nerd.of.steel

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

A few weeks ago I was sitting around the table with a few of my friends discussing random tidbits about our jobs in the web development world. One of my friends who mostly does graphic design and a bit off CSS styling was complaining about the lack of a grid overlay for CSS programming like you could find available in Adobe’s Fireworks and Photoshop suites.

After sitting around and thinking about it for a second or two, I realized there was no reason why there could not be such a solution available. With a little bit of CSS and PNG magic, anyone working with CSS could have that nifty grid in no time at all!

I was just watching episode 180 of DL.TV and they featured a hack that would allow you to disable the close tab button for individuals that accidentally close their Firefox browser tabs while they are clicking back and fourth between them.

If you have watched the episode, there is a much simpler way of recovering an accidentally closed tab than doing the whole "about:config" method. If you haven't watched the episode, the method involved typing "about:config" into the address bar and changing the numerical value for "browser.tabs.closeButtons" from 0 to 1 or 2 (2 disables the button all together).

Unfortunately, this hack doesn't help you recover already closed tabs, it just prevents you from closing tabs in the future. If for some reason you ever close a tab by mistake and you do not remember the URL of the site you were on (this happens to me all the time), you can easily recover the lost tab and session by pressing the following key combination:

CTRL+SHIFT+T

Not only will this bring the last closed tab back to your screen, it will place the tab in the same position it was in before you accidentally closed it and you can continue to press CTRL+SHIFT+T to bring up all of the tabs that you closed since you opened the browser. It's like the "CTRL+Z" command of tabbed browsing and without it, I would be lost. 

It should also be noted that you could theoretically use this feature to spy on someones browsing activity if they always leave their browser open, but that would be naughty and everyone would shake their finger at you in disappointment so don't do it! ;)

If you own a Windows Mobile device then chances are you have heard of Fizz Traveler or have run across the homescreen weather plug-in for this program. While Fizz Traveler is a fantastic program, unfortunately not everyone can afford it. This is where Google comes into play, by also offering a web-based weather service. With just a few clicks of the keypad you can have Google serve you up a five-day forecast that is just as good as any other weather prediction software.

Most people are unaware that there are some handy image editing tools built into Windows Mobile 5. While they are basic they can help make up for some of the sub-par pictures that are taken with your 1.3MP camera. The features we will be covering will be the rotate, crop and auto correct features