Make Smarter - NC GIS Conference, jQuery Templates, Inception Scene with Blender

First up in this month’s Make Smarter is the 2011 NC GIS Conference, coming up later this week. Workshops are on Wednesday, and the conference proper starts on Thursday. It’s an outstanding conference - if you’re in the area, don’t miss it. There’s a FOSS meet/drink-up being put together by Julia Harrell – head to geoglobaldomination for details!

I ran across all kinds of jQuery tutorials this past month. These two videos cover jQuery performance tricks and the new templating extension.

jQuery Performance Tips And Tricks 2011 - Addy Osmani from Addy Osmani on Vimeo.

Modern JavaScript Development: Boris Moore on jQuery Templating from Addy Osmani on Vimeo.

Tack onto that a jQuery Fundamentals ebook and videos of the entire jQuery Conference in Boston. Also make sure you check out the latest jQuery release (1.5) that came out this month. Of particular interest is the new deferred object. In my highly unscientific analysis, 1.5 feels faster.

And now for a few quick hitters:

• The videos from linux.conf.au 2011 are online at blip.tv. There are over 150 talks available on all kinds of topics. Bring popcorn.
• Think you have Blender chops? Try recreating the hallway scene from Inception. Warning: this hurt my brain a little.
• And finally, Slashgeo posts about an e-Learning framework for geopspatial open source software, data, and standards. It looks like it's still in the formative stages (i.e. no courseware I could find yet), but it looks like a great project.