After I realized what the bug was, I am sure that many users have come across it before, but for whatever reason none of them submit the bug to me.

Why did it take so long?

I would say on a normal business day i spend 10 hours a day developing (4 10’s is the way to go!). I probably run into 1-2 software bugs, not counting any in my own apps. That number goes way up if the day consists of heavy adobe product usage (fucking flash), up to about 6-10 in a single day. Regardless, I run into lots of bugs and may only report  one every 2-3 months.

Doing the math that means that there is 90-270 bugs I run into before I report 1 of them. Yes some of those are duplicate bugs but still thats a lot of missed reports.

So why do I not report more bugs?

I would consider myself to be part of the target audience who should report software bugs, but I don’t.

• Reporting bugs takes to long

Taking the time to put in enough information for a fellow developer to debug some error takes way to long. I would guess that on average it takes about 10-20 minutes. I personally do not care enough to spend 20 minutes to have point number 2 happen.

• They normally mark it as unreproducible (Microsoft you are terrible at this!)

Over time I have submitted 4-6 bugs to Microsoft, all about visual studio, with as much information as I can, and every single one has been marked unreproducible, then resolved (I don’t know how the fuck they consider it resolved?), then closed. It feels as if I am wasting my time, and because of it I stop submitting any more bugs.

On the other hand, when not dealing with Microsoft, I normally do not receive any kind of notice saying the company received the bug. So again I stop sending them in.

Make sure you respond to your users who are sending you bugs! Otherwise they will end up like myself and stop submitting ANY kind of feedback.

• I have no clue where to report a bug (Adobe)

Personally I hate adobe. Everyday it grows closer to my hate for apple, regardless with the exception of Facebook they seem to be the only major software company to have such buggy software. I cannot use an adobe product for more then a couple hours without it crashing. Flash, and Flash player are the worst!

• I have no desire to report the bug

Sometimes we just have no desire to submit the bug. We couldn’t care less about the software and really don’t want to waste my time submitting the bug.

When you get a bug the user is telling the company that they care about their product, and that want them to fix it!

So don’t get mad about bugs, be glad that users are submitting them.

How can we create a better way to report software bugs?

I have not come across a site that does a better job then grooveshark. On their site they have a feedback button clearly located on every page.

Once you click on this feedback button a very friendly message pops up and asks how you feel about the message and then asks for the message itself. Its a very simple way to get feedback and works great for submitting bugs, feedback, and any other form of general contact to them.

What did this user go through to submit a bug on my site?

This is a valid question that all site owners need to look into. Currently this site (corymathews.com) has a very prominent contact button.

How long did it take you to find it? Odds are, not to long. However when I take a look at the iSearchNotes.com site its not so clear. Take a look at the image bellow.

Do you quickly see a way to submit bugs?

Well if you really looked you would find 2 ways to contact me. You probably semi quickly saw the feedback link in the right, but it may have taken you a while to notice the contact link in the footer.

While this is by no means the best solution I would say that it is sufficient for such a small site as iSearchNotes.com. However as the site grows I will need a more clear way to submit feedback.

How about we take a look at a larger site such as Facebook.

Did you notice that tiny help button in the bottom right corner? I did not think that you would click help to submit a bug. This is like hitting start to shutdown… confusing.

Even after you click on the help button you will come to a screen where you must click suggestions from a large listing of other random crap in order to submit a bug.

Needless to say its way to hard to submit bugs to facebook and facebook is HUGE! There is no excuse for such a large site to be so difficult.

So how hard is it to submit a bug about your site/application? Could you making it simpler?

I quickly created a very basic (and very bad) model of a cup to see how it looked when I exported the cup in the .raw format. You can export a blender model using this format by first selecting the object you want to export (For whatever reason only the selected object(s) will be exported.) Then go to File -> Export -> Raw Faces(.raw). This is what I got after exporting. There shouldn’t be line wraps, however depending on your monitor you may see them. You can download the file in .raw format here.

