Is a pain in the ass. Yes, I said it, sorry. I know a there are a growing number of people out there using Firefox. Heck, I used to be one of them back when IE sucked, but it doesn't suck anymore. For those who are in Firefox, note that I finally got around to fixing a display issue with Firefox for this blog today. It had to do with a div that I had overflow set to visible on. It worked fine in IE, but in Firefox it caused the div not to stretch with its content. By switching the overflow to hidden, the content then displayed correctly, the div stretched in both IE and Firefox.

My question is, why? Why do different browsers interpret the same code in different ways, when there are, and have been, known standards out there for how to interpret the code? I am hoping IE 8 and its standards by default mode might help the symbiosis here, but come on, we are nearly 20 years into graphical browsers at this point. It shouldn't be this difficult to find these minute display issues.

 

I recently obtained a Safari subscription from O'Reilly which has already and will continue to interrupt my planned reading schedule of 1 book a month. The idea behind Safari is to bring as many books from as many different publishers as possible and make them conveniently available for a monthly fee. Safari consists of mostly technical books although a nice selection of business books is available as well, available from multiple big name publishers. This has started to make me a little A-D-D with my reading though as I bounce around from book to book. There are just so many books on there that I want to read that I am having trouble sticking to just one book and reading it all of the way through.

The service is great, but here are a couple of the bad points:

1. Individuals cannot get a subscription to their full business library. The technical library has a limited number of business books in it.

2. Reading everything online is not exactly the most comfortable experience, and Safari does not really go to great lengths to make it easier. They have a print fidelity mode and an html mode, but neither really solves the problem of having to scroll to read.

Ran across this website and I must say that I love it. You can type in practically any song you want and up it comes and will play on your pc via their browser embedded music player. I typed in 1234 looking for Feist and received about 20 hits including live versions, etc... Not sure of the legality, but it was published in PC Magazine not too long ago and provides the opportunity to purcahse the song, but that is done via a simple google search. The quality is very good. A simple loop back recorder on your PC and you could easily fill your hard drive. Merely an observation, not a suggestion.

I ran across a website that gives you the formats for all of the various connection strings that you may need to make when hooking up a data source within VS. Every time that I have to type in one of these I have to look up the format for it, so this site should help consolidate all of my searching: ConnectionStrings.com

I ran across this on Slashdot and thought it was interesting enough to repeat here: 

The DNS was created in 1984 and in 1985 top level domains were defined. The first top level domains were COM, ORG, EDU, GOV, MIL and ccTLD.

In April 1985 cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu and ucla.edu were the first registered .edu domain names.

The first .gov was css.gov and was registered in June 1985.

The first .org was mitre.org and was registered in July 1985.

The first .com was symbolics.com and was registered on March 15 1985.

Here is the list of the first 100 registered domains:

SYMBOLICS.COM BBN.COM THINK.COM MCC.COM DEC.COM NORTHROP.COM XEROX.COM SRI.COM HP.COM BELLCORE.COM IBM.COM SUN.COM INTEL.COM TI.COM ATT.COM GMR.COM TEK.COM FMC.COM UB.COM BELL-ATL.COM GE.COM GREBYN.COM ISC.COM NSC.COM STARGATE.COM BOEING.COM ITCORP.COM SIEMENS.COM PYRAMID.COM ALPHACDC.COM BDM.COM FLUKE.COM INMET.COM KESMAI.COM MENTOR.COM NEC.COM RAY.COM ROSEMOUNT.COM VORTEX.COM ALCOA.COM GTE.COM ADOBE.COM AMD.COM DAS.COM DATA-IO.COM OCTOPUS.COM PORTAL.COM TELTONE.COM 3COM.COM AMDAHL.COM CCUR.COM CI.COM CONVERGENT.COM DG.COM PEREGRINE.COM QUAD.COM SQ.COM TANDY.COM TTI.COM UNISYS.COM CGI.COM CTS.COM SPDCC.COM APPLE.COM NMA.COM PRIME.COM PHILIPS.COM DATACUBE.COM KAI.COM TIC.COM VINE.COM NCR.COM CISCO.COM RDL.COM SLB.COM PARCPLACE.COM UTC.COM IDE.COM TRW.COM UNIPRESS.COM DUPONT.COM LOCKHEED.COM ROSETTA.COM TOAD.COM QUICK.COM ALLIED.COM DSC.COM SCO.COM GENE.COM KCCS.COM SPECTRA.COM WLK.COM MENTAT.COM WYSE.COM CFG.COM MARBLE.COM CAYMAN.COM ENTITY.COM KSR.COM NYNEXST.COM

March 15 1985 April 24 1985 May 24 1985 July 11 1985 September 30 1985 November 7 1985 January 9 1986 January 17 1986 March 3 1986 March 5 1986 March 19 1986 March 19 1986 March 25 1986 March 25 1986 April 25 1986 May 8 1986 May 8 1986 July 10 1986 July 10 1986 August 5 1986 August 5 1986 August 5 1986 August 5 1986 August 5 1986 August 5 1986 September 2 1986 September 18 1986 September 29 1986 October 18 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 October 27 1986 November 5 1986 November 5 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 November 17 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 December 11 1986 January 19 1987 January 19 1987 January 19 1987 February 19 1987 March 4 1987 March 4 1987 April 4 1987 April 23 1987 April 23 1987 April 23 1987 April 23 1987 April 30 1987 May 14 1987 May 14 1987 May 20 1987 May 27 1987 May 27 1987 June 26 1987 July 9 1987 July 13 1987 July 27 1987 July 27 1987 July 28 1987 August 18 1987 August 31 1987 September 3 1987 September 3 1987 September 3 1987 September 22 1987 September 22 1987 September 22 1987 September 22 1987 September 30 1987 October 14 1987 November 2 1987 November 9 1987 November 16 1987 November 16 1987 November 24 1987 November 30 1987

Found a website that may be helpful: TutsBuzz 

Not sure I will use the programming side much, but the graphics side looks interesting to me. I have yet to dedicate a great deal of time to becoming good at graphics creation/editing, but, in the past, I have found tutorials like this a quick way to get up to speed.

Find and share logins for websites that force you to register:

BugMeNot

I've been a long time fan of fatwallet. It is a great way to keep up on deals and random finance related talk. Although the finance side has turned more into an App-O-Rama board than anything, which is something I have little interest in. The interest rate arbitrage is interesting, and maybe if I had more time and more trust in the credit card companies and credit rating companies, I would do one myself.

Another site that I haven't used much, but was recently listed in PC-Mag is Dealio. This is a price finder website/aggregator. Seems to work alright, but there are plenty out there already; PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, etc...

Slickdeals is another site much like fatwallet. However, it seems to get better traffic on the deal side than fatwallet. If I am ever shopping for something significant (a computer or something), I keep an eye on both slickdeals and fatwallet for a while before pulling the trigger. I just recently saw in PC-mag that slickdeals has a fillers function on their website. It helps you find the least expensive item(s) necessary to make the 25$ free shipping at Amazon possible.

I ran across an off-shoot that John C. Dvorak has (he is a PC Magazine contributing editor) called Cranky Geeks. This site hosts a bunch of 30 minutes shows that he does that are similar in nature to his columns in PC-Magazine; just random rants on technology news. The episode that I just watched was a round table with him Veronica Belmont, Annalee Newitz and Irena Slutski. Quite interesting.

This site has some good tutorials for Paint Shop to enable you to create decent graphics when you aren't really a graphics person. (i.e., me).