The cache (pronounced "cash") is a storage space on your hard drive that holds all the files that the browser receives from web servers. This includes html files as well as graphics, sounds clips, and movies.
In order to display things as fast as possible the browser checks the cache first and if it finds the pages you are requesting it uses the files on your hard drive instead of waiting for new ones to be downloaded from the Web.
If you are a web developer this can be trouble because the browser will keep showing you the old version and not the file with the changes you have just made.
A common trick is to hold down the CTRL key when requesting a new web page. This tells the browser to bypass the cache and to get the files once again from the source. This works with IE6, IE7, FireFox and other Mozilla-based browsers.
Using FireFox about:config settings
In FireFox you can disable the cache by using the about:config page. Type about:config in the address field of Firefox.
Do a search for browser.cache and set the line set browser.cache.disk.enable to false. Restart FireFox to apply this setting.
There are many other settings you can make to FireFox in the about:config page. Here is an excellent page that highlights some popular ones. Proceed with caution however. You can really ruin things if you mess around too much and don’t know what you are doing. Make one change at a time and test it. Also, I would recommend backing up the prefs.js file if you plan to do extensive configuration changes. On XP it is located in the C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR-USER-NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOUR-CONFIG-FOLDER.default. (If everything fails just delete the prefs.js file and FireFox will create a new one with default values.)
Being a one-language programmer isn’t good enough any more. In today’s world you need to have the right “product mix” to stay in the job market. Here is a story from eWeek.com highlighting the ten most popular languages along with how many jobs are available for each based on the current jobs out on dice.com, one of the more popular tech job sites.
Java and C# rate the highest with a total of over 19,500 jobs. Keep in mind that C# is the “Java” as part of Microsoft Visual Studio. If you learnJava and you’ll be able to easily write code in either language. Another hot language to know right now is VB.NET with 2,090 jobs.
What the article doesn’t cover is the future… In the next 10 years 30-50% of the COBOL programmers in the USA are going to retire. When I first heard these numbers, several years ago, I thought that the mainframe companies would convert over to the languages that are now common on the PC platforms, but this is not proving to be the case. According to the IT people at Wells Fargo Bank, COBOL be around for a long time to come.
Chad Fowler, the author of “My Job Went to India – 52 Ways to Save Your Job” adds to this discussion. He points out that “Java and .NET programmers are a dime a dozen in India. As a .NET programmer, you may find yourself competing with tens of thousands of more people in the market than you would if you were, for example, a Python [or Ruby On Rails} programmer.” He points out that, “You don’t find mainstream Indian offshoring companies jumping on unconventional technologies. They aren’t first-movers. They generally don’t take chances.”
He recommends competing in the job market in which there is actually lower demand globally and focusing on niche technologies such as COBOL in the banking industry or Ruby-On-Rails, which is the cutting edge (right now) in web programming.
Does this mean you shouldn’t take Java or VB.NET? Not really. These languages are considered the base knowledge for today’s programmers. And, once you understand how Java and VB.NET works you can pick up other languages like Ruby On Rails much more quickly.
The key is not to focus on any particular language but to learn the concepts that are common to all programming languages. Once you have that base you can adapt quickly and easily to the changing needs of the job market, now, and in the future.
Last July, fifteen high school students participated in the first annual TechNow Programming Camp. For three days they learned how to program using a language called Alice- creating 3-D games and animated movies. Each day, during lunch, employees from the corporate sponsors, Wells Fargo Bank, James Tower, Inc., and Carlson Craft Business Solutions, joined the students and talked about career possibilities. The instructors during the summer camp were Peter Johnson, Tom Edwards from the Computer Careers department here at South Central College, North Mankato campus, and Jeff Seehafer, from GFW High School in Winthrop. The students represented several area high schools including Waseca, GFW, East, St. Clair, and Loyola.
Everyone likes free books. Here is an excellent resource being organized by Globaltext.org .
Here’s a summary from their web site:
Through what he’s dubbed, “The Global Text Project,” Rick Watson and an international team of professors aim to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering subjects typically encountered during the first two years of college. A prototype text is already complete, and work is underway on the first book in the series.
The prototype book was created in 2004 because Watson couldn’t find a comprehensive textbook for a graduate level XML programming class he was teaching. Each student was assigned to write chapter, and Watson served as editor-in-chief. The book, “XML: Managing Data Exchange” (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML), turned out so well that it is still used in classes at UGA today. Each class that uses the text makes improvements on it, leaving it in better condition than they found it.
I looked through the XML text as well as the Java text and they both are an excellent resource for my class.
It’s interesting. Last semester I had my Web III (XML) class start a Wiki as part of the learning process. The idea was to do exactly what wikibooks is doing, although I didn’t know about wikibooks back then. I was disappointed when the students simply posted information that they copied from other sources on the Web in order to complete the assignment each week. I deleted the whole thing over the summer and decided not to pursue it.
Now I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. We could focus on a specific topic and all work together using a private wiki (a wiki is a web page where a group of people can all edit the pages – wikipedia is the most famous of these.) At the end of the semester we could submit the chapter to wikibooks.
Meanwhile, you don’t have to be in a third-world country to take advantage of these textbooks. Go out and find your favorite topics and bookmark them for reference.
Thanks to Tom Edwards for sending me the link about this.
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