Philip Marquardt

CSS IDs vs. Classes

Posted by Phil on November 7th 2008

As the 1 or 2 of you who read my blog know I recently created my own wordpress theme. Being that I’m NOT a CSS guru and I’ve pretty much taught myself everything I know about CSS, I made a few mistakes along the way. Pretty much everything went well, except my site fails XHTML validation (click the link at the bottom.. FAIL). So it turns out one of my problems is using ids in my divs vs. using classes.

I’ve always been under the impression that an id was used for most divs, and other tags for that matter, and classes were just used sparingly. But to my surprise, ids should only be used once on a page while classes are used in multiple locations. After pondering this for a bit, it does seem to make logical sense to have it this way.

For instance, lets say I had a container div and a entry div. The container just wraps the entire page so you could, for example, have the layout constantly centered and the entry wraps different comment posts on a page. Since the container is used only once on the page we would want to define this with an id and since the entry is used in multiple comments we would want to define this with a class.

<div id="container">
  <h1>Some container heading</h1>
  <div class="entry">
    <h3>Some entry heading</h3>
    <p>Some comment</p>
  </div>
  <div class="entry">
    <h3>Some other entry heading</h3>
    <p>Some other comment</p>
  </div>
</div>

The same should be done for other tags as well, such as spans, p tags, headings, etc. After I fix these problems on my site I will retry the XHTML validation and see what happens. Good luck to everyone else.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

This Past Month

Posted by Phil on October 7th 2008

Where have I been this past month?

Well, this is definitely the busiest semester I’ve ever had at Georgia Tech. To go along with that, I attended a career fair and lined up a few interviews in the process. I’m still trying to decide between grad school and the work force, so I decided I’d see what opportunities are out there. So far I’ve had interviews with Bloomberg, GEICO, and Oracle. I had a second round interview with GEICO and I have a second round interview scheduled with Oracle.

We’re half way through the semester now, so I have a good feel for my classes.

Processor Design (CS 3220) is the most time consuming but also the most interesting class this semester. We’re basically implementing an entire ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) on a piece of actual hardware using Verilog. My partner and I implemented the ISA in perl, which is good, because I’ve been wanting to learn perl.

Software Engineering (CS 3300) is interesting as well. We’ve built a program from the ground up doing all documentation before actually coding (Waterfall Process). Now we’re coding the application and it does seem easier to code considering the amount of detail that went into the planning. I believe in our next project we’ll be doing the reverse.

OS Design (CS 3210) is different than I thought it would be. There’s a lot of lecturing and not as much hands on lab work. Part of the blame has been the software we’re using for our simulations, but now that it’s fixed, we still haven’t done as much lab work as I had hoped we would. Hopefully it’ll pick up in the second half of the semester.

Finally, TAing for CS 1316 has been fun. I enjoy teaching the recitations (assuming I’m prepared) and also teaching students in the one-on-one office hours. I’m determined to help non-CS majors learn Java!!

The CETL 2000 class, for first time TAs, is informative, but I could think of better things to do with an extra hour in the morning (zzzzzz).

In unrelated school / web news, THE TAMPA BAY RAYS ARE IN THE ALCS!!!!!!

I’ve been a Rays fan since I’ve been in college (~4 years) and it’s amazing to see how far they’ve come. From worst record in baseball and finishing last in all but 1 season since they’ve been a team (in the 1 season, they finished second to last and open champaigne bottles to celebrate not being in last) to winning the AL East and having a chance to go to the World Series. That’s quite an amazing feat and shows how any team can bring the right people together, work hard, and get things done without having to buy their way to a championship, even though it hasn’t worked for the Yankees for a while.

Yellow Jackets are off to a good start too, looks like Paul Johnson’s offense is starting to come together. I predicted we’d have 3 turnovers per game due to the amount of tossing and quick inside handoffs that go along with the triple option, but so far they’ve proved me wrong. I hope they keep it up!

Until next time (zzzzzzz)

Posted in Classes, School, Sports | No Comments »

Yellow Jacket Football is Back!

Posted by Phil on September 4th 2008

It’s a little late, but I went to the opening game vs. Jacksonville State last week. While JSU is not a formidable opponent, it was quite a show put on by Paul Johnson’s spread, triple option offense scoring 41 points. The defense didn’t miss a beat either giving up only 7 points in most of the game and 7 in the last minute. It was hard to really analyze the entire game since we were sitting behind one of the end zones. I’ll put my coaches hat on if I can watch them on tv against Boston College, our first real test.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Fall ‘08 So Far

Posted by Phil on August 27th 2008

Fall semester is in week 2 now and classes are starting to show their colors. I dropped the physics department’s solar system class, PHYS 2021, and the lab. They’ve been replaced with a TA class for CS 1316 and the 1 credit hour intro TA class for first timers. TAing has been fun so far and I’m glad I did it. CS 3210, Design Operating Systems, looks like it’ll be a fun class. It’s half lecture half lab, so we’re going to get our hands dirty with the kernel and such. CS 3220, Processor Design, also looks fun. We’re programming on real hardware, yet again getting our hands dirty. Finally CS 3300, Software Engineering, is interesting so far. The class is actually defining the requirements for the first project and then each group is working on a separate part, much like it would be done in the real world. CS 3300 seems like it will be the most work, there are a lot of document write ups, group meetings, and coding. Ok, it’s 3am and I work at 10am.. time to go.

Posted in Classes, Projects, School | No Comments »

Smokey Mountains

Posted by Phil on August 23rd 2008

My girlfriend, Andrea, and I vacationed in the Smokey Mountains for a little get away a week before classes started. We stayed in a cabin on Deep Creek. The creek wasn’t too deep, but it was fun none the less. The national park was just a mile from our campground where you could carry your tube up the path next to the creek and tube back down to the car. The creek has some whitewater parts that ended up throwing me off my tube, but a lot of times the tube got stuck on the rocks

The views were incredible, we were surrounded by mountains, streams, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. Our cabin was about the size of my kitchen and apparently slept 4 people. There was a futon and a bed above the kitchen, but I would guess it would be cramped with 4 people. It was bearable with 2 people and a dog. Mia (the dog) loved the creek, but hated staying the cabin alone while we went tubing and hiking.