Let me interrupt the stream of presentations here with a quick interlude telling you about how cool Hong Kong is. I am currently sitting here at a cafe writing this on my newest toy – an Asus eeepc which I bought for about 200 GBP the day before yesterday.

I like Hong Kong to bits, there is hardly any city that is as efficient and easily accessible. People are very proficient in English and all signs are bilingual. On the other hand you can get Bladerunner moments when you leave the neon corners and end up in a local side street with interesting food and products you have no clue about.

It is easy and cheap to get a cab should you get lost but in general there is hardly ever any need to. The underground (MTR) is easy to find with signs pointing to the nearest stations all over the shop and inside it you can see on the trains which station you came from, which direction you go and which other lines connect on an illuminated map.

The easiest way to pay for the tube is an octopus card, which is a prepaid card you get for about 10 GBP with 3 pound being a deposit you can redeem on your last day should you want to return the card. This card also enables you to buy things in shops, which can come in handy should you not want to collect a lot of change :-).

Connectivity is nuts, you’ll find free wireless in nearly every cafe or shopping centre (and boy are there a lot around here) and if you want to be 100% sure you can sign up for a 30 day access with PCCW, a massive provider who has hotspots in nearly every corner of the city.

Mobile coverage is even on the underground which means you hear people happily chatting away covering their mouth and half the mobile with their hands.

There are cashpoints on nearly every train station with no fees but the UK bank ones (cheers, Barclays) and you can pay with Visa almost everywhere without getting any strange looks.

You are also never far from clean and freely available public convenience places should you need to wash your hands or comparable tasks.

All in all it is a joy being here and with the flight and hotel being very affordable I can recommend anyone coming here, should you want to stock up on things that need batteries :-)

[tags]hongkong,hong kong,travel,transport,mobile computing,vacation,asia[/tags]

Yesterday the first ever PlugLondon event took place in the Skype offices off Tottenham Court Road in London, England. PlugLondon was the idea of Jonathan Gabbai of Ebay, Paul Amery and Antoine Bertout of Skype and me and we wanted to give London based developers a chance to show off what they have done and network in an environment devoid of HR, PR or other business lures or pressures.

The signs were bad: it was raining cats and dogs (the classic London rain that will get you from all sides and therefore is not stopable with a brolly), the tubes were overcrowded as there were also protest marches planned in the city and generally the westend was packed with shoppers trying to get their christmas presents.

Nevertheless about 40-50 people showed up and we consumed the pizza and drinks provided before heading off to the Bricklayer’s Arms for some more drinks.

So far all I heard was good feedback and some very good suggestions how to move the event forward. We’ll see what we can do for the next one, but I guess we’ll wait a while till the weather is better and people came back from holidays. I personally am off to a 8 day trip to Hongkong on Tuesday.

• Check the PlugLondon photos
• See other blogposts about pluglondon on technorati

[tags]pluglondon,unconference,london,uk,england,developers[/tags]

This is one of my talks at the Yahoo! Frontend Engineering summit in London and it deals with the options of cutting down the size of the YUI library components. There have been many articles and posts about this subject already but none really explained the idea of using YAHOO_config to load components on demand instead of using the YUI loader.

This is also the trick I used to create the unobtrusive flickr badge v2.

[tags]yahoof2elondon07,webdevelopmentsummit,yahoo,yui,javascript,lazyload,widgets,badges,performance,speed,webdevtrick[/tags]

It is quite cool to see that your feedback is being implemented in something as big as the YUI. With every release the team excels itself building new components but also fixing and changing the existing ones.

Part of my job is to test the YUI for the European market (as we by default develop in 5 languages and encounter totally different issues) and in Asia (oh well, obvious that there are differences) and I am happy to say that all the problems we found got fixed and several of our suggestions implemented in this release.

While a lot of this is under the hood you can also see some new components in the 2.4.0 release:

• Probably the most anticipated step is YUI getting a jQuery style CSS selector engine which allows you to quickly access the document without having how to traverse the Dom with native functions.
• For those who need to work with numerical data a lot, the YUI now has a Flash charts component which allows you to create fancy pies and graphs easy
• The new get utility is not the same as YAHOO.Dom.Get() but allows you to load scripts and CSS on demand after the page has been rendered by creating new nodes and having control over what has been loaded. This is quite handy in terms of page performances and I waxed lyrical over that in the past.
• Those who love to take your Script to the garage and give them an intensive test-run will love the new Profiler which profiles JS in a browser environment
• And last but not least we finally proclaimed our undying love to the JSON format by adding a new JSON component that allows you to stringify and validate JSON you retrieve either with dynamic script nodes or AJAX.

Again, under the hood, there are a lot of changes you cannot see but result in much better performance, especially in the DragDrop and the Rich Text Editor Control.

• Get YUI 2.4.0
• Full coverage on the YUI blog

[tags]YUI,libraries,upgrade,news,json,selectorengine,flashcharts,charting,profiling[/tags]

No, I am not talking about last year’s elf yourself viral pest, but about being an Excellent Learning Facilitator or ELF. This is a training for trainers which turns a lot of your beliefs about teaching and training inside out and by doing so makes you a much better trainer. I normally don’t talk about personal stuff here, so sorry if you expected another JS posts, but I really wanted to talk about this as I think a lot more people should go for it and I am proud to have pulled it off.

The ELF course is held by the UK company Matrix42 and has a lot of cool benefits:

The ELF courses are mapped to the National Occupational Standards for Learning and Development
The Bronze assessment is accepted as evidence of competence for professional membership of the Institute of IT training, as recognised by OCR at Level 3 equivalence on the National Qualifications framework
It is also one of a few qualifications to be endorsed by the British Computer Society (BSC) against their ACTT qualification which is a level 4 qualification on the National Qualifications framework

Beats me what a lot of that means but what I took away from the course is basically that it:

• teaches you how to make learners find solutions themselves instead of listening to you (thus remembering a lot more)
• makes you aware of the different kind of learners and how information should be conveyed to them to be easy to take in and to stick
• teaches you to plan a full learning event and sessions in those to be as useful as possible for the participants
• makes you aware that you can teach really complex technical courses without computers or monkeying about in front of a powerpoint.

My personal win was to get away from the speaker that I normally am and switch to trainer when I need to. Not everybody who gives public speeches and writes books is also a good trainer, actually it is quite a step from one to the other and you need to set a massive switch in your head.

In my case I messed up my first practical test exactly for that reason: I was more of a presenter than a trainer which made me rush participants. Silence is not a problem and if neither you nor participants in a training talk this does not mean nothing happens. In the heads of the participants there is a lot going on. I changed my pace and stance and voila, the second time I passed with flying colours.

Anyways, I am proud to be an ELF, and I will try my best to use this new approach and ideas as soon as I can bag another workshop or longer training session.

• More info about what an ELF is in comparison to a destructive trainer or Goblin
• Check your own level of knowledge as a trainer

[tags]training,trainer,ELF,excellent learning facilitator,teaching,training,learning,BCS[/tags]