NAMA blog

I just had a pain realization as I was weeding through Flickr. I was looking at a photo of Stephen Colbert holding a panel that said “WII OPERA BROWSER.” Then it came to me. With growing popularity of Wii over other home consoles, (which I foreseen but unfortunately didn’t buy the stocks of) there will be more and more people using Opera browser. Now, I’m aware Opera is one of THE most standards compliant browser out there but as a web developer, you have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to code compatibility. And so far, I’ve been drawing right on Opera. I truly believed catering to IE6, IE7, Firefox for Windows and Safari and Firefox for Mac was quite generous. But with Wii and its browser gaining more market, I just might have to start worrying about ANOTHER browser. Whoever said more competition is good obviously isn’t working in its field. Oh how I miss the days of IE domination. (purely from developer point of view >.<)

Sometimes, it’s just too unbelievable where this world is heading to. Poor folks at Kwik-Fit are being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars for listening to music at work. Yes, you can apparently be sued for having a music on while you are working if others can hear your music. Sure this is only going on in UK now but it’s really only a matter of time before it spreads. As if the world isn’t already lonely and isolating with all the technologies, now we’ll have to put on a headphone and ignore our coworkers to listen to music? Common sense is becoming more and more of a rare commodity nowadays.

I came across Red Interactive Agency website while reading up on good typography website (I’ve got to say this is one of the best websites I’ve seen this decade). I believe typography is very important in a website because you only have few seconds, if that, of your audience’s attention to make your first impression and one of the main ways to do that is by providing them exactly what they are looking for in a clear, visually appealing manner. Every time I come across a site with contents in tiny text, crazy colors, or in irregular alignment, I usually just click back and find another site. With so many websites out there in this day and age, great representation is not something you should do but must do because otherwise, the audience can and will find what they want elsewhere. Also, poor presentation on the website leads the audience to doubt the integrity of the content as well as the company so it is very crucial to make sure the face of your business on the web is not just a pretty one but trustworthy one as well.

Short and simple. If you want WordPress’ permalinks to work on GoDaddy hosting, you need to wait couple hours after you change the setting in the WordPress. Also make sure .htaccess file has 666 permission in the root of the blog directory.

After few months of procrastinating, I finally decided to search out for the color picking tool I’ve been needing for quite some time. ColorPic lets you pick out any color on your screen and tells you the color code so you can use them during the web development. It has to be one of the most time saving tool a web developer could have. For instance, if you came across a good color or you forgot what color you used on your website and you need the same color to use on another website element, you have either print screen -> paste in Photoshop -> color pick or view source -> search through hundreds of lines of css/html to locate the element. But with this tool, all you have to do is open the program and click the color. Hurray indeed.

Every once in a while, I come across “possessed” codes while developing for hope-to-die-soon Internet Explorer 6.0. I read over the code a hundred times and quadruple check everything yet I can’t locate the origin of the annoying gap that shouldn’t be there. It used to be because of an empty space between the previous tag and the img tag in html (which shouldn’t be a problem since space is ignored in html) but today I encountered another unresolvable gap. After pulling my hair out for few hours (thank god my parents aren’t bald) I found the solution which was as odd as the IE itself. I entered a br tag after the img tag and somehow the gap disappeared. I don’t remember using any middle-ing so I’m not sure how that pushed the image up but it did and I’m too tired to figure out what happened. (you can only stare at the same 2 lines of code for so long) So next time you come across some gap above an img in IE that you KNOW shouldn’t exist, try one of those 2 tricks. It’ll help maintain your sanity through this jungle of browser compatibility.

Yes I’d love to get my hands on one so it’ll clean my front yard of all the pesky ants but that’s not the Aardvark I’m talking about. I came across the Aardvark extension for Firefox few weeks ago and it’s been so helpful in so many occasions, I just had to talk about it. It’s basically an interactive version of Firefox’s more popular extension “Web Developer Toolbar’s” outline function. You just enable the Aardvark and hover your cursor over any items on the page and it’ll tell you which tag that item is using and outline its boundaries. And with some shortcut keys, you can expand the tag to its parents, delete it from the page view, view its source code, etc, which reduces the troubleshooting time greatly when dealing with complex css/html codes. Give it a whirl and see how much it can help with your coding.

I attended Refresh Phoenix last night at Inza Coffee with a friend of mine. Refresh Phoenix is a gathering of people in the web industry (in this case, in Phoenix, AZ) to talk and share ideas. Every time I attend this monthly event, I’m constantly amazed at the amount of knowledge and help I gain from these folks. If you’re in a web field and living in Phoenix metro area, I strongly suggest you attend one of these. I truly would not be at where I am now without all the information and motivation from this group. (and I didn’t even attend that many of them! although that will change) While you’re at it, go check out Forty Media, brains behind the Refresh Phoenix, especially if you’re looking for a big web company for your big web site needs. They’ve got a terrific portfolio.

I only came across this site just couple days ago but luckily I was able to find an invitation for it thanks to “dreamlord9″ and oh lord what great services it provides. You get to create a new phone number which you can pick from dozen-ish choices and then have it forward to any of your phone(s) whether it’s cell or land line. You can set different rings for callers to hear which you can customize and assign to different callers so what your spouse hears while waiting is different from strangers. :)  And you can hear voice mail through the website so you don’t have to waste your minutes! If you get lucky enough to come across an invitation, I definitely suggest you give it a whirl. It’s very unfortunate mine came around right after I printed my business card so I won’t get to use an easier-to-remember-number but still great nonetheless. If you’d like an invitation, all you need to do is ask! I still have more than handful.

Nothing says “genius” like cool pen tricks. If you really think about it, you’d only know how to do all those spins with the pen only if you sat down to study for loooong periods of time. Either that or you just spent hours trying to perfect the pen spinning skills instead of latest exams like I did back in the day. Regardless, here are couple videos that show you how to do all the cool pen moves so YOU can look super intelligent when you’re waiting for a credit card receipt at the checkout line.