Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
I have finally acquired a spare laptop from work following replacement of machines, now it isn’t the best but I didn’t mind because all I wanted was a basic machine to play with linux on, specifically Ubuntu.
That isn’t the case anymore because I have fallen in love with Ubuntu! It has been an absolute dream to use, the GUI is beautiful and the ease of use is much better than Windows.
Installing I had some problems with v7.10 however, where it just seemed to hang after showing the Ubuntu progress bar when trying to load the install. However I thought I would try v6.06 as a last resort – it worked. When installing I loved the ease of set up, Microsoft should take a leaf out of the Linux book (or maybe a full chapter!). The installation did collapse at first attempt (at some point during the Open Office install) but following a retry I was away.
Setting up my wireless network was a little easier than Windows, not completely trouble free however. I could connect to my wireless network fine once I found how to choose the network to connect to, but I still couldn’t load any web pages by domain name, only by IP address. A little investigation and I found that Ubuntu had set the DNS to be my router. Once I had changed that to my ISP DNS servers I was cooking on gas.
I have yet to really try to use the machine for any serious work, or really get stuck into any programmes or terminal exploration – but I’ll let you know when I do.
This blog was brought to you by an Acer Travelmate 290 running Ubuntu 6.06.
Friday, October 12th, 2007
Lately work we have had to build numerous email newsletters (e-zines, and sometimes even “eFlyers”?!) with a huge amount of content and very image heavy. The number and frequency of these emails mean a challenging turnaround time and the use of templates of previous email wherever possible.
However the client dropped a massive bomb shell when it was revealed that they (as a large corporate company) use Lotus Notes 5 as their primary email client. This is bad.
Not only does this mean we have to output a huge amount of work but it also means that this work must be absolutely indestructible, unbreakable code.
If you look at the following examples of emails displayed between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, you can see how perfectly valid and working emails can be slaughtered left, right and center by the Lotus Notes HTML rendering engine.
Sony email which uses styles quite heavily. While this means that the email will not display as designed in email clients that do not support CSS (Gmail, Notes amongst others) at least it will degrade gracefully.
This Hugo Boss email doesn’t use any style for any layout or formatting byut still breaks quite badly.
My preferred method would be that of Sony, or even plain text emails – which a recent .net podcast (episode 19) said most people surveyed would prefer to receive. Unfortunately the limited technical experience of marketing staff that have to sign off these emails mean that we have to make the emails work in Notes if possible, even if the actual recipients receiving the email in Notes is minimal.
There are a number of methods that can be used to make sure you emails display as planned in Lotus Notes and hopefully the trials and tribulations I have endured for the past year can be kept to a minimum for others by following these rules.
-
NO BACKGROUND IMAGES
They just don’t work. This doesn’t just apply to Notes, but also includes other well know email clients. This should be a general rule for all HTML email builds.
-
ALWAYS SET OUT TABLE COLUMNS FIRST
No matter whether widths are set on the
|
tags themselves, it has always helped me to have an empty row right at the start of every single table, with 1px in height spacer images defining the table cell widths.
-
NEVER EVER USE ROWSPAN
Now I don’t know why this doesn’t work, but it proved to be a thorn in my design for a long time. I find that the only way to guarantee the reliable display or a table exactly as it should be is to ignore that rowspan even exists and insert tds in every row wherever required.
-
DON’T SPLIT IMAGES HORIZONTALLY
If you have a wide image, don’t split it across a row. This often results in extra space for no apparent reason, stretching the table row containing the images. Even if you have distinctly separate images, if you can get away with just using one full row width image then do it. And fight to keep it that way.
If you absolutely have to split images horizontally, each must be in its own table cell, because even with absolutely no whitespace in the code, Lotus adds a single character space between each image.
-
USE NO STYLES
In my emails, I usually set text size at 11px or 12px using a style in my font tags to get around a link and copy size bug in hotmail. However Lotus Notes ignores this, and ALL other styles. So use no margins, padding font declarations, in fact use no styles at all. Go back to the early 90s, when CSS didn’t even exist!
Since I still like to make sure the link and surrounding copy are the same size in hotmail, I still define font size, however use 13px with a size="2" back up in the font tag (or 10px and size="1").
