Dark Side of the Carton

Poor Planning Leads to Poor Execution

Chris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:29:30 +0000

When it comes to home improvement, I’m fairly comfortable tackling most projects even if it is something I haven’t attempted before. I recently decided that it was time to install crown moulding in my daughter’s room. I hit the web and started doing a little reading. After reading a half dozen articles, I was fairly [...]

Horizontal Subnav with CSS and jQuery

Chris — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:42:49 +0000

Navigation and sub navigation is something that almost all sites have and very few actually implement in a user friendly way. I’ve struggled with the best way to do this in the past and even hacked the jQuery UI Tabs implementation to achieve what I needed. Last week I was browsing some of the feeds I [...]

A working recursive directory remove function for PHP

Chris — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:18:40 +0000

I’ve got a client that really wanted to have functionality built into his site that would duplicate a directory and all the files. No big deal except that all the files end up owned by nobody and with the permissions set to 644, which means I can’t delete them via FTP when something goes wrong [...]

The $300 Million Button

Chris — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:15:03 +0000

I made a post the other day talking about user interface and I wanted to share the post that really inspired me and changed my whole viewpoint on interface design. It is called The $300 Million Button.

Preserving form data on the fly – Part 1

Chris — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:55:31 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to interview a celebrity about an upcoming video game that he is involved with. There was a little bit of a challenge to conducting this particular interview because it had to be conducted through Twitter. Twitter isn’t a great avenue for interviews since I didn’t want everyone to see the [...]

What is more important, design or UI?

Chris — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:21:35 +0000

There are really quite a few steps that go into a well designed site beginning with the functional design of the site, the visual style and appearance of the site, and then the underlying code that pulls it all together. I’m very good at the last piece of the puzzle, but I have never taken [...]

Firefox 3.5 Character Encoding Issues

Chris — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:49:07 +0000

I usually upgrade to the newest version of Firefox, currently 3.5.2, as soon as it becomes available. In the last week or so I noticed that certain web forms with text boxes begun to display very odd characters regardless of what I was typing. I could copy this text and paste it into notepad and [...]

5 Tips to Write Better CSS

Chris — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:31:03 +0000

I’m not normally a fan of crosslinking to other sites, but I ran across a really good article for people new to CSS that may need a little direction on how to organize their CSS. These are things that would have been hugely helpful to me as an early user of CSS. You can check [...]

Working with the OpenView Database Part 1

Chris — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:54:33 +0000

To be a rockstar administrator of an OpenView installation, you’ll need to be comfortable working with the raw data in the OpenView database. This article is going to cover the basics of the OVO database and which tables you should be familiar with. To begin, connect to your OVO database using SQL Server Management Studio. The main [...]

New Content: HP OpenView

Chris — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:54:08 +0000

Starting today, I am going to be expanding the content of this site to include information about working with and administering an HP OpenView environment. By day, I manage an enterprise level monitoring infrastructure running HP OpenView/Operations Manager and there seems to be a discerning lack of information on the internet with relation to some [...]

Sort Data with NULLs at the Bottom in Microsoft SQL Server

Chris — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:18:04 +0000

One of my clients has a reporting system that orders the data by a column that is a date. They wanted the sort to be ascending, but this places columns with a NULL value at the top followed by the data ascending. They wanted the NULL dates to appear at the bottom. To achieve this, [...]

jQuery Superfish Menu and Jeditable in IE7

Chris — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:24:30 +0000

Since I’m carrying on a love affair with jQuery right now, I’m moving most of my customers to jQuery based plugins to simplify the JS code that I am currently using on their sites. One customer happens to make extensive use of the jQuery Jeditable plugin for dynamic/ajax based content updates. One issue I ran [...]

Validating reCaptcha with jQuery and AJAX

Chris — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:12:01 +0000

I recently did some work for one of my clients that involved securing some simple web forms. These forms were to request literature or request a call back, simple stuff. Incidentally they were getting hammered with spam. The clients didn’t seem to care for this so they asked me to stop it. My first move was [...]

New Blog

Chris — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:42:24 +0000

Most of my posts over the past few months have been of a technical nature and it’s time for this blog to officially find it’s place. From this point forward I will be focusing my writing efforts on PHP, jQuery, or whatever else I am working with at the time. My new personal writing will [...]

Taking a Break

Chris — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:54:30 +0000

No, I promise that I didn’t die or forget about this site. The reality is that in the past few weeks I’ve been swamped with freelance work, taking a much needed vacation, and working on some of my personal sites to improve them. I’ve got a few things lined for this site and I’ll try [...]