About 18 months ago, I purchased my first MacBook Pro… a 17 inch monster laptop. I absolutely loved the big (1920×1200) display that I purchased as an additional feature.

Over the course of the past year, I realized that I was not really very mobile with that behemoth. Obviously, at more than 17 inches wide and almost 7 pounds, it can be quite a cumbersome unit to drag around with you. Even more, the space it takes up on your lap makes it almost unusable. Calling it a “laptop” was a bit of a stretch.

No more… earlier today, I traded in that MacBook Pro and got the new 15″ unibody MBP. 320gb of drive space, with 4gb of ram packed into a nice little 5 pound chassis. Not quite as small as my wife’s 13″ MacBook, but certainly more inline with what I would consider a laptop. All that said, I really do miss the 1920×1200 resolution, even though the LED display on this is much brighter. If I do want that resolution, I can always plug it into my wife’s 24″ Cinema display.

Using a little css trickery, you can completely hide your email address from spam harvesters. The drawback to this approach is that it will only work on sites that read left-to-right as it uses CSS to reverse the direction of text.

Add this class somewhere in your CSS file.

span.reverse {
  unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
  direction: rtl;
}
 

At the point that you are ready to present the email address, code it in your HTML, but just key it in backwards. For example:

<span class="reverse">moc.rehtrebttam@retsambew</span>

The CSS above will then override the reading direction and present the text to the user in the correct order.

Pretty clever technique.

I work in an environment, where, unfortunately we are somewhat constrained as to which browsers we support. Our target market has a very slow update cycle and our products are not necessarily the kind where the loss of use would force an IT upgrade. Therefore, our ASPNET applications must continue to support IE6.

A few clients have been consistently reporting an issue where in IE6 only images where randomly disappearing after they were clicked on. However, we had never been able to reproduce the issue. Until earlier this week…

The images in question were being toggled dynamically with a bit of javascript that looked something like this:

function toggleImages(id) {
    var img = document.getElementById(id);
    if (img.src == "active.gif") {
        img.src = "neutral.gif");
    } else {
        img.src = "active.gif";
    }
}

The html markup for the image display looked like this (with some irrelevant code removed):

<a href="javascript:void(0);">
    <img id="imageIdentifier" src="neutral.gif" onClick="toggleImages('imageIdentifier');"/>
</a>

The first clue that this was something that was caused by IE6 was that 1) no other browser was affected by the way this code was written, 2) it only manifested itself when accessing the web server through a proxy (local hits to a test website failed to reproduce this problem), and 3) only when the ‘Use HTTP1.1 for proxy traffic’ was selected from the advanced options did we see this.

As we begin to investigate this further, we find a few reports of this issue via Google. The issue has something to do with the events not being fired properly when using javascript in the href attribute. Ultimately, the fix was very easy. We simply needed to add a return false; after the onClick handler.

So there I was earlier tonight… Trying to review my credit reports like I do about this time each year. A visit to annualcreditreport.com and I was on my way… until I got to Equifax’s site.

I’d managed to forget my login information to Equifax’s site, so I used the “forgot username/password” link and was presented with a form to enter my last name, social security number, and date of birth so that they could present my challenge question to reset my password.

Imagine my surprise when I got this (click the picture for a full-size version):

So, what is my what? I’m not really sure what to type in here. What is my red star?

Equifax has also disallowed me from setting up a new account, since I already have an account tied to my social security number. So, here I have an interesting paradox. I cant login to the account because I dont know the secret word, but I cant create a new account, because I already have an account that I cant log in to.

Epic FAIL.

Earlier today, I needed to ship my camera to Canon for some repair work. Everything was moving along fine and the clerk at the UPS store had helped me box it up. He printed the label for it and informed me how much it was going to be. The price seemed reasonable and I agreed. When I went to sign the shipment receipt, I noticed that I had a $0.49 charge on there labeled a fuel surcharge.

Seriously.

Come on, UPS! I just filled my truck with gas for $1.40 per gallon and you still feel compelled to charge a FUEL surcharge when the price of gas has been cut by more than 50%. If you want to increase your rate, that’s fine, but do it in a manner that isn’t so blatantly inaccurate.

Since having purchased my MacBook Pro last year, I have managed to successfully wean myself off of almost all Windows applications for my home life. The only Windows app I still use (and keep a Parallels VM for) is Microsoft Money. I am absolutely stunned that no one has figured out how to clone Microsoft Money on OSX.

I’ve probably tried about a dozen or so finance apps for OSX, but find each one lacking in some way. The primary deal breaker is that the majority of them do not offer automatic transaction downloading from my banking institution (Bank of America in *Idaho*).

If anyone has any suggestions, I’m up for them. The ones that I’ve already looked at: iBank, MoneyDance, MoneyWell, Money by Jumsoft, Cha-ching, iCash, and several other freebies.

For those that are regex-challenged (like myself), determining exactly what a regex will match can be very much hit or miss. Recently, I stumbled across Rubular, which helps make this a little easier. Rubular is a Ruby regular expression editor, with a very sexy, ajaxy interface.

Type in your test string using the quick reference at the bottom of the page. Then enter your regular expression, and the observer takes over to show you what your regex matches on.

Very cool tool and one that I’m sure I’ll be back to visit.

Yet one other thing I love about OSX is that .iso is a first-class citizen. I’m able to mount/burn iso files without installing any other software (yes, I’m looking at you Windows).

Recently, I had a group of files and folders that I have been transporting around. I had been looking for a way to group these into an ISO so 1) they’d be easier to transport and 2) I could burn them to a CD easier. What I did not know was that with the hdiutil terminal app, I am also able to create an ISO of a folder in OSX without any additional tools.

The syntax is pretty simple:

hdiutil makehybrid -o ~/Desktop/image.iso ~/path/to/folder/to/be/converted -iso -joliet

Mission accomplished.

For the past several months, I have been rather disappointed because all the new exciting features labs have been rolling out to gmail accounts, but my Google Apps account was not getting any of these new items. I was not even seeing the Labs tab in my settings.

Earlier this evening, I was able to figure out how to do this:

• Log in to your Google Apps account as a domain admin
• Click Domain Settings on the Google Apps domain screen
• Click the checkbox next to “Turn on new features”

After selecting this checkbox, I was able to get access to all the Labs stuff, including the new task manager. Very cool!

Several years ago, I posted about webhost4life and what I considered a good act of customer service by their organization. Reading through the comments, you can see that that post has turned into a sounding board for webhost4life grumblers.

I’ve posted other comments regarding webhost4life on my blog, specifically the comment policy which was related to a comment from a webhost4life representative that I received regarding the post above. He wanted me to delete the negative comments. I replied and described my comment policy to him and have not heard from him since. Or so I thought…

The last two comments on the original post (from Bruce and Bill) interestingly enough came from the same IP. I feel ethically obligated to refrain from revealing the IP address in this post. However, what’s even more interesting is that when a whois lookup is done on that IP, it shows UNI MARKETING ALLIANCE. If you’re not familiar, UNI MARKETING ALLIANCE is the corporation which is doing business as webhost4life.com.

Posting fake comments on a site to attempt to improve your organization’s appearance on the internet is a despicable thing to do. More now than ever, I feel that my decision to leave webhost4life.com has been validated.

To the webhost4life.com folks: rather than posting fake comments on blogs that represent a fair evaluation of your services, you may be better off focusing on improving the service. Customers are much smarter than you give them credit for.