Carl Backstrom's Blog

I just received an email that my abstract for a presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope has been accepted.

Congratulations! Your abstract, Building the New Stuff: AJAX, JSON, and APEX 3.1, has been accepted for presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008, June 15-19, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Gotta love that title!

I've never been to New Orleans so am really looking forward to going, I've been told it's my kinda city. If you have any hints / ideas of things I need to go see or do while there please drop me a line or leave a comment.

I have big plans for my session, like it working unlike my first try at Oracle World. Thanks again unconference you saved the day!

I'm not sure if there is demo grounds there or not but if there is I'll be working the APEX booth or at least circling and grabbing people for APEX demos, if there's not I'll be stalking around crowds of people doing pretty much the same thing.

See you there!!

Yup I guess it's my turn this blogtagging thing seems to have taken off, I figured it would get to me at some point , thanks John you know we have some deadlines here right ;).

1. I have a 15 year old daughter and I am 34 years , so if you do the math I started pretty young, fortunately she's much smarter and prettier than her old man, hand codes her HTML , uses the GIMP for artwork , is a cheerleader , snowboards very well, and is savvy enough to IM or call me for all her homework research needs. And if your reading this kid you better be done with your homework!!!

2. I'm a snowboarding fanatic but growing up in Southern California we didn't have that nice soft powdery snow or huge scenic bowls to people seem to like so much. What we had was big jumps and an awesome snowboard park so you'll find me doing 50/50's on the rails and getting big grabs on the table tops. Nowadays I wear a helmet but still seem to get concussed about once a season, so if you see me 5 feet in the air upside down with snowboard on my feet, just keep watching or grab a camera something bad/funny is about to happen.

3. From the age of 8-13 I lived in a windowless shack , as in windows with no glass, on the back acre of a 5 acre farm, well I got windows in when I was 10 ,happy times! The rest of my family lived in a very nice two story house but I had three sisters and they got the rooms in the house. So the answer to 'Were you born in a barn?" or "What did you live in a barn growing up?" the answer is pretty much "Yup".

4. I have a degree in Geography from San Francisco State University, and specialized in GIS and Remote Sensing. I worked for several environmental consulting firms and did things like work on the Presidio Rehabilitation , South Bay Salt Ponds, saving the California Tiger Salamander, and killing Egeria densa in the Bay Delta. I was actually a CS major for most of university and only had a 17 units to go but they were all math classes and I loath math, maybe someday I'll go back just to finish up.

5. After high school I went straight to the construction industry and was planning on doing that for a career. After a couple years on a very hot day (115 f) doing roofing in Lake Elsinore, Ca I decided ,right then and there, to go back to school. Was a waiter for 20 minutes once as well, suffice to say I don't have the temperament for it.

6. I polevaulted all through high school and college, yeah people actually hold on to a stick run full speed put the stick in a hole in the ground and hang on. Hopefully though you land in the pit (the landing pads), and not in box (the cement and metal hole you put the stick in), otherwise you'll end up with torn tendons and ankles that ache in cold weather.

7. You can tell a lot about a person by their favorite quotes....

'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...''

-- Isaac Asimov

---

He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."

-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

---

Godzilla hates infrastructure.

-- Unknown

---

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.

-- Maurice Maeterlinck

---

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

-- Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV

---

"Everything in moderation -- including moderation."

-- Harvey Steiman.

8. Every internet / web development job I've ever had in some shape or form has been from craigslist. Oracle actually hired me directly from a craigslist posting, go figure.


And there you go 8 random and hopefully interesting and educating facts about me. So looking around at some people I should tag and haven't at least posted that they have been tagged, So I have 6

Kris Rice , Tyler Muth , Sergio Leunissen, Marc Sewtz , Christian Shay , Kuassi Mensah


EDIT:

There has been a bit of a backlash on the blogtagging thing and truthfully it's not fully out of place, sometimes these things get a life of there own and get out of hand.

http://www.dizwell.net/prod/archives/57

But truthfully I like putting a personal face on things, sometimes I think we all forget there is a person/people on then end of that blog or developing/selling/marketing/researching that product and a bit of lightheartedness , especially in the beginning of the new year is not a bad thing. Sure if this happens everyday i think we will all have a big problem with it. But just once , or even once a year I think helps everybody.

My 2 cents.
Carl

Looks like something on feedburner was messed up and it put 3 weeks of the 'few' links I share/broadcast at one time.

But I do respect a good sense of humor, good job Bill.


http://view.break.com/429420 - Watch more free videos

This is one big long rant and bounces around a bit but stay with me :)

I'll admit it I'm a hypocrite when it comes to web development. I'll rant and rave about about standards compliance and the right way to do things.

http://carlback.blogspot.com/search/label/standards
http://carlback.blogspot.com/2006/11/javascript-pet-peeves-for-some-reason.html

Then I'll turn right around and use tables for layout, and add my own namespaced attributes to HTML elements and then tell people not to worry about standards mode and XHTML validation.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1138556#1138556
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2051001#2051001
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1025081#1025081
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=2271436#2271436
http://carlback.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:561667500346126206#611615600346656142

You might ask how I can do this and look myself in the mirror, especially some of you that have been on the the receiving end of the ranting, well let me tell you there are three very important reasons.

TIME , MONEY , REALITY

TIME and MONEY you never have enough, neither does your boss/company/client/etc. And you need to finish the current project you are on yesterday and get started on the next project the day before that , sound familiar ;)

Getting to 95% standards compliance is easy, that last 5% is what is the killer, and nobody even cares except some buggy W3C validator.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=736

XHTML is not the solution to a problem that concerns anybody except the guys who have to write
parsers that convert markup into DOM trees.

Building a tableless layout is all great and good. Except then you have to spend extra time and effort QA'ing because the different browsers render CSS different, or not at all (more on that later).
Even if the newest browser version renders things better if you are like most people and want to reach the biggest audience then you need to support older browsers for a long time (IE 6 is not going away anytime soon).

REALITY is the 800 pound gorilla and that gorilla's main branch to beat you over the head with is my favorite, the most useful and most ubiquitous piece of software in the world, the web browser.

It's not my fault I didn't do it.

MS did it with IE.
Netscape did it with Netscape. (RIP)
Mozila Group did it with Firefox.
Apple did with Safari.
Opera did with Opera.

And what did they do?

They are the ones that don't render things correctly and even more importantly they don't render consistently , and let me tell you the big secret, they probably never will unless they all decide to start using the same rendering engine, which isn't going to happen, and truthfully shouldn't, competition is good and will result in better browsers. Look how much better IE7 is compared to IE6 and IE 8 just passed the ACID 2 test which is huge, and the reason for these improvements because Firefox is so much better than IE, at least for now.

Don't get my wrong standards compliance is a worthy goal, but like most things in this world it's the journey not the destination that is the worthier part.

As you strive to get to 100% standards compliance your page weight goes down, your CSS gets separated out of the HTML to where it belongs. And the closer you get the easier it is but it's a never ending process, HTML 5 will be here sooner than you know it, and this will start over again.

On APEX's end we will continue to make sure the HTML we generate is as close as we can make it to XHTML compliant as we can while still supporting the widest range of browsers in the easiest way.

PS. NO!!!! YOU STILL CAN'T USE FONT TAGS ANYMORE, THAT IS TOO HYPOCRITICAL EVEN FOR ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!