My last post on here was way back in July and I should be ashamed of myself. I start every year with the hope that I'll be an amazing blogger and the internet will adore me, I will score fans and forever be admired. As I get older, I realise that this is not likely to happen, however, I'll continue to post here and be determined to make a little comment about something everyday.

So, for my first post of 2012 I will comment on my wonderful trip to Paris. I really love that city. I stayed at the amazing Hotel Jules, one of the GLA Hotels and had the privilege of being looked after by Mr. Jean-Louis Descoins and his exceptional staff. Don't forget to stay there on your next trip to the city of love. The weather was dull and grey most days but the sites never cease to amaze. I made my way to the Musee D'Orsay and Sacre Coeur, two sites that you must visit at least once. I did have the chance to catch up on my reading, and I'll tell you something, I really love my Kindle Keyboard! I was able to power through the last bits of The Once and Future King by T.H. White and knock off the classic The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks to some generous gift giving I've also got World War Z by Max Brooks and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson on my list. I know, I'm such an amateur when it comes to reading for fun but I'm hoping to turn pro pretty soon!

What's on your reading list?

I finally had a chance to look at Google+ tonight and in all honesty it is everything I expected it to be. It isn't much at the moment since being on a social network without many friends is like being at a rock concert by yourself. However, the user interface really appeals to me. In fact, all of the UI changes implemented by Google in recent days are exceptional. Yes, people will still find faults but I like the consistency across the services. The design itself makes really good use of soft lines and subtle highlights. I've also loaded the new design for Gmail, which is particularly stunning. The additional white space and sparing use of color as prominent call to actions is really exceptional. I suppose it will only be a matter of time before this is rolled out across the other properties. I know this would be a welcome change to the Google Docs section.

All in all I like the direction that Google is taking. Consistency in branding is always a big plus.

I really like the spreadsheet functions added to ColdFusion 9. It makes my life so much easier but I discovered an annoyance with the spreadsheetFormatColumn function today. It would seem that you have to set the column formats after you add data to a spreadsheet. If you attempt to set it before calling spreadsheetAddRows it will set the column format to default. Not cool.

I was a big fan of Delicious because keeping track of all the sites that interest me is a hard task. The problem with this service though is that it is difficult to easily access the information unless you install a plugin on every browser that you use. This is even more of a problem when you have several machines both at home and at work. Of course, you can visit the site but the workflow is not ideal. The advent of tabs in browsers can allow you to open Delicious in one tab while working on other tabs, however, do you really want to have to keep that service open all the time? It just doesn't feel important enough.

My current solution to the bookmarking problem is to use Gmail. I email myself links then use labels to organise them. Again, not ideal, but it has two advantages over Delicious.

1. I typically always have Gmail open in a tab during the day
2. Gmail is with me everywhere, including on my mobile devices

I believe that Delicious can be resurrected if it can overcome these two main hurdles. Can the YouTube founders do this? Maybe, but it would be very difficult. The incarnation of the service will have to be much more compelling than it is currently. A utopian solution would be to get the main browser creators to include a reference to a universal bookmarking service that uses Twitter or Facebook logins for access. Hey, I never said I wasn't a dreamer!

I've finally started playing with Railo and tried installing it on my Mac with Snow Leopard installed. I wasn't able to get it to run initially but had to make two quick changes to get it running:

1. Give the current user (the user under which you are currently logged in) Read + Write access to the entire* Railo folder, including all the sub folders.
2. Change the default port for Tomcat from port 80, to port 8080 since I already had Apache running on port 80. To change the port, edit /Railo/Tomcat/conf/server.xml and change the connector port.

I have largely ignored Railo in the past but I am really eager to play around with it and get some stuff deployed on this platform.

* Note that I am using Railo in a development environment so I gave full Read + Write access to the entire Railo folder, in a production set up this would definitely not be a wise thing to do. I don't think this would be a problem in most development environments since the user under which Tomcat would be running would usually have the correct permissions.

I've not posted for a long time on this blog (or any for that matter). As with many people I seem to always have an excuse for not posting on here but then I see the trend setters of the internet able to post every day about something pretty cool. I reflect on this and wonder why I don't find something useful to post about or even have anything to say on a regular basis. I am going to write a bit more and hopefully it will be interesting and useful!

Picture this:

You are sitting on the bus,  your commute is 45 minutes long so you whip out your iPhone and start browsing Twitter. Your friend posts a link to this awesome article on social marketing, you follow the link and then sit for the next 15 minutes frustrated with:

1. waiting for the page and all it's ads to load
2. not being able to read the content because you keep having to pan back and forth on the screen.

This tends to happen to me a lot. There are VERY few sites out there that seem to understand that today there is a need for a mobile version of a website. Sure, you can get an app for your favourite site on your iPhone, Android, Symbian or Palm powered phones but these apps usually don't offer the website content or experience. The modern mobile OS and browser technology allows most websites to load and operate just as they would on a laptop or desktop but the experience is poor. With limited screen real estate, I want to execute my tasks quickly and effectively. I don't want to pinch or zoom on anything other than a map!

Two sites that have provided excellent mobile versions are:

1. Amazon - who understands user behaviour better than the users themselves, provides a slick, easy to use interface which makes shopping a breeze
2. Wikipedia Mobile - utilizing a minimalistic design, Wikipedia provides quick, relevant information on the go, no matter what your screen real estate!

These are just a couple examples but there are countless businesses and website owners out there who choose to ignore the tremendous mobile market to be tapped. Wake up people, it's 2010!

Some of the design choices in Office 2007 really baffle me. Some simple tasks just cannot be completed without jumping through so many hoops. I can't understand why this isn't on every website in the entire world! But, I hope this helps some of you out:

1. Go To: My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types
2. Choose XLS (Repeat for XLSX)
3. Click Advanced
4. Uncheck "browse in same window" in advanced window.
5. Then highlight Open
6. Click Edit
7. Make sure in the Action box it says &Open
8. Make sure in the application used to perform action it says: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"
9. Check the box next to use DDE
10. Remove anything that is in DDE Message box
11. Remove anything that is in DDE Application Not Running box
12. Make sure the application box says: EXCEL
13. And in the Topic box it says: System

The original tip can be found:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=8&threadID=195249&messageID=2254006&tag=content;leftCol

This allows you to have multiple independent Excel windows open. Very handy if you have multiple monitors.

This has been tested on Windows XP and Excel 2007.

Be strong,

The waves vibrate

And message delivered.

Fear abandoned,

The source is I.

We came across an error today with our drop down menu system that uses a PNG-24 semi transparent drop shadow image around the border where the transparency would appear black in IE 7 and IE 8. After searching and trying all possible fixes we found the solution to the problem and it was quite simple.

Our menu system uses jQuery (doesn't everything these days?), and had a nice fade in and fade out transition. jQuery handles the fade transitions by setting the opacity which IE does not like very much. So using the fadeTo() functions in jQuery is a no-no in IE. The solution, use hide() and show() instead. It's not as elegant but the transparency issue was fixed on all modern browsers.

Other solutions to the problem include:

1. Using a background colour instead of transparent on the style so you would do:

.my-transparent-stuff{background: #fff url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

instead of

.my-transparent-stuff{background: transparent url('image.png') repeat-y scroll left top;}

2. Using PNG-8/transparent gifs (hey, it's a solution)

3. Forcing IE8 into IE7 mode by adding the following meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

I still can't understand what Microsoft is doing!