Work

I’m sure you guys have heard about Git. It’s been making a lot of waves lately. It seems that I’m always the last to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to things like that, but I’m finally here. Introduction There are tons of Version Control Systems (VCS) out there: Source Safe (Microsoft’s Baby, which sucks by the way), CVS, and SVN. Git is different from those in one major way: It’s a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one.

I jsut realized that my brand new WordPress theme sucks in Internet Explorer 7. My footer doesn’t show up, and my sidebar is all the way to the bottom. I remember when I first started with this them, I went through the whole cross browser thing and everything looked fine. I tweaked everything to my liking and was satisfied. Now I have to go backwards, one element at a time and try to isolate which tweak, new content, post, or plugin that has caused this to happen.

I know a lot of you might be wondering what’s going on, but once again we’re gonna have to take a short break. I recently sold off my old computer so right now I’m paying for internet access and I don’t have a computer. OK, I’m not a total idiot. I did make a purchase recently. I ordered a bunch of computer parts, since I’m building the new one. Here’s the problem.

Introduction OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information. How It All Started Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good.

Introduction

Back when I was doing my internship we had a major problem we were trying to solve. The project involved creating a web based terminal emulator using AJAX. Well, it was a little bit more specific than that. It was basically duplicating a specific application in the browser window.

Problem

Sounds all well and good except that this application made heavy use of F Keys, e.g. (F10, F5, F1, etc). Needless to say this would not really be viable in a browser since F1 would call up help, F5 would refresh and F10 would send the cursor to the menu. We had already written a nice enough key handler that worked rather well, with the exception of these F Keys.

JavaScript Solution

After a lot of hacking around I found a way to stop the browser from calling up and propagating those events. My code was, for lack of a better word, nasty; but it did work. It involved a lot of IE/Mozilla workarounds. I recently came across some cleaner code, so here you go:

OK, So I’ve just gotten done with my Algebraic Structures (Part 1) final exam. Yes, Part 1. It was supposedly designed to help us in that the in-class portion does not contain any proofs. The result is instead of having one normal sized test taking up just 2 hours, we have one in-class portion that was really difficult and took one and a half hours; and one take-home portion that is full of proofs that is going to take about eight hours.

Funny as hell. I must admit, that part about Internet Explorer is so true, but what are you going to do? It’s all part of the job description.

In the world of web design you often come across people who don’t exactly know what they want. And that is usually a good thing for you because you can then charge them for the minimum and increase based on “added features”, which they should have seen up front, but they don’t always. This has the slight problem of having a contract with an indefinite time period.

A time period is usually scheduled for delivery of the product in the contract. This ensures the buyer that the product will be delivered in a reasonable time frame so that you don't keep extending the job for not real reason. One thing I've learnt, however, is that you need to also specify a time frame that the user has to review the work and ensure that everything is to his liking. You absolutely need this if you're not charging by the hour.

This is the problem I ran into a couple weeks ago and I’m still trying to get out of. I did a website for this guy a couple months ago. We agreed on a fixed price because it was supposed to be an easy enough job: a nice static layout, not much PHP, a Gallery, etc. A prototype was done in about three days. He was amazed by the quality of the website and had nothing but praise. Everything is good right? Wrong. He now had to burden of supplying content for the website. To make a long story slightly less long, this took a couple of months, and he only supplied pictures for the gallery and content for one of the six pages (not the home page). Now you may be thinking what does that have to do with me if the guy’s website

is empty, he paid for a design and that’s what he got right? Well I would agree with you there, but the problem was he had not yet paid the balance on his bill.

WebTTY is an interesting package. During my internship I actually had to do something like this. My employer didn’t appreciate a pre-packaged solution though, so I had to produce all the code myself.[ ]1 The WebTTY package allows any Linux terminal processes to be controlled in a text area HTML element on a webpage. The output from the server process is collected on server side, and is send to a text area element.

I’ve actually been meaning to try this myself, well a variation of it. I would , however be comparing these speeds from a C# Application performing data access to the SQL Sever 2005 or MySQL backend. Based on these tests it seems that I’d be better off with an ASP.NET connection, since this will be running on a windows environment. I will definitely take Karl’s tests into consideration as I perform my own.