ace’s blog

Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.

Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.

I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!

I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.

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Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.

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Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.

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Good night (I hope).

The marathon painting session is OVER.  Five rooms in five days!  One room a day makes it sound very misleading and almost simplistic.  We actually have been doing trim for the past two days so that means five rooms in three days!  It was insane.  I’m glad it is over!  Now I can just go back to being busy doing other things such as NOTHING!  What will I do with all of my free time at night while I’m not painting?!  Seriously though, painting sucks; although I am really good at it now.

Hurricane Ernesto is threatening to close down my new office tomorrow.  It’s a good thing I’m making more money and the job is in !Memphis (that’s programmer speak for not Memphis) because otherwise, I wouldn’t move into hurricane alley!

Monday, I worked on an issue that has been sitting in my queue at work for a little while now.  It actually felt good to get some coding done and not just researching other former employees code.  I spent the whole day doing that and I’m just about finished with it.

Last Friday, I did some work on the PeopleArray dev site.  I got the Lightbox Gone Wild JavaScript working for the Add Contact and Edit Contact portions of the site.

The problem I was having with that was that the “window” that opens up wasn’t large enough to cover my entire form.  The problem was that the default code specifies a specific height and width for the background window.  I must have overlooked that because I really thought I was going to have to hack up the code to get it to work like I wanted it to.

Lot’s of updating on minor things.  I’m glad you care enough to read this far.

I am trying my hardest to use CSS instead of tables for peoplearray.com. But since every browser gets to interpret CSS and “standards” in their own way, I (and all web designers/developers alike) get to hack up our CSS files to make our pages look the same in most of the major browsers.

Here is a screen shot of my issue:

Notice the little line of white? That is where my header class is being divided between two parts: id=header-image and id=header-text.

Here is my CSS code:
.header {
background:#DAE0D2 repeat-x bottom;
width:100%;
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#header-text {
text-align:right;
float:right;
width:80%;
height:68px;
}
#header-logo {
float:left;
width:20%;
height:68px;
}

Anybody have any ideas as to how to get rid of this small white line? It is only visible in Opera9 as far as I know. I only have access to IE6/7beta, Firefox 1.5.0.4 and Opera9.

Has anybody used Lightbox Gone Wild? Anybody know how to resize the box to the size of whatever you are displaying in it?

I’ve got this version of Lightbox (original here) being used for the “Edit Contact Information” feature of PeopleArray. As soon as I can get that implemented correctly, I’m going to use the Lightbox Gone Wild feature for the “Add Contact” logic.

You can check out what I have done so far, and track my progress, here. The ‘dev’ version of PeopleArray uses the same database as the ‘live’ version so any contact info changes you make on the dev site will be reflected on the live site. Your PeopleArray user id and password will work on the dev site.

I’m a fucking idiot. That is all. For those of you non-geeks and other that are but just don’t want to look at a stupid error, now’s you chance to stop reading.

…

Still here, GREAT! That’s stupendous.

Once upon a time, your’s truly (me) was having a problem formatting the birthdays of a contact being enterred. So to debug, I had the following code
<br /> if($user = ‘acedanger’) {<br /> echo $birthday;<br /> }<br />

The problem that I was trying to figure out was that no matter who was logged in and added a contact, it always showed up under user ‘acedanger’. Can anybody figure out why?? Too late. The code should have been:
<br /> if($user == ‘acedanger’) {<br /> echo $birthday;<br /> }<br />
if($user == ‘acedanger’) {
echo $birthday;
}
with the only difference being the extra ‘=’. A single ‘=’ sign in PHP is an assignment operator whereas double ‘==’ signs is a testing operator. (Notice how I am able to use technical terms in everyday speak! I’m a l33t programmer/moron). Anyway…that is all. Continue on your way, not being a moron like myself!

I found this on digg. It’s funny to me because I was battling some of this crap the past couple of days on a page on my company website.