0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.001836 -0.016245 0.011633 -0.001512 -0.011633 -0.011633 0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633
-0.001836 -0.016245 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.011633 -0.011633
0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 -0.001512 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001836 0.016993 0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 0.011633
-0.001512 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 -0.001836 0.016993 0.011633
0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 0.016943 -0.002119 0.011633
0.016943 -0.002119 0.011633 0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633
-0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.016295 -0.002119 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633
-0.016295 -0.002119 0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 -0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633
-0.001512 -0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.001745 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633
0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.001512 0.011633 -0.011633
-0.008956 -0.008956 -0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.011633 -0.011633
-0.011633 -0.001745 -0.011633 -0.008956 0.008956 -0.011633 -0.001512 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.001512 -0.001745 -0.011633
-0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 -0.016295 -0.002119 0.011633 -0.013645 -0.001861 0.011633 -0.009766 0.009583 0.011633
-0.016295 -0.002119 0.011633 -0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.009766 -0.009779 0.011633 -0.013645 -0.001861 0.011633
0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.016943 -0.002119 0.011633 0.014015 -0.001861 0.011633 0.009596 -0.009779 0.011633
0.016943 -0.002119 0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 0.009596 0.009583 0.011633 0.014015 -0.001861 0.011633
-0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 -0.001836 -0.016245 0.011633 -0.001613 -0.013616 0.011633 -0.009766 -0.009779 0.011633
-0.001836 -0.016245 0.011633 0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.009596 -0.009779 0.011633 -0.001613 -0.013616 0.011633
-0.001836 0.016993 0.011633 -0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 -0.009766 0.009583 0.011633 -0.001613 0.014044 0.011633
0.011633 0.011633 0.011633 -0.001836 0.016993 0.011633 -0.001613 0.014044 0.011633 0.009596 0.009583 0.011633
0.009596 0.009583 0.011633 -0.001613 0.014044 0.011633 -0.001311 0.010066 -0.007815 0.006850 0.006819 -0.007815
-0.001613 0.014044 0.011633 -0.009766 0.009583 0.011633 -0.007247 0.006819 -0.007815 -0.001311 0.010066 -0.007815
-0.001613 -0.013616 0.011633 0.009596 -0.009779 0.011633 0.006850 -0.007278 -0.007815 -0.001311 -0.010072 -0.007815
-0.009766 -0.009779 0.011633 -0.001613 -0.013616 0.011633 -0.001311 -0.010072 -0.007815 -0.007247 -0.007278 -0.007815
0.014015 -0.001861 0.011633 0.009596 0.009583 0.011633 0.006850 0.006819 -0.007815 0.010067 -0.001513 -0.007815
0.009596 -0.009779 0.011633 0.014015 -0.001861 0.011633 0.010067 -0.001513 -0.007815 0.006850 -0.007278 -0.007815
-0.013645 -0.001861 0.011633 -0.009766 -0.009779 0.011633 -0.007247 -0.007278 -0.007815 -0.010071 -0.001513 -0.007815
-0.009766 0.009583 0.011633 -0.013645 -0.001861 0.011633 -0.010071 -0.001513 -0.007815 -0.007247 0.006819 -0.007815
-0.001311 0.010066 -0.007815 -0.001115 -0.001287 -0.007815 0.010067 -0.001513 -0.007815 0.006850 0.006819 -0.007815
-0.001115 -0.001287 -0.007815 -0.001311 -0.010072 -0.007815 0.006850 -0.007278 -0.007815 0.010067 -0.001513 -0.007815
-0.007247 0.006819 -0.007815 -0.010071 -0.001513 -0.007815 -0.001115 -0.001287 -0.007815 -0.001311 0.010066 -0.007815
-0.010071 -0.001513 -0.007815 -0.007247 -0.007278 -0.007815 -0.001311 -0.010072 -0.007815 -0.001115 -0.001287 -0.007815

Basically, if you haven’t already noticed, it is 4 sets of x,y,z points. You will not get any of the materials when you export the object only the polygons.

Now that we have our object we will need to be able to display it using opengl. First we must read in and store the points.

CupVectors[3][4][33];

ifstream cupFile;
cupFile.open(”cup.raw”);

for(int z=0;z<=32;z++)
for(int y=0;y<=3;y++)
for(int x=0;x<=2;x++)
cupFile >> CupVectors[x][y][z];

cupFile.close();

Pretty simple code. Store the points, open the file, loop through the points, store the points, close the file.

Now that the cup vertex points are stored we are able to easily display them in opengl with another small loop that will create the triangles and save them in our display list.

