The End of it All

I am just at the end of bringing a solid two weeks of total craziness to an end and apologize for not being able to even make one post. Twitter, my personal work, my garage, my laundry, my master schedule and my (now unfortunately) ex-girlfriend all had been ignored for a solid two weeks. And for all of that, I am very sorry, but a man cannot live on 30 hours sleep in a week and be expected to function at anything close to full capacity.

The Horizon

This week we’re wrapping up three projects, one of which came and went in 9 days, packing up, and getting ready to have to move the office from it’s home for the past few years into a new space that will be more conducive to the direction in which we’re headed.

Beyond the horizon

There are some exciting things afoot, most of which I can’t talk about here, but if you’re close to me, you know why I do what I do. There’s one developer who’s been holding up the release of the new Ultra16 site, he’ll remain nameless, but as soon as he gets his act together, our great portfolio, and some other cool jazz will be out there for the masses, and the new clients to ogle.

• Taking a cab home, today was a few hours longer than I planned. #
• I love it when a cabbie doesn’t listen to directions to try to make a buck #
• Just spent 45 minutes stuck on the subway. #
• Time for some pizza from “Two Boots” #

You may notice that I have a new little banner running on the top right corner of this site… Some folks got a lovely idea recently that for one day, all supporting sites will run without and client-side scripting.

As time has gone by, more and more sites have come to depend on javascript for their basic functionality to work and in my opinion it’s a shame. I admit that even my portfolio (which was thrown together in about 2 days) was dependent for a little bit, but that quickly changed as soon as I started actually using my brain about a year and 1/2 ago.

Why this is such a good idea

It’s a responsible thing to do. If a developer cares about their users or their client’s users, they will build apps using “traditional” methods (GET POST and the like) and then add any client-side scripting to compliment the already functional app or website. Progressive enhancement in my opinion should be a standard, at least unofficially by now.

I hope developers everywhere step-up, and do what they need to to “make it right” and participate on July 7th 2007

http://www.scriptlessday.com/ They’re on twitter as well.

• at home, reinventing my chillax #
• Making a late dinner #
• going to bed, oy i’m tired. #
• Im going to hit the sack #
• proving once and for all that sleeping late *does not rule*… it’s just called oversleeping. #
• Coffee and bagel before I take the train in, #
• Placing nose to grindstone #
• finishing the girlfriend’s taxes so she doesn’t kill me. #
• Buying what I hope will be a delicious sandwich #
• Just found out we didn’t win a particularly large pitch, and i’m relieved. #
• doing multiplatform Q/A of some client work that’s due tomorrow #
• demoing an app to a client #
• Work just keeps rolling in, so i’m going to the deli. #

If you ever need to post a file to share with a friend, or a client, or a secret lover. Senduit is free, and your uploaded file is given a unique url that expires when YOU want it to (up to a one week lifecycle).

http://senduit.com/

I decided to start paying attention to my Feedburner and Google Analytics stats, and how can I put this… no one reads this blog. I found this lovely information out after installing the Wordpress Reports plugin.

I must admit that this info does make me a little sad, but I’m hardly surprised. I don’t post very often as I’m usually spending at least 12-14 hours a day at the office and free time comes at a pretty high price.

At least I’m regularly tweeting

One thing I have been doing lately, other than beating my head against some current project’s development limitations… err I mean requirements has been to regularly post tweets to the very popular Twitter service for a while now. Other RSS come as various forms of Audioscrobbling, I’m posting to Last.fm and Virb all day every day, and have considered taking Emily Chang’s example and putting together a lifestream. The idea of a lifestream for me raises an age-old question…

Which comes first, the life or the lifestream?

I figure, if I aggregate a lifestream, I’ll at least have one of them. In the meantime, I’ll just post a link to my Tumblr

Books, reviews and all that crap

On my desk sits hundreds of dollars of books, most of which I’ve already read, and more than half of them I’ve enjoyed. So you may start to see occasional book reviews pop up on here from time to time.

My blogger code is B9 d+ t+ k s u+ f i+ o+ x e+ l- c+

I got it here http://leatheregg.com/bloggercode/. Get yours.

• getting a late start after a 16 hour day yesterday #
• made my first friend on the twitter #
• deciding to leave the comfort of my office for the comfort of my home office #
• Tweeting from my phone #
• Waiting for the 6 train #

originally posted here http://www.krop.com/jobs/48c5y/

Client-side developer (mid-level or wizard)

Lemme break it down for you

• Love what you do, we do and that’s why we’re here.
• Be great at what you do, we try our best to be great, so it’s fair to ask it of those we work with.
• Never claim you know it all, unless I’ve bought a book with your name on it.

We’re not just looking for a specific skill-set, it’s all about your smarts, personality, and what you can bring to the table.

So let us know if you can answer a few of the following, or have any other interesting stuff notched on your belt:

• Do you know all the basic standards compliant, unobtrusive, semantic and accessible stuff?
• Can you tell us what browser likes *:first-child+html ?
• Know $()? can you .bind()?
• Are you friends with designers? Did you used to be one?
• Have you worked on the agency side before? If not, tell us why.
• Solid knowledge of AS 2.0+ a plus
• LAMP, .NET, or Rails. a plus

We are Ultra16, we have a big green wall, an office in NoHO, AirTunes, andoften hang out at the office just because we want to. We also have beenaround since the 90’s and work with clients who you’ve probably heardof.

To apply just hit us up at humanresources@ultra16.com with your resume, some links to your work, a code sample if you feellike it, and a paragraph or two about yourself (don’t be afraid to showyour personality)

Max over at OpenLaszlo was writing about some browser/quirk detection that he put together for v4.0. He listed in his post a number of quirks for IE7, some of which I was aware of, and some I wasn’t.

• Can’t set opacity on any div that contains <input type="text"/> or <textarea/> without getting nasty visual artifacts in the text field.
• Must use the AlphaImageLoader if we want opacity to apply to a div and all its children.
• AlphaimageLoader must have its src property set to the URL of an image to prevent a red x/missing image icon from appearing
• AlphaimageLoader does not send onload/error events - instead we have to use the img tag mentioned above
• IE 7 still has memory leaks for apps loaded in iframes
• Empty divs with style.backgroundColor set appear ~10px tall unless they contain an img (for less than 2px tall) or have style.fontSize = '0px' applied.
• IE does not support ' when setting a div’s innerHTML property
• IE does not send onclick/onmouse* events for divs without a blank image attached

One of my favorite IE7 quirks has to do with z-index being overrided by the order in which the element appears in the DOM. If a div has a z-index of any positive number and it’s followed by a div with a z-index of anything less, and they are positioned in an overlapping manor, the div that comes second in the DOM appears in front of the div with the higher z-index value.

What are some of your "favorite" IE7 bugs / quirks? I’d like to put together a comprehensive list.