About

magic potion

About Me

My name is Jim. I am a retired physicist/software engineer with 30+ years of experience. I am well versed in many programming languages including Fortran, Lisp, C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Java, Python and Perl. Now retired does not mean I have stopped living. It means I am released from the daily grind of earning a living. It means I have the spare time for development of my web skills and other things I find interesting. I am in a state of learning while waiting for the inspiration of what grand project to tackle.

About ByteBabble

I acquired the ByteBabble domain in 2000 but I have not done much with it until 2012. I am going to try and catch it up to today's standards for a decent web site. I plan to test various capabilities and host some of them as examples. Things will come and go over time. I think this is a pretty good domain name for a technical/computer blog, but I am not there yet.

About My Development Tools

I enjoy hand coding of HTML5 and CSS3. I use free and open source tools whenever I can. I have used many editors but my current choice is Notepad++ with the Zen Coding plugin. For browsers I primarily use the Firefox and Chrome browsers, and use Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari for testing. I also use Gimp, IrfanView, Paint, Gallery, FileZilla, Bulk Rename Utility, and XAMPP (for local hosting). I write Python scripts to help me automate some activities by processing data in text files into html files. I also use Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint, and OpenOffice which can export documents into PDF files. I currently develop on XP Professional/Windows 7 and on Ubuntu. I was and still am a Macintosh fan. I am eyeing a System 76 Ubuntu laptop for next Christmas!

A while ago I discovered the Bootstrap framework from Twitter. The responsive grid feature is wonderful and solves the problem of making a website look good on desktops, tablets and smart phones with the same HTML. More recently, I have started working with Joomla 3, which uses Bootstrap as its underlying framework. I am also working with the ZURB Foundation framework. These are all tools for the toolbox.