Previously I’ve talked about reversing text with CSS by simply setting a few CSS attributes. Today we will try another trick: turning text upside down. It’s actually possible using a simple CSS property and works cross-browser today.

The JCP has long come under fire for the insularity and high fees associated with its process. In this report from a QCon panel on open standards development, new executive committee member Rod Johnson explains why he decided to join the organization he once "likened to a commissar in Soviet Russia." Other panelists quoted include Bill Venners, Cay Horstmann, and Michael Van Riper.

There are many untold stories in the world today. From saving lives to sacrificing your self for the greater good. Stories are past down from generation to generation and I want to make sure there is another story that is told to every programmer in the world. It is the story of those who write perfect code.

Something was brought to my attention which, to say the least, left me a little baffled: IE 6 is coming to mobile phones...

Few words on UML class diagrams i.e. why this kind of UML diagrams are worthless.

When I review web sites, and also in my own projects with a number of different team members, I almost constantly stumble across something web developers should really refrain from: inline styling and inline JavaScript code.

One of the best aspects of living in the Bay Area is bumping into all sorts of interesting computer folks. Today I’m working from a coffee shop and bumped into Tantek Çelik, CSS and Microformats man. He pointed me to a fabulous blog series introducing Microformats and all the major formats for a more lay-person audience, created by Emily Lewis:

The purchase of BEA left many of us wondering what would happen with the products that both companies (BEA and Oracle) shared.

This is a step by step guide which shows how you can write an OpenID Authenticator for Tomact

Miško Hevery open sources Google's Guide to Writing Testable Code.

There were a number of comments about my recent article on the negative effects of too much database normalization so allow me to expand the topic a little more. The most consistent comment I saw was that while many of you agreed with me in principle that too much normalization can lead to poor performance, the country name example was a bad choice. As a former teacher, I tend to choose illustrative examples that are easy to understand and explain. As a blog writer, I also tend to forget the web is full of nitpickers that will argue with you unless presented with a concrete example from the real world.

The Opera Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) is an incredible tool and Opera recently released some details on this, called MAMA for short, and some of the findings they have managed to gather using MAMA. Zone Leader Schalk Neethling sat down with Brian Wilson, QA Engineer at Opera Software, to learn more about MAMA.

Sam Ruby is always worth reading; today his Half Full took me on a (rare) visit to HTML5-land. Among the many things I feel guilty about, not having the strength to follow HTML5 is prominent. Ian Hickson and his posse have repeatedly proved that they can effortlessly overrun my input buffer; I wonder how W3C stalwarts like Dan Connolly are holding up under the strain?

In the main (trunk) branch, there are two cardinal rules: Never check in anything that breaks the build, and never check in an unfinished feature. The main branch should always be in a state where it’s ready for release. Features have been entirely added or don’t exist yet; complete changes have been made, or not even started.

I spoke on a panel at Mashup Camp this week on why Ajax Standards matter. I was quoted by Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise as saying that we are locked in a struggle for the soul of the web, so I thought I would expand on that theme.

I was snagging some icons to go into a comp of a Silverlight LOB application today when I realized that some of the metaphors used in the software we’re refacing (Silverlight front-end to an existing LOB application), just don’t hold anymore.

This post give you a insight view of various PHP frameworks.....when should you use it ...which is suitable for you etc.

Simple tips on making your HTML or Ajax application more accessible.

Article on using WebSockets, and Server Sent Events proposed in HTML 5 specifications to build real time apps

Asynchronous I/O support in JDK 7.

For several years we have been hearing requests from you for a fix for the class loader problem, 4670071, in which custom class loaders can deadlock. We recognize this is an important issue for many of our customers and apologize for how long it has taken us to find a solution.

The Java Persistence 2.0 Public Draft is scheduled to be released this week, so I thought it would be a good time to review some of the new features that you can expect to find. If you're familiar with the first draft of the JPA 2.0 specification (the Early Draft), you know that it focused primarily on the area of O/R mapping improvements. The Public Draft builds on these improvements, and provides ways to leverage them through extensions to the Java Persistence Query Language and through the new Criteria API.

If you haven't seen Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I invite you to read those. I'm really excited about the amount of response I have received on these posts and I really think something good can come out of this. The only problem thus far is I have received an email from 1 person wanting to join the project. I can't do this alone and I can't do it with 2 people. For this to work I really need more participation on the actual project so if you would like to help in any way please send me a gmail address to gdboling AT you know the rest.

Why the sudden interest in Java? Because Java memory model is very relevant to C++0x. The keyword here is sequential consistency. Java enforces sequential consistency on all access to volatile variables. C++0x introduces atomic objects which, by default, also follow sequential consistency. So C++ atomics will, by default, behave almost exactly like Java volatile variables.

Roy Fielding recently wrote in "REST APIs must be hypertext-driven" I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API. Today's example is the SocialSite REST API. That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating. That was pretty much my thought when I saw that spec. In a comment to his post he continues. The OpenSocial RESTful protocol is not RESTful. It could be made so with some relatively small changes, but right now it is just wrapping RPC results in common Web media types. That also has been exactly what struck me about that protocol when I looked at it.