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- Author
- Frans de Jonge
- Date
- Fri 28 Nov 2008 at 16:21
Republished from The One with the Thoughts of Frans.
Have you ever visited a website with specific password requirements? Nearly every website has requirements for minimum length. Various websites want capital letters, numbers, or - more commonly - both. In itself, this isn't so bad, but I keep forgetting all of these requirements. Websites should list their password requirements on places other than when creating an account and when changing said password. I don't want it to pollute the main page or the login interface, but when I ente…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 26 Nov 2008 at 18:43
- Comments
For those not familiar with American-consumerist culture, this coming Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the states. I've put together a list of the top ten coolest gadgets for the holidays, some expensive and some rather cheap. They are in no particular order.
iPhone 3G
The iPhone has become the best selling handset in the US and would make a great, more expensive gift for a family member, particularly for teens and businessmen. Whilst the iPhone 3G isn't exactly cheap, it is p…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 24 Nov 2008 at 13:04
- Comments
Now that I'm living in Minnesota (or Minne-snow-ta), I've taken up an interest in gadgets and technology designed for winter. Here are three of my favourite gadgets for cold-weather climates:
Philips Wake-up Light
One of the things I hate most about winter is the darkness. The sun rises really late and sets way too early. I also get up really early for work, way before the sun ever rises. Philips Wake-up Light simulates a sunrise so that you wake up naturally. It has some proven health benefits they claim, but I personally just like …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 21 Nov 2008 at 18:42
- Comments
SitePoint has an offer going on for the next few days where you can get a free download copy of The Art & Science of CSS for free just by following them on Twitter! This is certainly a creative way to promote their new Twitter channel. It certainly has proved popular as well because they now have over 10,000 followers! Not only is this book free, but, in my opinion, it's one of SitePoint's best books too. Go follow them on Twitter and get your free copy before it's too late!
Anyone can follow me on Twitter too, but I don't have …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 19 Nov 2008 at 23:18
- Comments
The Official Gmail Blog announced today the availability of themes for Gmail! They look pretty snazzy, I must say so myself, and certainly look leaps better than the default Gmail interface's colours. The new themes are being rolled out to all Gmail accounts in the next few days, so if you don't see the new Theme tab under Settings don't freak out. You can read the blog post to see a grid of some of the cool new themes that are going to be available.
I'm just waiting for my account to be upgraded! Hurry up Google I want to try out the ne…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 19 Nov 2008 at 16:48
Last weekend I was at the Mall of America with a friend and we went inside the Apple Store. I always make a habit of going to the Apple Store when I am at the Mall of America because it seems that there is always some new Apple gadget I haven't seen in person yet. This time I hadn't seen the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, so I wanted to stop in and to see them in person.
Wow, the new trackpads suck. The glass part of the trackpad is nice and it certainly looks sleek without the separate button. However, the new clickable trackpad is abso…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 17 Nov 2008 at 12:16
- Comments
With the current state of the world economy, everyone is questioning the future of their market. I don't think that the world economy has entirely collapsed yet, as many people seem to assume. We are no where near Great Depression conditions, but it is still important to expect some financial hardships for most markets in the coming years. How will the Internet fair in the declining economy? Of course, this is a bit hard to predict, but I think that we can at least examine a few factors that shed some light on the future of the Internet.
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Thu 13 Nov 2008 at 18:45
- Comments
I've noticed in the past few months that fewer and fewer websites have resizable layouts that can properly shrink for an 800x600 resolution. The few resizable layouts I've encountered will only shrink for an 1024x768 resolution, which I guess they assume is the most common monitor size now, and slightly expand for anything larger. It was only a few years ago that most websites catered to an 800x600 resolution! Now it seems the era of resizable layouts is dying out.
Resizable layouts are ultimately better for the user because they don't re…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 11 Nov 2008 at 23:53
The New York Times' blogger Saul Hansell has reported a clarification about Opera and the iPhone. He went and further questioned Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Opera's chief executive, about Opera Mini and the iPhone for extra clarity:
He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an "internal project" of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple's software development kit and realized th…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 10 Nov 2008 at 12:30
- Comments
Before being elected as President, Obama promised that his new administration would embrace technology in order to incorporate citizens more into the democratic process. One way he plans to do this is to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to his cabinet "to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century". Beware that this position will probably only be symbolic, but it's a step in the right direction.
There is a lot of speculation about whom Obama will appoint…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sun 9 Nov 2008 at 15:07
- Comments
PunBB 1.3 has finally been officially released just today! This release brings tons of improvements from 1.2, particularly the new extension system. Here is a small list of improvements (from the official news post):
Extension system based on hooking technique. One click extension installation, no need to modify forum's code anymore.
Full UTF-8 support.
More customisable styles, templating system.
New layout: markup, CSS, language files updated, markup helper functions added.
URL rewriting schemes, nice URL's built-in.
Split/merge t…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 7 Nov 2008 at 21:08
When you're designing a website you know how many windows you can have open: code editor, web browser(s), Photoshop, terminal window (for SVN or CVS), etc. You're desktop gets crowded! Sure, there are various windows management tools in every operating system, but when you have five or more windows open it still gets crowded. This problem is quickly solved by virtual desktops, which allow you to group sets of windows into their own "desktop".
Before I purchased my Macbook, I just dealt with one desktop, largely because I had two huge …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 5 Nov 2008 at 20:17
Last week there were a number of reports on the Internet about Opera's mobile browser being rejected from Apple's iPhone App Store. To clarify, Apple apparently rejected Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile. I guess some people were confused and didn't realise that Opera has two mobile browsers. Apparently, Opera Mini was rejected because it was running a Java ME runtime on the iPhone, although this is only speculation. This of course violates the iPhone's SDK agreement. Still, if Opera were to redevelop Opera Mini using the C API, Apple would pro…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 3 Nov 2008 at 12:29
- Comments
CNET's News.com is reporting about Windows 7 having quickly leaked onto Bittorrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova:
The pre-beta version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system released to developers at the Professional Developers Conference has already made it onto prominent BitTorrent sites, where thousands of enthusiasts around the world are currently downloading it.
Windows 7 leaking out onto Bittorrent is no surprise at all, it happens with everything nowadays. It would be nice if Microsoft just gave out the pre-rel…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sat 1 Nov 2008 at 13:06
- Comments
Many of my client projects have utilised WordPress as the foundation for each website. This is usually the client's choice because they don't want to pay for an entire custom CMS, no matter how much I push for it (because I find it the best solution in most cases). Hence, I have to find ways to build off of WordPress in order to meet the client's specifications. Luckily, the WordPress development team has made one of the best plugin platforms I have ever worked with.
Creating new plugins and modifying existing plugins for WordPress are ex…
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