I’m in ur Web, Moving my Sait

Please update your bookmarks to:

http://www.robozen.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Robozen

I’m Online? Looking at a Website? No Shit!

There’s no hope for the web, is there? Most sites are poorly made and look like oatmeal on a baby bib. Others are developed cleanly by someone whose code doesn’t suck only to face another hurdle: the idiot copywriter.

The fun at this jewelry outfit begins with the domain name: steveclarkweb.com. I admit, it’s hard to find a good one, and steveclark.com is registered by a New Jersey ambulance chaser. But steveclarkweb? You don’t want “jewelry” or “designs” or “creations” to differentiate you from hordes of other Steve Clarks? No: a domain name has a far more important function. Even before people see your site, it should explicitly let them know that it is, in fact, on the web.

The tagline is also very important to this end. Steve Clark describes his site as “The Online Jewelry Showcase of Steven Clark.” There is space for ten words, and online is one of them. Wise choice, my friend, because I was under the false impression that I could jump through the screen and see real jewelry. Thanks for clearing that up!

But you know, I’m still not sure what this page is for. Is it for walking dogs? Will it make me a cheeseburger? Is it an alternative to The Google? I have to read the Basic Overview on the homepage to find out:

This website is designed to allow for shopping one of the finest fashion jewelry lines in the USA. It is meant to be available to my existing customers and to help find new ones.

So even though I still don’t know what kind of jewelry you sell, how much it costs, or even if you sell wholesale or retail, I am lucky to have received much more useful information:

1. I’m in a virtual jewelry showcase, not a real one,
2. this “website” of which you speak is designed to allow for shopping, and
3. I am eligible to partake in this shopping experience if I have shopped here before, or even if I have not.

Truly online web-based internet homepage website marketing at its best!

Angry CSS Tip: Don’t Name Your Classes After Attributes

Name your classes something sensible! If I see another CSS class named “blueText” I will scream. YOU CAN TELL IT’S BLUE WHEN YOU LOOK AT IT, STUPIDS.

CSS was invented to make attributes easy to change. Say you want a blue message on all your pages. You sensibly label it with a CSS class ‘message’ and set its ‘font-color’ to blue in the stylesheet. Then it hits you that your users are blind idiots. Since you’re smart, you just go to your stylesheet and change one attribute from blue to red. Then you can shut down your computer and spend some time with your kids before they end up in juvie from your absentee parenting.

If, however, you are retarded like some of the people I work with, you will not name your class ‘message’. You will name it ‘blueText’. When you change it to red, you will go through every one of your pages and change the class name to ‘redText’. Then you will go home, wonder why CSS was ever invented, and cry yourself to sleep.

Seeking God’s Gift to the CSS Community

I’m looking for someone to chop PSD files into clean, W3C-compliant CSS layouts. If you have a keen aesthetic sense, replete with Macbook and box frame glasses, great. However, I already know many talented designers who are shit coders. I don’t care if you think black looks good with orange, or if you can’t tell mauve from burgundy. I just need you to know CSS.

I will shower you with riches and glory if you can do it right. However, if I catch you confusing an id with a class, notice repetition in your stylesheets instead of clean cascading (why do you think they’re called ‘cascading’?), or see so much as a single table used for non-data purposes, you are FIRED.

Telecommuting acceptable. Javascript a plus.

Killing Trees for the Environment

Al Gore’s huge energy bills, the massive carbon footprint of the Live Earth concert, and now this from a client’s company mailing list:

To whomever is printing out the 100+ page report on Carbon and the Environment,

Please cancel your print job or watch over the printer while your report prints.  I’m waiting for documents to print that I need to fax to our customers’ charge companies, and they are behind your report—which keeps jamming in the printer—in the queue. 

And is it really necessary to kill tress printing out a report this long—about the environment?

This doesn’t have much to do with technology, but…LOL.

Why are IT Interviews So Stupid?

When interviewing a programmer, check that he is: a) good at coding, and b) bearable. Chat about his experience, let him scribble an algorithm to reverse a string, and wish him luck. Right?

Hell no. Tihomir Nakov just released a list of dumbass questions Google asks during its job interviews.

They include:

• How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
  
• How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
• You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

If you have ever been interviewed for an IT job, I bet your ass in that blender that you’ve been exposed to this bullshit.

Let me make one thing clear: I am a decent developer. I can do what I claim I can do. Give me a real software problem at an interview and I will pull infrastructure design, algorithms and a DB schema out of my behind. However, when I’m dressed in an itchy wool suit with nylons creeping up the aforementioned behind and I’m worrying about sweating all over the interviewer during our handshake, the last thing I want to do is solve extra credit word problems from a fourth grade math test. Ok?

Would you ask a doctor how many daisies are at the end of a rainbow? No, you’d see if he can tell genital warts from a common cold. Would you ask a mechanical engineer how many lollipops are in a candy store? No, you’d ask him to design a fucking bridge. What is it about IT interviews that makes them so bullshit-permeable?

How to *Actually* Revert in Subversion

Some Subversion naming conventions are downright lousy. For instance, “svn revert” reverts your code to some older revision, right? Well that’s what you think, my sensible friend, and you’re wrong! All it does is it reverts your working file to the latest version in the repository, the same thing that can be accomplished with a simple delete and svn update.

So to actually revert to an older version in the repository, you have to issue this madness:

svn merge -rhead:123 http://my/svn/repository ./workingcopy

Where 123 is the number of the old revision to which you want to revert.

Social Networking for Pervs: Neat!

There’s a new site called Vision 20/20 that allows you to find sex offenders in your neighborhood. That’s neat and all, but the cheerful messages kind of sound like social networking for rapists and pedophiles: “Locate Sex Offenders”,  “Wouldn’t you like to know if any of them are living in your neighborhood? Now you can!” and finally, “Do it now. It’s Free!”

I know it’s intended to protect your family and all, but really, won’t these dudes just drop by each other’s houses for coffee, bowling and evil?

Verdage Hiring

That’s right. I have too much work on my plate and am looking for evil minions to do my bidding. You must be:

1. Awesome (no exceptions)
2. Cheap (within reason)
3. Freelance (no agencies)

Scandinavian/Baltic location would be great, but not required. Knowledge of Java, Ruby on Rails or PHP preferred.

Please send CV’s and hourly rates here.

ASP.NET: Bulk Editing with DropDownList in DataGrid

Before getting to the point, allow me to bang my head against the wall one more time:

Me: I can do this in Ruby on Rails or I can do this in .NET.

Client: Which would you prefer?

Me: Thanks for asking! I personally prefer Rails. Development will take half the time, and will cost you half the money. Plus I think adding new features, as well as AJAX special effects, is much easier.

Client: Interesting idea. Let’s go with .NET.

That said, some of you other poor souls may have been wondering how to make a .NET control that:

1. Lets you update multiple records of table A at once.
2. For each row in A, allows selection using a DropDownList populated from table B.
3. The DropDownList must display the existing selection for each record of table A.

There is a very good C# solution here. I have translated it into VB, so if anyone needs that, give a holler and I’ll post it.