The Lighter Side of Code

I am currently working on my laptop and I had to move a huge file from my desktop and I was cringing at the thought of Vista running the file transfer.  For those who have never had the joy of working with Vista, it has the worst file transfer utility EVER.  The estimated time is always off by hours and for some reason it takes 3-10 times longer to move a file than any other Windows OS.  I just downloaded TeraCopy after looking around for a good utility and wow!  I just moved a 358MB file in 1/10 of the time the native Vista file utility would’ve taken.  If you are feeling the pain, get TeraCopy.

It was pretty funny though.

I am by no means a fan of soccer, but I am a avid US fan and this first test sucked!  The US ladies played lackadaisically and looked horrible on the pitch.  All I saw was lazy passes, sloppy long ball play and random players tripping over their own feet.  Norway simply whooped some butt, and made the US ladies look sad.  I guess they played hard, but it wasn’t hard enough in my opinion, this is the Olympics!  If I played in the Olympics I would rather die on the field than lose, but I guess I just hate losing more than some.  Anyway, this better not be a trend for the rest of the games.

I recently became a Mac user and I am in love…again.  Well, I wanted to move my mail from Outlook over to Mail.app, but I didn’t want to pay for Entourage.  So, I went searching and found some help on the interweb that got me migrated successfully.  Well, one thing annoyed me about the GUI, and that was how the preview pane was always on the bottom.  I figured there was a setting that I could use to fix the problem, but I couldn’t find it.  Here are two plugins that tae care of this.  You can have a vertical view by installing one of the following:

WideMail and Letterbox.  I am personally using Letterbox, and it does the job just fine.  I hope this helps someone out.

As a developer I think anything that helps me figure out visual problem faster is great for me.  It is my opinion that Firefox is the best browser out there for development work.  If you include the many plugins and the fact that you can use frame specific properties, if you are working with frames, Firefox is far superior.  So, when I started extending Firefox to help me work faster and with less pain and suffering I found these plugins.  The main reaosn I am writing this post is to inform the folks who don’t use any tools other than CF studio 5 or just Dreamweaver.  So, here we go:

Although I don’t use this plugin all the time, it is necessary for another one of the four plugins I have listed.  I occassionally use Firebug for javascript debugging and css manipulation, but the main reason I have Firebug is for:

YSlow is a plugin that analyzes you page and tells you why it is running slow.  This plugin is great when you have gotten your queries working correctly and your page is still running slow.  This is the final touch plugin I use to get a site optimized.

SeoQuake is what I use when I am working on the SEO of a website, or looking at tricks that others use to get high rankings.  I have only been using this for a short period of time, but with all the information available to you it’s become invaluable for me.

Finally, my all time favorite

This plugin is simply the cat’s pajamas!  Matching this plugin and cfeclipse has increased my productivity immensely.  My favorite features are the “Display Element Information” and the “View Form Information”, but that’s because I use those a lot.  Quite frankly, if you can think of something that you would like to view in the generated HTML, Javascript, or CSS you can probably find an option to display it with Web Developer.  Whether it’s image sizes and dimensions, editing css information, or outlining tables and divs, this bad boy is sweet.  If you don’t have this plugin or if you haven’t used it yet, you have to start.  I will step off the soap box now.

I have been going to Hulu for a while now to watch TV shows that I missed during the week.  I stumbled upon the site on one of my many trips through searchville and I really dig this site.  I rarely get to watch TV with two kids and a wife who is a reality TV junkie.  Now I can go online and catch that shows I missed and some new shows I didn’t know about…all for free!

Hulu offers tons of content and some networks I never knew existed.  By the way, the Mojo network had some interesting shows there.  So, there you go, if you already knew about Hulu then nevermind but if you didn’t then check it out.

I was talking to a friend of mine and he brought up the car version of Voltron.  Now, I don’t know if I blocked this out because it was crap or what, but I found this clip on theTube.  Pay attention to the number of cars it took to assemble Voltron, holy crap!  They went from five to fifteen, more than double the number of people needed!  Hilarious.  No wonder why I don’t remember it.  I kept telling my friend that it was an obvious marketing ploy to get kids to buy all of the cars.

I was listening to one of my new favorite podcasts at FreelanceSwitch.com and I ran across this neat little site.  Behold Twistori.  I am sure that some of you have seen this site before, but I found it a good waste of time.  I couldn’t believe some of the stuff people were saying on Twitter.  Check it out.  Oh, and for those freelancers out there, you should definitely go through FreelanceSwitch.com.  They have a ton of information on the site and it’s good info, not the fluff you see on other sites.

I am glad that I don’t work in anoffice setting, because I would’ve just gotten some crazy eyes.  I haven’t been to sys-con in a while now, and I remember one of the reasons I stopped going.  What is up with the Windows Server ad in the top right corner that starts running on load?  It runs on EVERY page!  At least autoplay based on first view or something.  I am listening to  some music and bam here comes the lame ad with the audio ramped up.  Am I the only person annoyed by this?