webbson #webdev

Whatever service you register for there probably is a pre-populated check box about receiving news and events via email, the question I'm asking is if that really is a necessity in today's social internet based society? 

My first instinct is ´Hell no!`, the first thing I do whenever I receive a newsletter it to go to the bottom of the mail and hit that unsubscribe button like there's no tomorrow. I get bombarded enough of new products and services though Facebook and twitter, if I'm interested in a company I can easily follow them on either of them and hopefully they will send an update whenever they do something interesting.

For whom are newsletters working then? In my head the typical person who likes newsletters is more than 50 years old, who is stuck in the 90's and don't use the computer for more than ordering stuff and paying the bills. They probably still have an old computer running Windows XP and use Internet Explorer. At least in my head that is the typical newsletter reader. 

While rage-unsubscribing one day I found this wonderful service Unroll.me which makes it easy to unsubscribe and manage your subscriptions. 

What about the companies still implementing newsletter then? I guess it's all about getting to all customers, and since newsletter has been there since well before all the social networks it's easier to keep it as an alternative.

I don't know about you, but I have many computers for many things on my desks and instead of having multiple keyboards and mice there is a much better solution!

In comes Synergy, an application which is most easily described as a software KVM without the video part. You setup a server, which is the computer you have connected your keyboard and mouse to, then you configure where you clients screens shall be located and then you connect your clients to the server and voilá! Just like extended desktop but on multiple computers.

At work I run a Windows laptop with an external screen as my main computer and at the side I have an MacBook Pro for mail and docs. Hence I get a triple screen setup. The good thing is that you can mix OS's however you want.

At home I have an old laptop standing on the side by my main 27" screen just running irssi and other small linux stuff on a crunchbang dist. 

Pros:

Less cluttered desk

Copy-paste text between clients

OS independent

Many settings

Cons:

No file copy

Sometimes you try to drag a window from one machine to another

"As a web developer, I stare at Chrome's developer tools -- particularly the Elements and Console tabs -- all day long. As a result, all light and no dark makes Zach's eyes dull and tired. A coworker alerted me to the fact that as of very recently you can change the theme in Chrome to dark. As a fan of Sublime Text 2, and its color scheme, I thought I'd give it a shot -- and wow, what a difference."

If you've ever tried playing with responsive pages and have used float: left/right on children inside a container you've probably noticed that the parent container isn't getting any size heightwise unless you manually enter a it. This can be a problem if you for example want to add a background behind all the floating children.

If you look at the following JSFiddle you can see it for youself:

What is the solution to this then? Well it's rather simple, as long as you just have the floating elements inside the parent div, add overflow: hidden to it and it will magically engulf all the floating children. Try yourself to add it to the #outer div.

This is a site I made about a month ago, basically what it does is to collect how many BTC/MHs different auto-trade multipools payout for each day and then present it in a easy to understand way.

New pools are added when they have a way to read the BTC/MHs for the last 24 hours in an easy way, the best is if they have an api with historic day by day data back in time so I can get a lot of statistics in directly.

Since I'm going to try to make the sound in the 360 as great as possible I decided to take the sound system that I had in my V70 T5 and put in the 360. That means stripping out the amp, subwoofer, wires and front speakers and mounting new speakers in the front that shall be powered by the car stereo.

The xenon ballast on my Volvo V70 T5 2004 broke so I only had one working headlight. Instead of paying the 3000 sek it costs from Volvo or 1500 sek from a parts dealer in Sweden I bought one on ebay for only 800 sek.

If you like me like to test the newest software releases and frameworks you might have got the same error as me when you have an old Sitecore installation (pre CMS 6.5.0 rev. 120706 (6.5.0 Update-5)) and try to login. 

This is because .Net 4.5 changes som stuff that Sitecore depends on in the older versions.

The error "Object of type 'System.Int32' cannot be converted to type 'System.Web.Security.Cryptography.Purpose'" can be dealt with in 3 ways that I know of.

Uninstall VS 2012, .Net 4.5 and reinstall .Net 4.0.

Or you can upgrade you Sitecore installation using this guide.