1. Gritter – By:@jboesch

jQuery Grown look-a-like plugin

Plugin Page

Demo

2. jQuery Link Nudging – By: @davidwalshblog

A jQuery Link Nudging Plugin which is essentially a classy, subtle link animation

Plugin Page

Demo

3. Create The Fanciest Dropdown Menu You Ever Saw

Create The Fanciest Dropdown Menu You Ever Saw

Demo

4. ColorBox – By: @jacklmoore

A light-weight, customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery 1.3

Demo

5. Interactive, Filterable Portfolio – By: @JoelSutherland

A jQuery Plugin to Create an Interactive, Filterable Portfolio

Demo

6. Animated Menu Using jQuery

Nice animated menu using jQuery and CSS

Demo

7. jQuery Ajax delete

jQuery Ajax delete

Demo

8. Galleria

Galleria is a javascript image gallery

Demo

9. Easy Slider By: @cssglobe

Easy Slider 1.7 - Numeric Navigation jQuery Slider

Demo

10. Cycle Lite

lightweight slideshow plugin

Demo

11. Notify Bar By: @DmitriSmirnov

shows a notify bar (like on Twitter's webpage)

Demo

12. Animated Tabbed Content – By: @gayadesign

Animated Tabbed Content

Demo

To Stay up to date with more great jQuery Links follow @jQueryLinks on twitter.

String FileName = "FileName.txt";
String FilePath = "C:/...."; //Replace this
System.Web.HttpResponse response = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response;
response.ClearContent();
response.Clear();
response.ContentType = "text/plain";
response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + FileName + ";");
response.TransmitFile(FilePath);
response.Flush();
response.End();

For more content types check our http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME_type#List_of_common_media_types

You can view live demos on iSearchNotes.com or at the plug-in webpage.

In order to create our rounded corners you will of course first need jQuery. If you do not already have jQuery hurry up and go download it at jquery.com. I will wait.

Waiting…

Ok so now you will also need to download the rounded corners plug-in. This small jQuery script can be downloaded by saving this file jquery.corner.js

Now we have all that will will need to round those corners. On the page you wish to have the rounded corners on you must add includes to both javascript files.

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.corner.js"></script>

Now we must tell jQuery which areas of the layout to round.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
$("#content").corner()
});
</script>

<div id="content">Hello this would have rounded corners</div>

This simply uses jQuery’s selectors to select the id content and rounds all 4 of that divs corners by the default amount.

This plug-in can do so much more then this example. You can pick which corners to round, how much to round by, how to round, and much, much, more. Instead of listing them all check out the plug-in page to see more uses of it. (there are some pretty cool ones near the bottom of the page)

There are many different ways to use it but some of the more common uses would be:

	$("#content").corner()
	$("#content").corner("bottom");
	$("#content").corner("top");

You could always avoid javascript altogether and do it the hard way using css.

When I had to overcome this problem my main requirement was that I could not open word on the server.

Searching around the net produced countless pages with the same responses of using COM or using some third party library’s and software. However as with any project if it is possible I, as well as many other developers, try to avoid third party products.

I eventually came up with this solution:

<?php
	header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-word");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; Filename=SaveAsWordDoc.doc");
?>

Then along with your meta tags add the following

<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=Windows-1252\">

Placing this meta tag on a page will cause the browser to think it is a html word document. Thus prompting you to open/save the document instead of rendering it like a normal webpage.

The only downside to this is that when you open the file in word it will open in the web layout mode of word instead of print layout.

Example Usage:

You can view a demo of this in use over at iSearchNotes.com

Word Page: (SaveAsWordDoc.php)

<?php
	header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-word");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; Filename=SaveAsWordDoc.doc");
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=Windows-1252\">
<title>Saves as a Word Doc</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Header</h1>
  This text can be seen in word
<ul>
<li>List 1</li>
<li>List 2</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

Calling Page:
Just your normal html link.

link

The first thing I thought when I opened it up was that I clicked the wrong quick launch icon. I thought I pulled up Chrome, and that they had upgraded Cromes most visited page. But nope, It was in fact the new safari with a new interface which was copied highly inspired from Chome’s interface. Next I was thinking the top sites looked pretty good. Then I moused over them for a moment and the fan on my laptop kicked on, and my cpu usage went clean over 30%. Not a good first impression.

After that little kink it seemed that overall it was pretty slick until I opened up more than 10 tabs and realized, o shit, I cannot get to any other tabs unless I click on this stupid little … button. I tried the scroll wheel thinking they stole that from Firefox, nope, so next I tried the ctrl+tab/ctrl+shft+tab, and bingo. Still really annoying, I tried to drag some of the tabs around just to find out I have to drag them by that little icon in the corner, again not good.

Apple, I had to call you out on this one. Yes the new safari is better than version 3 but version 3 completely sucked on windows so it did not take much to do better, even Firefox 1.5 was better then Safari version 3.

I see a couple similarities…

You know its completely ok for apple to patent touch screen devises because they would never copy other peoples technologies.

