I need help. I’m looking to expand my horizons, learn something new and generally make positive and decisive steps to being less ignorant. I’d be most grateful, if you could help me, dear reader, by pointing out interesting and useful resources out there.

The topics are not really important. I may be biased to deepening my knowledge of history and design, but every topic and more importantly, every resource is a good one as long as you personally find it interesting and it’s accessible to neophytes.

There is an exception to this. Resources about software and software development should be avoided unless they cover the field from a completely original point of view or were created by an author, who is raving mad. I’d prefer both, but later requirement probably already includes former.

I don’t care about the form either as long as it’s fairly accessible. Books, blogs, podcasts, movies etc. are all fair game, but conferences with couple of thousand dollars entrance fees (or organized in USA) aren’t.

I fairly often talk to developers with disdain for Javascript. I don’t blame them, since I used to share it. There are various reasons for it, some more valid than others, but one that almost never comes up is the very thing that bothers me most.

I was reading about features promised for Javascript 1.7 which should be a part of Firefox 2.0 and I like lots of them. How wouldn’t I when only few of them can’t be found in Python.

The thing is, most of the time I have almost absolute control of which version of Python, Java or what have you I’ll use. But when your code lives inside of a browser, you’re pretty much stuck with what’s out there and if my experience is anything to go by then I won’t be using new features widely before next decade.

Who wants to wait that long?

Heat is gone, work isn’t, but I still found time to have fun while shamelessly copying other people ideas.

The result:

It’s a simple widget for displaying two randomly chosen pictures with a given tag out of up to a hundred.

The widget was successfully tested in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and Opera 9.0. It only sort of works in Safari, but if this is good enough for you, you can add it to your own page by inserting:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://markos.gaivo.net/marela/doublerandom.js?username=markos&tag=moja-izbira&time=2"></script>

You should, however, replace:

• my username (markos) with yours
• select a tag of your chosing
• set time lag in seconds between image replacements

I’m not quite happy with it yet. I’d like to fix Safari support and my code for avoiding two same images is still buggy. If you’d like to use the latest known working version, then use the link to my page. Otherwise you’re free to copy the contents of script’s directory.

And if you’re reading this post on the front page, you’ve might have noticed that there are no problems in using both widgets on the same page.