Busy day of seminars

I spent yesterday taking part in Microsoft Canada's TechNet Winter Tour 2005, which was here in Calgary. Pretty interesting stuff, but it was the seminar was about MS server family and security issues related to this. Being a developer, most of the topics covered were not related to the work that I do, although I did learn more about MS Virtual Server. Plus, I got a t-shirt & some demo software... Then, last night I again went to the CAMUG (Calgary Agile Methods User Group) meeting where the discussion was about how all the various stages in development, from design to testing, compliment each other when using agile methods for software development. As a bonus, on of the speakers was from ThoughtWorks, and as I have an interview with the company next week, it is nice to glean a little bit more information about the culture of the company.

The other big thing that I've done in the past couple of weeks was to revamp my personal website, which I had not done any serious work on for more than a year. I used a template from Dreamweaver for it, being too lazy to really want to think out a whole new layout scheme in CSS for it, but I heavily modified both the webpage and the underlying CSS file. Also, I managed to get it put together well enough to validate for the W3C XHTML 1.0 standardization GIF, having to modify some of Dreamweaver's pre-installed assumptions. Personally, I believe that all browsers should conform to the W3C standards - the internet needs a strong common base for webpages to be universally accessible and the responsibility of this universality should not rest on the shoulders of the developers to micro-manage their code for different browsers.

Nevertheless, after confirming that my personal website was ok, I went to the Iconic Solutions site and checked there. I found that I had to make some changes to the rounded corners control that I had found from the 4 Guys From Rolla, who did not include "Alt" variable that is required in XHTML 1.0. Almost got the whole site, but the I have yet to figure out how to get the Calgary weather flash applet that I found on the City of Calgary's website to be coded correctly in XHTML. Oh well, something to work on...