Not Practising What You Preach?

I have blogged about YSlow, a very nice tool from Yahoo, that gives performance indicators of your web page. Guess what? I ran it on their own page (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and found that they got 3 F's, 1 C and 1 B. Overall score was a D (62/100). A case of not practising what you preach?

Performance Grade: D (62)

B	1. Make fewer HTTP requests
F	2. Use a CDN
F	3. Add an Expires header
F	4. Gzip components
A	5. Put CSS at the top
A	6. Put JS at the bottom
A	7. Avoid CSS expressions
n/a	8. Make JS and CSS external
C	9. Reduce DNS lookups
A	10. Minify JS
A	11. Avoid redirects
A	12. Remove duplicate scripts
A	13. Configure ETags

Google Sky is up!

First google maps (earth) - http://maps.google.com, released February 8 2005,

Then google moon - http://www.google.com/moon/, released July 2005,

Then google mars - http://www.google.com/mars/, released March 12, 2006,

Now google sky!
http://www.google.com/sky/, released Today

Check it out!

Ext 2.0 Tips

Ever since I started dabbling with Ext a few months back, I'm addicted to it. Ext 2.0 has wonderful API documentation, but there are many hidden treasures that are not apparent. I will start capturing some of these starting from this post.

Toolbar Tips

• To create a separator between items, use '-' between the items. Hmm.., "|" might have been a better choice, don't you think?
  
• To right align a set of items, use '->' as the separator.

I'm Learning to Play Keyboard!

I have started learning keyboard! Last weekend, we had Kevin start his keyboard lessons, and I also succumbed to my long time craving for learning music. And, 2-3 hrs/wk was all I had to spend on it. Sounds too good isn't it!

Today was the first class. I used to play by hearing, but always wanted to be able to read notes and play in a formal way, especially to play the hymnals.

The 1 hour session was very interesting. The tutor was very knowledgeable and professional. She quickly understood where I stand and taught me the basics. I did some fingering practices for G and F clefs. Getting the keypress synchronized with the beat was tricky, but it came to me after several tries. Reading music and playing seems to be a mechanical activity. Atleast that is my initial observation. Let's see how it goes!