nerd.of.steel

After spending all morning eagerly refreshing my browser instead of working, it is official, Firefox 3 has gone live! All morning long when you browsed to the Get Firefox you were presented with the most recent version 2 build.

I have been using the release candidate for a few weeks now and I have to say, I love it! Mix that with the Glasser extension to give you that native Vista look and feel and you have one incredibly pleasant browsing experience.

Also don’t forget that today is Download Day and by downloading Firefox 3 you can help Mozilla get a place in history by setting Guinness World Record. Good times.

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.”

This site is awesome and I have spent a good many-o-minutes laughing at how insane poor ol’ John Arbuckle appears. After years upon years of unfunny Garfield comics, they finally managed to bring a smile to my face.

If Jim Davis was smart, he would retcon the whole series in this fashion… Now if only they could do this to the Garfield cartoon…

Visit Garfield Minus Garfield

"We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content."

Browsing around the web out of boredom today I ran across an interesting article by Eric Meyer. Pretty much, in a nutshell, Eric walks us through using certain CSS techniques to help you find out what problems are coming from where in your CSS.

Example Code:

1. font, center {
2. outline: 5px solid red;
3. }

Example Output:

This is a technique that I personally have been using for a while, though I’ve been partial to the color pink for my borders/outlines. For those that are unfamiliar, the CSS2 property “outline” is very similar to the the “border” property, except it doesn’t effect your layout. If you’re like me though, sometimes you just have to forgo the use of the “outline” property and use the “border” property instead just to see things break a little, which can be beneficial in some instances when you can’t figure out whats going wrong.

I ran across a rather odd Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 bug that I felt was worth sharing so no one went through the roller coaster ride of angry emotions that troubleshooting ridiculous bugs always seems to cause. So check this out — Dreamweaver CS3 has a really nasty bug that will crash the application if there is a CSS file in your defined site that is exactly 8KB (8.192 Bytes). Took me a few hours to figure it out but after a little digging through the Interweb and confirming it on Adobe’s support line, if you have a file that is exactly 8.192 Bytes or a multiple of that, it will crash the app and you will be doomed to not getting any work done. What would be the workaround you ask? Add some comments to your CSS files if you are coming close the 8KB mark to pad your files.

You know I use to love Dreamweaver for coding XHTML/CSS but lately I haven’t been too impressed with where the product was going since Adobe took the helm. Lately I have been using Aptana Studio and haven’t looked back. Unfortunately I can only use Aptana at home as the marketing agency I work for requires the use of Dreamweaver for all of their web development projects. If you haven’t checked out Aptana Studios, I highly suggest giving it a whirl, you might fall in love with it as I have.

I was incredibly surprised this morning when I checked my Google Analytics account and found an above average spike in traffic for the past couple days. Looking into it a bit more, I found that all the traffic was coming from Smashing Magazine. It appears that my Grid Overlay tutorial was worthy enough to land in their “Best of August 2007“ article.

I have to say, I’m a little speechless. While I have received a fair amount or praise and thanks over the article, to be featured in a “Best of” article along the likes of Veerle Pieters and tools such as Google’s Web Toolkit and Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor (which my article is directly above) is an honor.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who enjoyed the tutorial as well as sites that featured it such as Smashing Magazine and DZone. Also be on the lookout for several other CSS based tutorials as well as a follow-up to the Gird Overlay tutorial.

—Rocco

I was testing a friends web application the other day when I ran across this:

If you have ever built a database driven application from scratch, you should be familiar with this. What we have here is just 100% gibberish that my friend threw into his application just to test how the text rendered on the page. The worst part about this, was that the project I was testing for him was being packaged to show to his client later on that same day!

It is easy for a developer to fall into a wonderful world of lazy placement text but there are a lot better, and professional, ways to accomplish this. For placement text, I usually turn to a Lorem Ipsum text generator. If you are unfamiliar with Lorem Ipsum, which is also known as greeking, then I suggest reading up on this Wikipedia entry.

Lorem Ipsum in a nutshell is method of displaying placement text that looks as if it could be real words. While the text itself looks like it could be a foreign language, such as latin, it actually has no meaning at all. It truly is neat stuff, and looks a lot better than the showing a client an application you built with the text above!