Stolen Ideas:

1. Top Sites – Originally From Opera and also in Chrome (However at least they added that little star)
2. Full History Search – It’s about damn time…
3. Tabs on Top – When I grow up I want to be just like chrome
4. Full Page Zoom – Yup you were last.
5. Smart Address Field – Yup last again
6. Smart Search Field – And last again
7. Phishing and Malware Protection – Even IE8 has this

Now the things they deserve respect for.

1. Some CSS 3 Support
2. CSS Effects
3. CSS Canvas
4. Acid 3 Compliance
5. HTML 5
6. Development Tools
7. Windows Font Rendering

Why its a Load of Marketing Crap

“The world’s fastest browser”
JavaScript yes, but that’s only 1 part of a browser. Apple claims that safari 4 has its new Nitro JavaScript Engine which is “6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.”. I won’t argue that at all because the benchmarks prove it’s the fastest. However load this thing up on Windows Vista x64 and watch that free memory and CPU just disappear.

I did a “real world” test and opened up the same 12 tabs in Safari 4b, Opera 10a, and Firefox 3.1b2 and Chrome 1.0.154.48. (No I did not do IE, it’s almost never a real comparison.) I opened up the 12 websites that the new safari shows on its slow imitation of Opera’s Speed Dial, as well as 1 blank tab/speed dial/most visited/top site. I let them all just sit there for about 2-3 minutes and then took a look at the numbers and heres how they stacked up. (No its not scientific)

CPU Percent – 2.5Ghz dual
Chrome – 15%
Safari – 10%
Opera – 0%
Firefox – 0%

Memory – 3g total
Safari 4 – 394,824K
Chrome – 260,048K
Opera 10a – 152,784K
Firefox 3.1b2 – 132,184K

You can see from these results that “The world’s fastest browser” takes up 2.98 times more resources then Firefox and 2.5 times more than Opera. Safari also uses anywhere from 8-30% of my CPU time even when its minimized and not being touched. Opera and Firefox both use 0 CPU time when idle.

“The world’s fastest browser”, My Ass it is, maybe the world’s most bloated browser would fit the description better.

You really can see how badly chrome spams the process list when you look at it. Also the blanks are other programs that I have just removed from the list to make it easier to read.

“Safari is the first – and only – web browser to pass Acid 3″.
Uhh… I don’t even know what to say to this. Opera beat Safari to this way back in March 2008. Opera Passes Acid Test 3

Coverflow
Pretty cool but basically useless…

150 Features
Yea 150 Features only 28 new ones. I could get 150 Features out of a basic calculator, more marketing crap.

Overall Safari 4 is a great improvement over Safari 3 however on windows that’s not saying much Safari 3 was crap. Hopefully safari runs a lot faster on a Mac then on Windows and that huge memory and CPU consumption are not a problem for any of safari’s “real users”, however I cannot say, since I have not tried it.

This release of Safari was just a load of marketing crap, they took almost all their features from other browsers. Then Apple called these “highly inspired” changes “Leading the way with innovation”.

On a side note Safari you will not grow up and be chrome. Stop trying to look like them and come up with some of your own features in the next release or don’t call it safari 4, call it safari 3.x.

To end it on a good note, Thank you to apple for helping push JavaScript speed, and browser standards. Without these things the web will never be where it could be and for this I say, Thank You.

What are your experiences with the new Safari 4 beta so far? Are they the same as mine or better? Also to someone on a Mac, how is the performace of safari 4 on your system? I am curious as to how much faster it is.

So for example a mssql query using the escape character might look like

SELECT a FROM b WHERE a = 'cory''s'

Notice the double tick to escape the apostrophe. Really quite simple but still really weird.

Any way, here is a quick tip that will allow your c program to easily add text to the end of a file without ever having to deal with the file in your code. This is accomplished by a simple system call, take a look at the following example.

#include
int main() {
  system("ls >> 1.txt");
}

This simple code will perform the ls command and redirect its output to the file 1.txt. If 1.txt does not exist it will create the file. If the file exists it will append the output from ls to the file.

So for example you have a text box that users can input text into, they put a couple paragraphs in it and submit that data to the database. If you just strait output the content to the browser you will see one giant blob of text. So how can you fix this?

By converting the newline to a html
tag we can fix the problem. So with a little c# function we have the trick done.

public String FixLabelOutput(String val) {
    return val.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br />");
}

As you see our function simple returns all newlines as <br /> which will fix the way it is outputted.

In the aspx page you need to have this to display the corrected text. This of course can be placed in a label or just strait printed.

<%# FormatHtml(Eval("TextInfo").ToString()) %>