22 April 2011
MPICT
I now represent Foothill on the Regional Leadership Council at MPICT, the Mid Pacific Information and Communications Technology Center. MPICT is funded by the NSF to support ICT educators in this region of the country. MPICT holds conferences where we can learn new skills, connects us with industry, and conducts thorough surveys of the California job market for technicians in the ICT field.

In a survey of the job boards for companies hiring ICT workers, MPICT found 2800 jobs postings with 1900 job descriptions. In other words, it is a chaotic system with no clear set of skills that a student could learn in order to get a certain job. Our advisor from IBM actually wants to use Watson to analyze these job postings!

The other piece of interesting information is that statewide, community colleges transfer more students to the University of Phoenix then they do to California State Universities.


26 April 2011
HTML 5 and browsers: Community Night
Hosted by Microsoft in Mountain View

Doris Chen at Microsoft
TEK Systems, Tab Atkins on Google Chrome team

Interesting statistic: 58% of the average user's time spent on their desktop computer is spent in the browser.
WebGL: A graphics library that extends the capability of JavaScript to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics.
Websocket : push/pull without full http requests, but you need a special server for it.
Eventsource: similar to websocket, but doesn't require a special server.
Animations must regularly yield to browser with settimeout(), but
Requestanimationframe() does it for you – better.
Elements can have draggable attributes set to true.
Gradients : CSS feature that currenlty requires prefixes.
Prefixes allows browsers to experiment with a new feature.
Variables and mixins in css coming soon.

Two events for learning HTML5 are coming up next month:
1) sfbayacm.org for HTML 5 workshop
2) web camp 20,21 May at MS. Http://bit.ly/gvpCmA. HTML 5 and web development

Giorgio Sardo from MS IE 9
Microsoft believes HTML5 is the future of the web
"Expression web super preview" renders a page on multiple browsers.
SVG allows you to animate and so interact with video.
HTML 5 is made up by W3C, IETF, Ecmascript.
Html5 spec is at last call!
IndexedDB Instead of SQL
Mediacaptureapi
Video tag doesn't allow you to run it full screen NOW

Websites to check out:
Beautyoftheweb.com.
Xanthir.com/blog
Oreilly.com/go/Ugebook
IeTestdrive.com
html5labs.com
http://sound-weaver.appspot.com
http://soundweaver.info/