I start my coding sessions with about 10 minutes of learning. In those little 10-minute sessions, I often pick up a new tip that saves me hours of work. I also have a month-by-month plan for my game and, midway through, I’ve planned a month where I’ll do nothing but learning again. It might seem extravagant, especially when there’s a key market window I want to hit, but I feel confident that I’ll save more time than I’ll actually spend learning.
It’s simple: Learning saves time, and time is the most precious resource available. We all have a limited life to lead, so it’s important to make the best of it. If you don’t maintain your mind, it will eventually fall apart, just like your personal finances, your car, or your body. So feed your curiosity and make it a habit to learn something new every single day. You never know what you might discover.
The post Learning, Every Day appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
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