Random and Opinionated Thoughts

by: Jennifer Zelazny

Serenity Now!

Tollways

This summer I have been doing a lot of traveling. Back in July I drove through Pennsylvania – and I have an iPASS so I do not need to stop and deposit coins in tolls in IL, PA, NJ, NY. I just got 2 bills in the mail for failure to pay 2 $0.50 tolls […]

TV

It's That Time of the Year Again!

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 […]

Serenity Now! Standards

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 – […]

CSS Hints Web Development

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.

Apple Serenity Now!

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. […]

HTML/XTML Web Development

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 […]

Life

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)

Hints HOWTOs UNIX

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 […]

Hosting jappler.com

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 […]

Apple Serenity Now!

.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 […]

CSS HTML/XTML Web Development

Great CSS Buttons

I am working on a project that started small and got really big. Good for the company, bad news for the code. I am in the process of going through the code and to fix and optimize it for multiple browsers. One word of advice for developers: when starting a new project, expect exceptions. One […]