Life does not get too much better than Penn State football Saturdays…and this year should be one of the best years of all time. Why? First and foremost – this will be the first full season for my son. He was born last December and saw his first Penn State bowl game (PSU won), but I really look forward to the entire season. Second, we now have the Big Ten Network. Third – we should have DirectTV HD installed as of next week. Here is to another great season with JoePa!
Archive for August, 2007
All posts written in August, 2007.
Aug
28
2007
Secure Email, Secure Web Site – Thanks
One of my top pet peeves in my field is the use of self-signed SSL certificates for public web sites. I have no issue with using self-signed SSL certificates for a development environment or something internal, but when you have outside users, you need to show them that they can trust you. Just today – I got a “secure” email from my student loan company (which first got marked as junk). When I clicked on the URL in the email (https://securemail…) I got the error message “certificate was signed by an unknown certifying authority”. My blood began to boil.
A. You have all kinds of personal information about me, my loans, etc and you cannot pay $199 a year to get a certificate that my browser recognizes and trusts?
B. You make an extra effort to send a “secure email” to a “https” (secure) site, and choose to setup a “securemail” sub-domain – and when it comes to the certificate, you skimp? Wow.
Aug
24
2007
CSS Checker
What do you do when you have thousands of lines of CSS and probably have hundreds of lines within the thousands that are no longer used…but you have no idea because multiple people have contributed? You use the CSS Redundancy Checker.
Aug
23
2007
How I Fix Hardware Problems
If you know me…and have seen me work with hardware, you know my style of troubleshooting. First – read to see if others are having issues. Second, make sure all the connections are working. Third, look for the dumb reasons why something would not work (electrical, buttons). Fourth – use force to beat the hardware. At first step four was out of frustration. Then, Apple made it an official option with my old displays. I quote:
…you can most often break the adhesion between the grid wires by using the heel of your hand to moderately impact the side of your display under the Apple logo on the right, then left side. Using moderate force does not damage your display.
Today I ran into some hardware trouble in my car – my super finicky – already been replaced “CD Error” prone CD changer in my Volvo. Last time I got the “CD Error” my Volvo dealer had to send the changer to Sweden so they could send my back my CDs. Since I no longer have the luxury of a warranty, I had to take matters into my own hands. After getting the error, I decided first to read the manual – no mention of the error message. Then I tried resetting the unit – figuring that some sort of button combinations would do the trick. Third, I powered off the unit, powered it back on, switched inputs…no luck. After this – and the thought of paying way too much money to get it replaced…I started punching it…and wouldn’t you know – I enjoyed listening to a CD on the way home.
Aug
21
2007
Retro MacOS WordPress Theme
I stumbled on this sweet Retro Mac OS WordPress theme and had to pass the link on to others. Rock on!
Aug
20
2007
validate, validate, validate!
I have been working on a project for a few months that has been touched by many developers at various points in time. It is my job to optimize the code, ensure it works in multiple browsers, and then test new functionality. This is a huge project with tens of thousands lines of code. I recently got stuck on one issue that I could not figure out at all…so I finally decided to run everything through the W3C validators, and as soon as I did, I realized I should have done this as soon as I started on the project, then every x weeks.
I know I have said it before, but I will say it again. If you are working on a project and ever get stuck on something, validate your code.
Aug
16
2007
A Moment Outside
Last weekend Amy, Evan, and I went to some friends’ lake house. We had a nice encounter with some deer (much better than the bear I encountered in my parent’s back yard this summer)
Aug
15
2007
Nano Tip
I have been doing a lot of work recently on a remote server and have needed to use a text editor – so I decided to use the ever-so-easy nano. Problem is – the files I am working on are very long and editing them is not fun. I finally decided to look through the man pages (I am an emacs person myself) and found something that ended up saving me tons of time…”go to line number”. If you are editing a file and know you need to edit something on line 1245, you would type in:
nano +1245 master.css
and it would open the file to line 1245 so you do not need to scroll down. Thank you man pages!
Aug
13
2007
Jappler Recommends: Liquid Web
It has almost been two years since I moved all my sites to Liquid Web for my hosting needs and am still very happy with them. If you take a look at my hosting category, you can see I have been around the block a few times. I have had a few issues, BUT, everyone who I have spoken with is very knowledgeable, helpful, and always been on top of the issue. If you are interested in a new web host, I highly recommend Liquid Web.
Aug
08
2007
.mac Update
Serenity now – Apple has updated their .Mac service. There are some good updates…and some bad. The good: the Web Gallery looks pretty sweet. The bad: .Mac users can now send and receive email attachments up to 20mb. Ugh…nothing drives me more crazy than getting large email attachments. What is large? For me it is anything over 3mb. How to completely drive me insane? Send me your billboard sized photos that total over 3mb. On the upside of the .Mac improvements, I am very excited about the additional space – 10gig as well as Junk Mail via their webmail app – still no filters, but I am almost ready to give up. Looks like I will stay on for another year of the .Mac tax.
