Praying for well-commented code

Today, I finally get to restart on one of the major projects that I need to finish. For the five weeks, we’ve been putting out one huge fire so I’ve not had a chance to work on it.

Now I realize I have no clue where I left off, and don’t remember how all the code works. That’s one reason it’s good practice to comment the code, so it’s easier to see what the code does and why. (Believe me, this is an absolute necessity when looking at other people’s code.)

This was found at the top of one of the functions:

/// TODO: FINISH IT.

Good times.

July 20th, 2007 4 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Science/Technology

Old white guys and Senate website “design”

Have you ever wondered how insects tell themselves apart? We can barely see a difference between one praying mantis to the next, yet we know that somehow, they manage to determine who’s who.

It’s just like old white guys in government. Look at the picture at the top, and tell me how the heck we can tell those Senators apart. If it weren’t for the different color ties, those guys be indistinguishable.

There is one thing I must congratulate Congress on. The webpage the picture’s from is proof positive that Congress does have some self-control on the budget, as they clearly have not hired anyone to update the page design since the mid-90’s. A few things my co-workers and I noticed:

• There’s still a link to Netscape Navigator
• Site is “optimized” for IE 4 and Navigator 4
• The senator pic uses imagemaps
• A 400KB 2500px wide pic is loaded to display a 421px wide pic

July 19th, 2007 2 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under History, Science/Technology

Random Stuff

1. Trogdor is fun for some reason. You’re a dragon who stomps on peasants and “burninates” villages while avoiding those pesky knights and archers.
2. Went to get some extra RAM for the comp today…a few of my programs will eat any sort of memory you feed it. A 22″ widescreen for only $250 caught my eye. After an agonizing few minutes, this was quickly filed under “want” instead of “need”, and will withhold until later.
3. Ladies: how do you wear those knee-high boots with any sort of comfort? Not that I know any females personally who I’d think would have such footgear in their closet.
4. Today, a woman came up to me at the gas station asking for some money for gas. The term “crocodile tears” does not even begin to convey how fake she seemed. Nonetheless, I gave her a few bucks. How would you handle it? Is it better to err on the side of caution for fear of denying help to someone who really needs it? Or is it better to ignore the people you’re 90% sure are lying to discourage future panhandling?
5. You get sucky customer service when you wear a smelly, dirty shirt.
6. The Autobot sticker fails to enhance this car:
   

July 7th, 2007 3 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Entertainment, Science/Technology

Sore displeased

The site was down earlier today, due to some database issues. Apparently, they had to do some sort of roll back, because all the stuff from earlier today is gone. Grrrr.

Yes, this is the second time it’s happened in two days. Time to place a call…

July 3rd, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Burning Agony, Science/Technology

Sore displeased

The site was down earlier today, due to some database issues. Apparently, they had to do some sort of roll back, because all the stuff from July is gone. Grrrr.

July 2nd, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Burning Agony, Science/Technology

Grab bag: just because it’s interesting

Physics Misconceptions: Don’t worry, it’s not rocket science. Mostly.

Bigelow launches its second inflatable space module: This is definitely rocket science.

Did you know Chef Boyardee was a real guy?

According to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, playing chess and “black gammon” (backgammon) are forbidden for a Muslim. For what I can gather, this is because they were used for gambling. However, horse racing is OK.

June 30th, 2007 7 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Chess, History, Religion, Science/Technology

The perfect name for a sister website

One feature of humanity’s improved knowledge of chemistry and biology is the ability to create edible substances which technically count as food, but probably shouldn’t. Juice cocktails are a great example. Containing 5-10% juice, they are mostly sugar water. The best you can say about those things is that they usually add Vitamin C, so you at least you won’t get scurvy.

Yours truly, the Liquid Egg Product, is a substance that sounds worse than it is. It’s basically eggs that have gone through some or all of these processes: separation, pasteurization, mixing, or dehydration and rehydration.

This article gives a bit of information on American “cheese”. The thought that’s kept going through my head is the term “process cheese food”. What a great name for a sister website! And there’s a processed cheese food already (it’s a 1995-style personal page even more insipid than this one).

Hmmm…maybe the time has come for one of those “webrings” (talk about mid-90’s style) for pages with domain names that are artificially created edible substances.

June 26th, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Science/Technology

Updates

The page was down for a while. But at least it was my own fault.

WordPress had an upgrade that I implemented because it covers some security holes.

Also, the site address will be changing to liquideggproduct.com. It makes more sense. blog.donaldbriggs.net will forward to the new address, of course.

June 23rd, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Science/Technology

And this is one reason I roll my own site

If my site’s screwed up, at least I want it to be my own fault. It’s frustrating to have to rely on other people to clean up stuff for you:

I’m not being critical of Xanga. This has nothing to do with being disappointed at not being able to check three of my friends’ blogs to see if they had any updates.

June 20th, 2007 2 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Science/Technology

IE users: I (finally) have you covered

The site now looks more or less as intended in Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, I haven’t installed IE7 on this machine (don’t know if you can rig having both versions at once), mainly just for situations like this, where I can test for the still-used IE6. IE7 showed the same kinds of errors, though, and I’d imagine it’s fixed there as well.

Learned about a few IE-specific styling bugs as well:

The IE6 Three Pixel Text-Jog

The IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug

For the pictures in the individual post, I (finally) created the following class:

.pictureright {
float:right;
padding-left:10px;
padding-bottom:5px;
}

For some reason, IE needed position:relative; to be specified, or it would place the image all over the place and the image would jump around when you moused over the title. This is despite the class for the entry already specifying relative position.

Lessons re-learned:

• Despite the rise of alternative browsers, IE still dominates the market…it still has 70%-85% market share depending on the source.
• Even IE7 has its quirks.
• Make sure to test a webpage in at least these browsers: IE, Firefox, and Safari. (Sorry, fellow Opera users–at <1% of users, we're not relevant enough yet.)

June 16th, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Science/Technology