Author Archives: illiniguy

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:22 pm on December 30, 2003  

Lord of the Tabbed Browsers

So a week or so ago, I was raving about AvantBrowser as the best thing out there for tabbed browsers (that actually run IE). Well, I was a little fed up with AB’s shortcomings in customability, so I went and checked out one of its competitors again, MyIE2. To be honest MyIE2 has much better mouse gestures and options, and now has support for the Mozilla engine (whatever that means). The rendering engine (or should I say how it looks while rendering) still hasn’t sold me completely. It seems a tad bit slower, and a little choppier, but I’ll have to see. Overall it’s a draw with AB right now….I’ll let you know the final verdict.

BTW, the interesting thing is they have very similar popup dialogs, for like donations, etc. They are both written by Chinese developers, although MyIE2 does have a team of developers as opposed to AB which has just one (another reason I’m considering the switcheroo)…..OOOO, kids stay tuned for the end of this cliffhanger!!!!!!!!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:17 pm on December 30, 2003  

What?

I just read this in a description of a carjacking, of the car stolen:

‘…a dent in the driver’s side passenger door…’

Sooooo is that the driver’s side, or the passenger’s side?

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:53 pm on December 23, 2003  

Some X-Mas Games to Pass the Time…

Here’s some online holiday games you can use to waste the time until the ‘final bell’ rings and we all head out for the holiday (and drinking)….

Slingshot Santa
Elf Bowling 2 (pretty funny; actually it’s a download file)
Nokia’s Sketchy Sledding
Snowball Fight

and a couple from the movie Elf’s website:

Snowball Fight
Etch-A-Sketch

note i can’t accept responsibility for any of the downloads from 3rd party sites

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:46 pm on December 23, 2003  

Service-Oriented Applications

Here’s an article that gives an excellent overview of the power of service-oriented frameworks, when to use them, etc. An albeit brief introduction into how to design such architectures, as I’ve seen them abused from time-to-time.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:35 pm on December 15, 2003  

Coming soon – My OO Cheatsheet

Yes, I finally got sick of developers not understanding that OO is an art of its own, and requires thought, training, and actually applying it to applications! Having done OOAD for the past 4 years, I think I can help jump-start your knowledge of some of the basics as well as the nuances of OO as I’ve seen it successfully applied. Actually, I really hope to give you a leg to stand on, as I hear so many OO discussions with viewpoints on one side or the other, with absolutely no basis for discussion (other than that’s what they think). I hope to shed some light on OO and ways to apply design principles that help cultivate a methodology that yields sleek performance and manageable and reusable code. And I think I can, given my experience…

I have the page on the site, but I won’t link to it until I clean up the current Q&A. It’s a little too late for proofing, even for me!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:29 pm on December 15, 2003  

Amazon has waiting lines…

No, I’m not kidding you, I just finished up my holiday shopping for my out-of-town relatives, and as is normally the case, Amazon was my retailer of choice (for the most part). It makes wrapping and/or shipping those gifts OOT so much easier! But it looks like Amazon is having some load problems, as it kept misplacing my session, sending me to an error page that really didn’t make sense. I figure it’s their default error page, a bad one at that, but not all was lost as I was able to use the Back button and continue working. Eventually I was able to get thru by doing this about 10 times during the process, but it doesn’t bode well for normal consumers who won’t understand what the heck is going on….not that I’m worried about Amazon’s bottom line being affected by such a glitch….

BTW, I’m about to call Amazon and offer my services as Santa’s little helper, by helping wrap their outgoing orders. On average, they wanted to charge me about $4 per item to giftwrap it (everything was smaller than a breadbox)! Guess the only problem is I don’t live near one of their distribution centers to make it possible…but those workers must be paid well with that much coming in per item….even though the hours and workload pry suck. Wonder if they off-shore…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 6:36 pm on December 15, 2003  

OO Cheatsheet is Up…

It’s started out somewhat sloppily. I started with the whole ‘returning null vs. returning an empty collection’ debate, and tried to explain why the answers were what they were, but it turns out to be a long-winded discussion, as there’s a lot of interpretation needed on the developer’s part. But I hope I at least helped reason towards a standard approach that has worked well for me personally.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 11:49 am on December 14, 2003  

I Used to Really Like ‘Information Week’ -AND- Recruiters

I read this magazine religiously, as it gives an excellent view of the IT industry from the business side of things. Unfortunately, I was catching up on some back-issues I missed, and I ran across this article by the Editor in Chief. Geez, can you get anymore PC in everything you say? Not to mention numbers 1 and 2 are based on lies……

And on a different note, if you are a recruiter and leave me messages three times a week…there’s a reason I don’t reply: I’m not interested! If I am, I’d reply, but unlike wedding invites, the rule is ‘silence means no’. It means I just don’t have time to reply to everyone leaving me messages…..sorry!