Or... you take the easy route and open up your web.config and search for <setting name="Login.RememberLastLoggedInUserName" value="true"/> and change this to <setting name="Login.RememberLastLoggedInUserName" value="false"/>

Problem solved, with the last fix the Workbox doesn't work. But atleast you can login and use the interface as normal as long as you don't need the workbox.

A lot of people who make websites that are for either for mobiles or just responsive websites that are made for all mobile devices. And one common thing for all those sites is the following meta tag. This tag was originally invented by Apple for the Safari browser on iOS and isn't a w3c compatible standard. The tag looks as following

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

Instead of this you should use @viewport which is a UA stylesheet in your CSS code. This proposed solution which by this day is just a developers draft would look as this

@viewport {  zoom: 1.0;  width: device-width;  max-zoom: 1.0;  width: auto; }

This blog now supports the Go dark for IE cause. 

I do this because I think that old browsers, especially IE (6,7,8) are hurting the web and making it more difficult for developers to make websites utilizing new amazing standards.

So, all users who use shitty browsers: Upgrade today!

So, since I can't change phone provider until December I'm stuck with my old iPhone 4 until then.

And one of the things that has begun to bother me more and more was that my home button had started to ignore my clicks. And like the tech savvy guy I am of course I would change it myself. :)

So, after I posted my problems in the [H]ard|forum I got a whole bunch of great advises and things I should try out. 

But the thing that it came up to in the end, which seems to have solved this issue was.... replace the SATA cable!

I bought my computer 2 years ago and at the time it consisted of

ASRock X58 Extreme3 motherboard

Intel Core i7 930 2.8GHz @ 3.8GHz

Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz

nVidia Geforce GTX480

40gb SSD (C:)

2tb WD green (D:)

2x1tb WD black in raid0 (F:)

Corsair HX850

Corsair H50

Now for about 3-4months ago I decided I needed to beef up the graphics, so I bought myself 2x Radeon 7970 3GB since my motherboard has 2 PCI-E x16 slots.

And everything ran great for 1-2 months. Then I started to get mysterious hangups, where my software froze, my I could still move my mouse. Any software I clicked in during that time would freeze as well. If I had "My computer" up I could see how the D: drive would loose all information about it. And if I had CMD up I could do "dir C:", "dir F:" without any problems, but when it came to "dir D:" CMD froze. Determined that it was my D: drive that was faulty I decided to order myself a new big SSD.

So now my specs looks as this:

ASRock X58 Extreme3 motherboard

Intel Core i7 930 2.8GHz @ 3.8GHz

Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz

2x Radeon 7970 3GB in crossfire

240GB Sandisk Extreme SSD (C:)

2x1tb WD black in raid0 (D:)

Corsair HX850

Corsair H50

After I installed that my computer ran great for exactly a week, then once again it froze. But this time with the difference that it would "un-freeze" after approx. 30-60 seconds and go back to normal.

Googled this error and found out that the SATA3 controller card on my motherboard was really unreliable (Marvel) and could give these problems. In the end of my googling I started to get random bluescreens that pointed at the Marvel driver so I thought it must be this. And then I moved my SSD over to the Intel SATA2 controller card and the computer worked, for 2 weeks. 

This was two days ago (9/9-12), I was playing Battlefield 3 and quit the game. Then I got massive freezes to the extent  that I had to reboot my computer. And now it wouldn't boot. On reboot it wanted to do a startup repair, I let it, but it couldn't find anything. Rebooted and it worked.

Looked in the logs and had a single error: "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0."

Shut it down and went to bed.

The next day I was going to play some more BF3, tried to start it thru Battlelog, "Origin is not installed". WTF!

Went to the Origin folder and found out that the origin.exe was missing. Tried to reinstall but the installer would just quit midways thru updating with an error in the windows logs. "Not enough storage is available to process this command."

Went to the Origin folder again and could find the origin.exe there. Sometimes it had an icon and sometimes not. When double clicking it I got the error "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item." Read all about this and tried everything but nothing worked. Until someone wrote somewhere, try with a different user account. 

Created a new one and voilá, Origin worked.

Thought hmm, my old account must be broken I'm going to remove it. Went into Windows user accounts manager and pressed delete account. Took about 30 seconds and the computer froze several times in the process. (the mouse wouldn't move either).

Went into the windows logs and was greeted with 20-ish "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0."