-
DO NOT USE P TAGS
Lotus Notes doesn’t recognise the margins that should apply between p tags, so I find that declaring a font tag then using spacers to separate copy blocks, as follows:
<font face="arial, verdana, sans-serif" size="2" color="#333333" style="font-size: 13px;">
Copy paragraph 1.
<br /><img src="../images/1x1spacer.gif" width="1" height="15" alt="" />
Copy paragraph 2, and so on throughout.
<br /><img src="../images/1x1spacer.gif" width="1" height="15" alt="" />
</font>
I’m sure there are more techniques and ways to make HTML emails work in all email clients, but I find that the above guidelines help me work more efficiently by decreasing the time spent on fixing Lotus Notes issues (especially when Notes development is a requirement), in fact most are so reliable that I have also started using the above rules in all emails. You never know, they might help when it comes to developing emails for Microsoft Outlook 2007, when Word is used for parsing HTML emails.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
A blog entry by my friend Gareth prompted me to blog about this useful bookmarklet.
So you have the web developer toolbar, have solved all issues in Firefox, only to find IE doesn’t do the same.
What if you could click a bookmarked site, load a piece of javascript, then you simply click on any element on a page to display the element, id, class, hierarchy, positioning, border, margin and padding values in a pretty interface? Well sonny, with X-Ray (from http://westciv.com) you can!
The best bit is that it even works in IE, so you can troubleshoot any box model or double margin problems easily! It’s an excellent idea, and if I hadn’t already voted for jQuery, I would have voted for it in the innovation category of the .net magazine awards. Maybe you could vote in my stead!
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
My friend and colleague sent me a link to this PC Mag article…
Oh dear! What I hope this does not mean is that I will keep working hard at developing my favascript, Flash, PHP ekcetera skills only to find that the job market is saturated with people fallen from grace in respective bust companies or that the purchasers and users of such online things are put off completely.
Personally I think that there will always be failures in any kind of business environment and t’internet is no different, however the current trend of jumping on the latest band wagon is dangerous and will add to “Bubble 2.0″. Creating the next social networking site, or the next video streaming site and investing everything into it is always going to be a big mistake – I just think that there would be less of an impact if the burst does happen if some people sat back and went “Actually they did it well enough and I won’t be able to compete.”
Of course there are the services that should be removed and destroyed – things like mySpace that is a total waste of time, space and effort. Bad code breeding bad designs, thousands of bands you’ve never heard of spamming you, hundreds of friends (I don’t think I have 1,00 friends anyway – nevermind that use myspace!), bored people bombarding you with pointless things (can be applied to facebook as well!) and owned by an evil (alledgedly) corporate giant.
Rant over.
Sunday, July 29th, 2007
So this weekend I had a nice weekend picnic-ing, then watched Transformers at the cinema. Sunday was the usual Sunday League training then couple of pints. Excellent weather both days, but I did have a couple of Transformers opinions I need to get off ny chest.
Firstly Bumble Bee wasn’t a Beetle. And to wind us up he’s parked nest to a battered Beetle in the car showroom who he dents with his door! OK, so the new Camero is fine and Bumble Bee wasn’t always a Beetle (just the best one was!). But changing at will between old Camero and new wasn’t right! OK I wan’t the biggest fan originally or of the comic but surely if the Transformers could change to anything they scan or touch then they could have all been F16s! Same with that anoying little radio/mobile phone thing!!
Secondly why was Optimus Prime a big rig instead of a nice flat fronted truck as I remember him!! I wish they’d left it as was, however I must say the new Hasbro Optimus Prime toy looks pretty impressive.
But apart from that the film was awesome and I enjoyed it a lot. The moments I really enjoyed were most of the Autobot lines, Optimus Prime getting his sword out and the whole fight sequences. I’ll look forward to the second film!!
Work wise I’ve had an interesting week, something came up, made work interesting, I made what I hope will be the right decision and that I can help make some interesting changes. That’s about all I’ll say for the minute! This wek will mostly be spent working out ways to use jQuery to “add value” to upcoming jobs. And learning AJAX more so I don’t get stuck with combining 2 different ajaxy implementations on one page!
And finally – Luke Young, Jonathan Woodgate, Tuncay Sanli and Alan Smith (hopefully) aint a bad list of signings for Boro this summer. Let’s get back in Europe boys!!