I jsut realized that my brand new Wordpress theme sucks in Internet Explorer 7. My footer doesn’t show up, and my sidebar is all the way to the bottom.

I remember when I first started with this them, I went through the whole cross browser thing and everything looked fine. I tweaked everything to my liking and was satisfied. Now I have to go backwards, one element at a time and try to isolate which tweak, new content, post, or plugin that has caused this to happen.

Or I may just find a new theme. But in the mean while, I’ll continue hating IE. Why doesn’t stuff just work as it’s supposed to?

 I realized this problem at the worst possible time, Monday morning at 1:41AM, so who knows when I’ll get to it.

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I know a lot of you might be wondering what’s going on, but once again we’re gonna have to take a short break. I recently sold off my old computer so right now I’m paying for internet access and I don’t have a computer. OK, I’m not a total idiot. I did make a purchase recently. I ordered a bunch of computer parts, since I’m building the new one. Here’s the problem. Like an idiot, I forgot to get a heat sink and a fan for my CPU. So I’m waiting for these to arrive in the mail. It should be some time next week though. But this is where I am. The only other place I have internet access is of course at work, but seeing as I just started this job, I’m not trying to get yelled at so soon. So I guess it’s see you guys next week.

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Introduction

OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information.

How It All Started

Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good. Business is so good that they got a new client in the state of Washington. For this client, however, they were doing a complete rewrite of their software from Visual C++ 6.0 (with all that MFC stuff) to a .NET product written in C#. So they were looking for programmers to work on the new stuff. So they were going from university to university looking for some programmers to handle the new contract.

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Introduction
Back when I was doing my internship we had a major problem we were trying to solve. The project involved creating a web based terminal emulator using AJAX. Well, it was a little bit more specific than that. It was basically duplicating a specific application in the browser window.

Problem
Sounds all well and good except that this application made heavy use of F Keys, e.g. (F10, F5, F1, etc). Needless to say this would not really be viable in a browser since F1 would call up help, F5 would refresh and F10 would send the cursor to the menu. We had already written a nice enough key handler that worked rather well, with the exception of these F Keys.

JavaScript Solution
After a lot of hacking around I found a way to stop the browser from calling up and propagating those events. My code was, for lack of a better word, nasty; but it did work. It involved a lot of IE/Mozilla workarounds. I recently came across some cleaner code, so here you go:

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OK, So I’ve just gotten done with my Algebraic Structures (Part 1) final exam. Yes, Part 1. It was supposedly designed to help us in that the in-class portion does not contain any proofs. The result is instead of having one normal sized test taking up just 2 hours, we have one in-class portion that was really difficult and took one and a half hours; and one take-home portion that is full of proofs that is going to take about eight hours. Yaaaaayyy. That’s what I always wanted.

Tomorrow I have Contemporary Programming Languages and I need to hand up my Numerical Analysis take home exam. That should be simple enough. On Wednesday I have to hand up Part 2 of Algebraic Structures and then that’s it. Did you hear me? That’s it. Well, that is after I graduate on Saturday. And I’ll be done with school for a while; a very long while. After this I have about one month before work starts. Yes, that’s a whole other story on it’s own, I got a JOB. I got to move and all that stuff. But hey, I’m just so psyched about finishing with school that I can barely contain myself. Again, this is a 10 minute break from my studies and I got to get back to it. I don’t want my GPA to take any other unnecessary dips before I’m all done. Rumor has it I’ll be graduating with honors. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

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Funny as hell.

I must admit, that part about Internet Explorer is so true, but what are you going to do? It’s all part of the job description.

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In the world of web design you often come across people who don’t exactly know what they want. And that is usually a good thing for you because you can then charge them for the minimum and increase based on “added features”, which they should have seen up front, but they don’t always. This has the slight problem of having a contract with an indefinite time period.

A time period is usually scheduled for delivery of the product in the contract. This ensures the buyer that the product will be delivered in a reasonable time frame so that you don’t keep extending the job for not real reason. One thing I’ve learnt, however, is that you need to also specify a time frame that the user has to review the work and ensure that everything is to his liking. You absolutely need this if you’re not charging by the hour.

This is the problem I ran into a couple weeks ago and I’m still trying to get out of. I did a website for this guy a couple months ago. We agreed on a fixed price because it was supposed to be an easy enough job: a nice static layout, not much PHP, a Gallery, etc. A prototype was done in about three days. He was amazed by the quality of the website and had nothing but praise. Everything is good right? Wrong. He now had to burden of supplying content for the website. To make a long story slightly less long, this took a couple of months, and he only supplied pictures for the gallery and content for one of the six pages (not the home page). Now you may be thinking what does that have to do with me if the guy’s website
is empty, he paid for a design and that’s what he got right? Well I would agree with you there, but the problem was he had not yet paid the balance on his bill.

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WebTTY is an interesting package. During my internship I actually had to do something like this. My employer didn’t appreciate a pre-packaged solution though, so I had to produce all the code myself.

The WebTTY package allows any Linux terminal processes to be controlled in a text area HTML element on a webpage. The output from the server process is collected on server side, and is send to a text area element. Keypresses in textarea are collected on client side and send to the server process. WebTTY uses AJAX/DHTML patterns to achieve in-page updates without refreshing the entire page.

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