She love's and hates (only some dogs) will all her heart.
She loves email too: taylor@code4life.com
Thank Goodness for Microsoft
WinAntiVirusPro2000 and its makers are a piece of work. It's spyware with a slick antivirus motif, and I got infected with it. I'm not sure how... I recall clicking through a popup alert without thinking. I don't want to blame StumbleUpon, but I think I stumbled across the installer, and it installed too fast to stop. Soon afterwards, bloody advertisements started popping up every ten minutes.
Here's my solution for ridding WinAntiVirusPro. There could be more direct routes, but it's kinda hard to test. I'm just so pleased with myself, and you'll at least learn about some cool tools. So, take that WinVirusPro2000! You're not going to force me to reinstall Windows. I'm going to do it now by choice.
First, I tried the old standbys to rid the infection:
1. AdAware - It found the handiwork of WinVirusPro, in the form of hundreds of cookies, but couldn't stop the onslaught. It would find 300+ infections. I'd rerun it and find another 300+.
2. Spybot - Same scenario. Although, it found a few infections that AdAware didn't.
3. VirusScan - The memory resident portion caught a few trojans when the advertisements started popping up, but a full scan found nothing.
That One Customer
We're a small company, so the Developers do the support. We answer the phones, the email, etc. It's nice being in direct contact with customers. We learn a lot (see Joel's article about treating every support issue as a bug). Plus, we directly get to hear how great we are. I never tire of the "You're so wonderful" and the "I couldn't live without you" praise.
However, we occasionally get the "This is the worst program bla bla bla". We just received feedback to this effect. It's tempting to ignore it. My first thought was that we'll never satisfy him, no matter what we say, so why bother. You know...I felt personally insulted. Maybe nothing we say can change his opinion, but we have to try. It's the right thing to do. We have an unsatisfied user, and as a company dedicated to helping people, we have to respond.
What causes a person to express themselves so negatively? Perhaps it's frustration. Our program is easy to use but requires some investment in learning. We may find out by answering his email (we actually invited him to give us a call), and we may learn something useful in the process. At any rate, we don't want him sabotaging our program to other teachers. We're dealing with a whole school of users (literately, it's a School of users. The email was from a Teacher). By reaching out and establishing a relationship, it'll be harder for him to speak bad of us. (We are decent people after all.) If he still does, he probably isn't very popular anyways and will be ignored.
This is for all you .net Developers
Common Language Runtime detected an invalid program.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.Exception Details: System.InvalidProgramException: Common Language Runtime detected an invalid program.
We got this error today on a very commonly used page. We just added a few lines of code to one aspx file and it started bombing. We removed the new code and it worked fine. We replaced the code with some Response.Writes and it bombed again.
We found some references online about the error and maybe a possible fix. Apparently, a max of 32767 local variables can be declared in a code block. That's a ton of variables, but it includes local variables used by the compiler. Our file has a ton of server script (that's functional but not functional), so...I guess.
The hotfix would likely resolve our issues, but that would require testing and messing with our production environment. We found a solution by moving a big chuck of code (in the aspx file) into a function (in the same aspx file) and calling the function.
My City
I like to study apartment buildings while walking with Taylor. These aren't the 1000+ unit apartment communities, with row after row of identical structures, that I found while living in Indiana. These complexes usually top out at 50 apartments, and fit into the Chicago area's orderly grid work of streets.
Each building is unique, and even new brick buildings can't match the quality of these old structures. The designs are better, the bricks are better, the ornamentation is better, and the wood richer...
Technorati
I'm claiming code4life (verifying it's my site) at Technorati. They'll crawl the site looking for the link, Technorati Profile, as verification. I'm not sure what Technorati is all about, but we'll soon see.Order to UL
Here's a simple example of an expanding hierarchical list. It's easily to implement and extend, and requires just some basic css, javascript, and html.A Simple Example
- Click to Expand/Collapse
- This is a test A
- This is a test B
- This is a test C
- Click to Expand/Collapse
- This is a test I
- This is a test II
- This is a test III
Each "Click to Expand/Collapse" is a list item in an unordered list. The three "This is a test..." sub elements are list items in a separate list...
