Spiffboy Blog

"You're so smart." Sure it's something that we all like to hear but I've been thinking about it, being smart is simply a choice.

Lately I've been learning quite a bit, much more than I ever learned at school. The reason for this learning is simple, I like to learn. I am the sort of person that practices learning. I read books on learning. That's how much I like to learn.

Long gone are the days of the "Best if viewed in..." banners, though I can't help but wonder if that is the best thing. I will grant you that it's awesome that developers are more aware of cross browser/platform issues and design methods, because we all know the web of the '90s was a nightmare. Today's web is riddled with phishing attacks, cross site scripting, sql injection and much more. Sure this is nothing new and browsers are working everyday to make things better by making things faster and easier to use.

We've all been there, sitting across the table while judging eyes glare at your resume as they fire off questions hoping they will trip you up. You sit nervously coming up with answers off the top of your head, thinking 'did I just answer that correctly?' or 'what is this guy wanting from this question?' Then they get to the part where they ask if you have any questions for them, and like a good interviewee you have done your research and have come up with a nice list of follow up questions. When you are finished, you shake everyones hands and get ready to leave. Oh, just one last thing, they ask you for a list of references.

It's been said, apparently not enough times, that the lack of error checking will bring a site to it's knees. Well, whom ever said that is a very smart person because I've seen it happen.

This is simply a rant, it's not meant to be informative, it's more meant to get things out before I go and shoot someone. Please expect nothing more out of this post.

Ah crap. I have to go over and talk to Dave again. I really don't like dealing with him but he is the developer on this project and he is who I've been told to talk to about this latest request.

Does this sound familiar? Have you ever felt the dread of talking to a developer/programmer/engineer or the likes?

Here are a couple tips that I have found working with Dave and other developers in the past. They don't always work, but most of the time I am able to reduce the stress level simply by following them.

I was talking to a number of friends of mine and was surprised to see that they were unaware of the little hidden gems inside of GMail. I will talk about just a few here.

So I was sitting around trying to figure out how I could get the right ellipsis (...) at the end of a string. I have an issue where I have a static width but a variable length text that will fit into this width. I don't want the text to wrap because it would not look good with the other blocks around it.

I have experimented with using substr to say everything after X characters gets cut off, but as you can see here, that's a problem.

As we become more aware of the dangers of posting personal information on social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace,Twitter... we make attempts to not fall into the same dangers by protecting our personal life and those we love.

There have been a number of stories where kids have been stalked by someone who has found personal information about them online. From the school they go to, the time the get out of school, habits and schedules they follow, all making it very easy for a stalker to find and follow them, or worse.

So I'm not doing a very good job so far of blogging every day. I guess I will try harder.

I will be in Vegas next week and since I've never been, I don't know if there's free internet there at all. This all means that if I can't find free internet, I will not be doing much by way of blogging next week.

I'm about to embark on a project at work that is going to be taking most of my time for the next few months. In thinking about it, I started thinking about virtualization in the office.

I started thinking, Hmmm.... what do most people in the office do and how much of their PC do they use?