Yes, the long waited my new MacBook Pro finally arrived. It came with 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed, Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control; supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities and glossy LED-backlit widescreen display.

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro Screen

Follow this link for the more details & the full spec.
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features-15inch.html

Click here for more photos.

PS: I still couldn’t find a good laptop bag for this in Sri Lanka. I tried ODEL & PG Martin but they didn’t had anything that I could satisfy with. Any suggestions?

Finally I managed to upgrade the blog in to the latest version of Wordpress. Since I had some hack attack on my blog I suppose do this long time back. But only yesterday night I got some time to do this.
And here goes the list of updats;

• Banner management is available now, but it’s disabled at the moment.
• More search engine optimization done.
• Now site will get automatically backup daily & weekly.
• Categories are now displaying as a Tag Cloud.
• If someone enter long URL in comment box, it will get chunk to fit the area.
• Posts which are older than 30 days will not available for commenting.
• Display some tips about the commenter when mouseover the commenter’s name.
• Added captions for images in posts.
• Strengthen the admin security.
• Visitors can get notifications through the channels they use. (Email, SMS, MSN, AIM, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger…)
• Visitors can share post/page with others via email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
• Now visitors can subscribe to comments.
• More Subscribing options are available now. (Google, Bloglines, My Yahoo, My MSN, News Gator, Netvibes…)
• My latest 5 public Twitter messages will display in sidebar.
• Visitors can send a post/page as a Twitter message to others.
• Related posts will display at the end of each post. (If there are any)
• Printer friendly version available for each post/page.
• Smileys are available for comments now.
• Optimized 404 Error page.

OK, That’s all for today. Hopefully next update will be about a new skin!!!

So finally I have updated the About page. Since I left the Aranxa last week thinking of updating this page but finally today got a time to do it.

Chamara

My name is Chamara Peiris, UI Lead/Information Architect living in Panadura, Sri Lanka, a small beautiful island in the Indian ocean. My blog is an online source for topics ranging from XHTML/CSS to web technologies to news relates to Sri Lanka.

I began my career in 2001 as a Trainee Web Developer. The first 2 years were mainly filled with UI Work with some more development work.

From 2003 onward, designing websites and user interfaces was my main focus.

In 2004 I’ve discovered Web Standards after seeing the CSS Zen Garden. Since then I’m actively promoting the benefits of Web Standards through my blog and trying to popular and implementing web standards in Sri Lanka.

Minlo Technologies

In 2006 I’ve co-founded Minlo Technologies together with Damitha Wickramasinghe. I’m the CTO of Minlo Group. We have been working with some local clients as well as with couple of foreign collaborations.

My vision is to make the web better WEB for ALL.

So this is the first time i am blogging from out of Sri Lanka.

Since i am going to London for some office work my transit is Doha airport. So I am putting this short blog post from Doha airport.

Hoping to blog from London with some photos, but it will depend on the office work as I will be at London only for 7 days.

අදට වැඩ ඉවරයි. ගෙදර ගිහිල්ලා මැරතන් එක දුවන්නං. මෙහෙ ව්දුලිත් කොටන‍වා.

මේක තමයි එපාම කරන වැඩේ. ටෙලිෆෝන් එකෙන් වරු ගනන් මීටින් තිබ්බට පස්සෙ වැඩ කරන්න වෙලාවක් නැහැ. ඉතින් ඊට පස්සෙ රෑ වෙනකන් හිටපන්කො! “පීට්සා” කාලා “රෙඩ් බුල්” බීල ලඟදිම ලෙඩක් හදා ගන්න‍ව කියල අපෙ අම්ම කිවිවා.

සිංහල බ්ලොග් මැරතන් එක පටන් ගත්ත ඒත් මම තාමත් ‍ඔ‍ෆිස් එකේ. මොනව කරන්නද, ලංකාවෙ හිටියට සුද්දගෙ වෙලාවට එපැයි වැඩ කරන්න. මම මේ අලුත් සයිට් එකක් හදන ගමන්.