If you don’t believe me, compare the two following texts:

Gibberish

Lorem Ipsum

LINKS: Lorem Ipsum Wikipedia Entry | Lorem Ipsuim – All the facts – Lipsum generator

If you haven't heard, Pownce is the relatively new Web 2.0 social networking service that finally brings hanging out with friends and pirating software, files, pictures, videos, and all that other jive together in one neat overly pretentious place.

Pownce is the brain child of the super cute and adorable Leah Culver, the extraordinarily talented Daniel Burka, and "The Dark Tipper" Kevin Rose (<-- insert rolling eyes and sarcastic comment here). Complete with a badly misspelled name and over dramatic Internet hype, Pownce is here, large and in charge while offering very little of anything new and a whole lot of "been there, done that... but we look pretty".

The best part about Pownce is I now have six invitations to give away to whoever wants one. If you want an invitation, just drop me a comment and I'll have one emailed to you! When leaving a comment, be sure to include your real email address (which isn't shown to the public) so I can get these out to you as soon as possible.

Oh man, the past couple of weeks have been hectic. So hectic in fact, I haven't been able to post anything interesting or fun, minus my triumph in the iPhone search world... which died a few hours later :)

So I was catching up on some of my favorite podcasts today, all of which reside on the TWiT Netcast Network and low and behold, they mentioned me and this blog! The podcast in question was Megan Marrone and Leo Laporte's Jumping Monkeys episode number 5, somewhere around 6:30 into the show.

Sure it was a brief mention about Glubble (Glubble To The Rescue!), but Megan and Leo have been heroes of mine since way back when so I'm sitting her like a school girl who just walked past Leonardo Dicaprio. The whole reason I use to subscribe to Comcast's Digital Cable service was so I could watch them and the rest of the old TechTV crew... then G4 destroyed my hopes and dreams.

All is not lost. I still get a huge dose of Leo every week via the TWiT Netcast Network and now that Leo and Megan are doing a podcast, I'm in digital daddy heaven. If you haven't checked out the podcasts on TWiT, I advise you to go do so. Go!

This weekend an interesting thing happened. I realized that my daughter would soon be old enough that she would one day soon want to hop online and browse the web. This realization has already started to come to fruition as my daughter is spending about a half hour a weekend playing around on the Barbie website.

Not wanting my little girl to accidentally run across something inappropriate I started researching ways to lock down our web browser. While my router comes equipped with the ability to blacklist any site my heart desires, doing so would be like punishing my fiancée and myself as the only way to turn that off would be to log into the router, change the settings and then change them back when we were done doing whatever we were doing. That whole process just seems cumbersome and annoying so I decided that I wanted something else that was less restricting to the adults in the household.

Today after browsing around LifeHacker, I stumbled upon Glubble. Glubble is a Firefox extension that allows you to whitelist which sites your Little Mr. and Misses are allowed to visit. This is all accomplished by a pretty nifty login system which requires the parent to set up two different accounts - one for the child and one for the parent. When your little one tries to view a site that is not an allowed site, the browser takes note of this and asks the parent/administrator if they would like to whitelist this site the next time that parent logs on to the browser.

As an extra bonus, when your little tyke logs on to their browser profile, they are greeted with a super friendly childlike browser skin to make the experience even more fun and kid friendly.

All in all, I dig it and I highly suggest any parent with younger children go check it out!

Download: Glubble
Source: LifeHacker

Alright, heres the deal. Someone was nice enough to give me a BETA invite to Joost a few weeks back and I would love to do the same for you guys. The only problem is, I only have a limited number of invites.

Instead of just giving them out randomly, I figured it would be best to make this entertaining. To win a invite just leave a comment to this post with a funny joke. Bad jokes will not be rewarded… unless there funny… but then they wouldn’t be bad. :)

If your joke can make me laugh, you got yourself an invite! Sound good? Cool! Let the chuckles begin!

Also, make sure to include your name and email address so I know where to send the invite too! Please try to keep the jokes clean as I would like to keep the site appropriate for nerds of all ages!