Just fair warning, I’m ranting about geeky stuff regarding web design/development…

I read a chapter in a book on HTML and CSS design about how to make your website(s) “standards compliant”. I said what the hell, let’s do it. So I started with the contact list page of PeopleArray. I ran the validator from the website of the group that defines what makes up the web standards (World Wide Web Consortium or W3C). I went to the contact list, let it load, viewed the source and copied it, pasted it into the validator and let it rip. The first few passes produced a ton of errors. Some of the errors included no alt’s on my image tags, I had a closing div but it wasn’t ever actually opened and then some id’s of some elements were duplicated (I made those classes and updated the CSS accordingly). Now I have one error…and I have no clue how to get around it AND I can’t believe that this isn’t allowed in the XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE. You ready for this? the onClick property isn’t allowed for anchor tags! WTF?!

So I looked it up and found this page. This page shows all of the allowed properties for different tags under this DocType. The only on* properties allowed for an anchor tag are onBlur and onFocus! No onClick. So now I’m trying to figure out how to get around this. onBlur doesn’t work, maybe onFocus?

EDIT: onFocus isn’t the answer. I guess this part of the website won’t adhere to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional (of Strict) standards.

So I have done all of my testing of PeopleArray using Firefox 1.5.0.x. I’ve gotten everything that currently works to do so by testing only in Firefox. I have only recently begun testing some of the other browsers out there (well, only IE 6 and 7 beta, and Opera9 beta). What I’ve found was not unexpected.

Here is a screen shot of PeopleArray in FF 1.5.0.x:

My model was Firefox so everything in the FF screen shot was how I expected to see the output of all of my time and work.

Here is a screen shot of PeopleArray in IE 6:

Notice how my *beautiful* logo does not have a transparent background like it does in Firefox? That’s one odd thing. Also notice how the box on the right has a standard message (as opposed to the same box in FF where the contact specific information shows up). The code that I’m using to pull up the detailed information of the first contact and display it in the box on the right is:

function handleContactClick(id) {<br /> var url = “/ajax-fetchContactDetails.php?id=”+escape(id);<br /> $(“progress”).style.visibility = “visible”;<br /> request.open(“GET”, url, true);<br /> request.onreadystatechange = parseXML;<br /> request.send(null);<br /> }

My two big projects are going to make me gray. The Damage Claims (DC) stuff is easy enough but the problem with it are that there are a bunch of little gotchas all over it. DC is a relatively new process so there is zero chance that I’m going to break anything that is currently working in production.

My biggest issue is the replacement of the revenue file. DC is my stuff and I’m sure I’ll be branded as the “DC guy” since I wrote it from the beginning. I’ve been so busy trying to fix the “small” DC issues that I’ve been doing shitty analysis for the replacement of the revenue file. Last night I worked on stuff for about 3 hours after Aaron went to bed and got here at 6:20 this morning so that I could focus on the revenue file thing and hopefully put that to bed. It actually isn’t a tough change, it’s just sitting down and identifying everywhere that needs to be changed.

Couple those two projects with my new guarantee letter/renewal billing responsibilities, month end reporting, (poorly performed) basketball, a new workout regime (low weight, much higher reps) PLUS a website idea that I just can’t seem to stop thinking about (peoplearray.com) and you’ve got one insomniatic, stressed out kid (well, kid in as much as a 26 year old can be considered a kid).

Ugh, I can’t wait until the first week in September when Meri and I get on a big ass ship and float around some islands (Aaron-less) for a week. I’m not sure if being without Aaron for a week is a good or a bad thing. Probably better for Meri and more difficult for me since she is around him about 24 hours a day.

In a previous post, I was getting a couple of odd errors in FF 1.5.0.3 but not from IE7 beta2 whenever I would click on a contact and then try to delete another contact. I solved the errors by added a separate request object for deleting a contact. So now my little contact list uses multiple request objects. I figured that out by surfing the web (read: googling) and also by reading a book called Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin. It’s a pretty good beginner AJAX book that explains a lot of the basics, including a rough overview of DOM (which I needed).