Wish everyone a happy & prosperous year!!! and hope this will be a great year for Web Standards

As most of people aware, my birthday was at couple of days back. And today morning I got a lovely birthday card from our UK office fellow Proportians.

In that card our “Creative Handyman” and famous rebel from “Young Soul Rebels“, Danny, The Daddy Barnes, has wrote a creative birthday wish in CSS way

This is it

#chamara {
    birthday: happy;
    returns: many happy;
    arrack: too much;
    next-day-illness: none;
}

Great work Danny and thanks for it and to all Proportians…

PS: Danny we are still waiting for YSR T-shirts

Introduction

The implementation of valid/standard methods, guidelines and best practices will help to produce high quality websites that are accessible to as many as possible. By building valid websites you can save time and money for the development and provides a better experience for the visitor.

Validation is also an important part of web development. Many errors that are hard to find can discover during validation. This is like spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax in a document. but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language. You can validate your (X)HTML page as well as your CSS.

Here I’m not going brief you about Web Standards, but I’m going to tell how we can use those best practices in Web standards to produce a valid (X)HTML page.

Benefits of having a valid code

• Future compatibility: Your website will compatible with future web browsers.
• Simpler development and maintenance: Creating Valid (X)HTML Documents Means Cleaner Code and Easier Maintenance.
• Faster download and rendering of web pages: Less (X)HTML results in smaller file sizes and quicker downloads. Modern web browsers render pages faster when they are in their standards mode than when they are in their backwards compatible mode.
• Better accessibility: Semantic (X)HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes it easier for screen readers and alternative browsing devices to interpret the content.
• Better search engine rankings: The separation of content and presentation makes the content represent a larger part of the total file size. Combined with semantic markup this will improve search engine rankings.
• Simpler adaptation to any media or screen devices: A semantically marked up document can be easily adapted to print and alternative browsing devices, like handheld computers and cellular phones, just by linking to a different CSS file. You can also make site-wide changes to presentation by editing a single file.

Best Practices…

• Include the correct DOCTYPE declaration at the beginning of the file. A DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.
• The DOCTYPE is case-sensitive so use the correct case:
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "- //W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" />
• Add the attribute xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" to the <html> element.
• Close all elements: Omitting </p> is not valid anymore.
• Change all elements to lowercase: <P> becomes <p>.
• Correctly specify empty elements: <hr> becomes <hr />.
• Quote all attribute values: <p align="right">.
• Always add attribute values: <hr noshade="noshade" />.
• Always use & in place of &. : <a href="foo.php?chapter=1&amp;section=2 />
• <form> element should have to have a action attribute always: <form action="#"
• If you are using name & id attributes in input element, both should be in same name: <input name="field_name" id="field_name" />
• Use alt attribute always for <img> element: <img src="image.gif" alt="" />
• Use width & height attributes as in this order in <img> element: <img src="image.gif" width="100" height="100" alt="" />
• Use a separate JavaScript file always & make sure you have put type attribute correctly: <script type="text/javascript" src="javascript.js"></script>
• Try to use a external CSS file for styles.
• Always try to use tables only for TABULAR data.
• Make sure you are using <th> for table headers & <td> for table data.
• Elements in (X)HTML must be closed in the reverse order that they were opened in: <strong><em>…</em></strong>

(X)HTML Validation services

• W3C Markup Validation Service
• CSE HTML Validator
• Site Valet
• Dr. Watson

CSS Validation services

• W3C CSS Validation Service
• CSS Validator/Syntax Checker
• About.com CSS Validator
• Web Design Group CSSCheck
• Web Design Group CSSCheckUp

Accessibility Validation services

• Hermish Accessibility Evaluation Tool
• Cynthia Says^TM Portal
• Vischeck URL
• WebXACT

Useful Firefox Add-ons for validation services and web development

• HTML Validator
• Web Developer
• CSS Validator
• View Source Chart
• Firebug
• JavaScript Debugger