oDesk Making Freelancing Easier

We all like it when companies pay you for doing what you do everyday. This is what oDesk. is doing lately. They have changed the way their freelancing process works - which means you can now pick more than 5 jobs at a time. These are good paying tasks that any self-respecting software person out there can do.

The even have videos to show you how to get started. I thought I should post it here because in the last couple of weeks, I've been seeing lots of traffic to this blog - all looking for information on getting started with oDesk.

If however, you already know how their new system works, you may also want to check out Hubpages as well. I've only spent a few months on and off getting to know the site well.

Which ever works for you, please leave a comment below and would like to know your thoughts.

Anyway, I recently got a notification that 21st Century C has been released. As a former C programmer, I thought I should get a copy.

This book is ok, it does not present any thing new other than talk about different approach you could take today to solve the problems you had decades ago. C has not changed, but programming techniques, technology and design patterns have evolved - so that's basically what this book is all about. One thing though that this book has going for it is the POSIX standard that its used through out.

So, if you are looking to brush up your C experience, you might find this book quite useful. And writing C code that is portable across many different platforms will not be an issue because this book focuses on standard C.

Simple XML Processing with DOM and SAX

It's been a while since I last had any need to process XML on the browser. Most of my processing of late has been on the server side which takes care of all the necessary work.

So, this evening, it was nice when I one of the Django application I have been working on required a fair amount of XML processing. In an effort to move some of the load to the client, I have decided that some of the job should only be performed when the require it.

What the application does is that it uses Geo and IP-mapping to detect where the visitor is and then provide them with the appropriate XML. The next stage is to  process that XML. So, to give you a very simple of how that XML is processed, I have included here both the XML and the DOM script for it.

 var doc = null;

function loadXML() {
    doc = document.getElementById("XMLIsland")
}

function DoIt() {
   var output = ""
   var records = doc.documentElement.childNodes;
   for ( var i = 0; i < records.length; i++ ) {
      townName = records.item(i).firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
      tempValue = records.item(i).lastChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
      output += "
Temperature in " + townName + " is " + tempValue;
   }
   document.getElementById("output").innerHTML = output;
}

I'm not sure why blogger is deciding to strip out all the formatting in my code above. But will fix it and try to show the code in full. It would be nice to show how you too could move some of your backend processing to the client.

As it turned out, the stripping of HTML tags is also happening o my JRoller page as well - where I originally attempted to post this blog.

Will update it when I find a solution.