The Boby Tag
I tire of top 10 list. Luckily short, simple tips (bordering on trivia) are popular. I happen to have a few:
1) W3C's Markup Validation Service is a gem of a tool. It validates a page's adherence to the html specifications. I use it to catch simple mistakes--the missing </a> tag or the tag I invent by accident, like the <boby> tag.
2) Do your layouts sometimes end up with extra padding in IE? Perhaps around content divs? Most likely you're running into IE's box model bug. It's infamous now and has been fixed since IE 6. If you're experiencing it on IE 6 or 7, your page is rendering in "quirks" mode.
There are two basic render modes, "quirks" and "strict". The mode can be controlled with the <!DOCTYPE>. Without a doctype most browsers default to quirks mode, complete with all the bugs and unsupported standards.
Code4Life is rendered in strict mode. Each page begins with:
(Code4Life is not fully 4.01 Strict. I'm just not good at adding the "alt" attribute to "img" elements)<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <HTML><HEAD>...
You can force a page to render in quirks mode by using a doctype of 4.01 Transitional:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
3) In 4.01 strict mode, units are required in styles. In quirks mode most browsers assume pixels (px). For example, Firefox will ignore the style "margin:5 10 5 10" in strict. You need to write "margin:5px 10px 5px 10px". IE always seems to default to "px", regardless of mode. There are lots and lots of other differences.
Java
I kind of forgot about Java. I've been so focused on ASP.net and Ruby on Rails lately. So, let's see go to Sun's site and check up on Java, and (of course) to spec out a server for my ideal home entertainment system. I want to not just _stream_ the movie "300" to every room in my house, but to actually render the frames, in real time, to each room, simultaneously.
Let's See
Ok, I see lots of links on Java's homepage, but no obvious place to start. I guess I'll pick the "Jave EE" link, instead of the "Java SE" or "Java ME" links....Looks promising...Let's try the "Technologies" link. Bingo! I hit the mother load. We have:
Ahh, Refreshing
I work for Common-Goal Systems. We make an online Student Management System, with a gradebook module for instructors. We do a lot of geeky things technology wise, and add lot's of new tech on the back-end and the front-end. However, we need to focus some love on the overall look of the site.
Having been at CGS for 1.5 years, I understand our customers and their needs. But after a year and a half, wow, has the site become familiar. Mock up after mock up, I'd go back to the original design and think: that's how it should look. I guess I've grown to appreciate its functional and usable design. I'm sure our long time customers feel the same way. So, any redesign is going to have to be evolutionary.
Save the Car Kabob
The Car Kabob
We have a car kabob (actually, it's called the Spindle). No other country has a car kabob! Every other country _wishes_ they had a car kabob!. We need to restore it, not tear it down.
History
The spindle was built in 1989 in Berwyn (pronounced Berrrrrrwynnnn). It's just blocks from Route 66, which passes through the town. Berrrrrrwynnnn is mostly known for it's collection of bungalows, and its annual celebration of a mushroom--the Hobie Day Parade. It's also home to Cartopiaaaa. The Spindle is actually the focal point of Cartopia.
How to Save The Spindle
Do we really need another Walgreen's? Seriously, officials want to tear down the Spindle to build a Walgreen's. Check out Save The Spindle, join the protest and view the Illinois State Senate resolution to preserve the spindle. Visit Save The Spindle (different site) for ways to help and get drunk!
Update: Several hundred bikers from around Illinois showed up for the "Save the Spindle" protest. We all showed up, hung around for a little while, and left. (It was the ideal protest for this day in age; we care, but you know, we have a lot of other things to do and get bored quickly.) Unfortunately, no news crews came so it's hard to judge the effect of the protest.
Previous page Next page