Wow!

I've been reading CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland to get a handle on Cascading Style Sheets and it includes some interesting links to other CSS resources on the web.

One spectacular site I just found is css Zen Garden, a site that demonstrates some of the power available just through CSS. The designs are fantastic and the site itself is very generous in offering the code behind the scenes for students to learn from.

I'm starting to like FireFox ...

I don't take sides in the quasi-religious war between Microsoft fans and Open Source devotees. Mostly, I just want a good standard to work with and I don't begrudge a company for making a profit while setting one. This also means that I'm going to go with the best solution, regardless of the source.

Now that I'm studying Cascading Style Sheets for use in the redesign of Drewslair.com, I'm starting to appreciate some of the differences between the browsers.
I've had Firefox installed for awhile now so I could test changes to the site but that's about all I've been using it for. Now I'm getting a deeper perspective on how the browsers deliver content and I'm seeing the FireFox does have some nice advantages.

One I just ran across was the way in which font-sizes are handled by the browser. It's annoying to me the way so many sites use such small text lately, maybe in an effort to look trendy. My eyesight's pretty good but it's still a strain sometimes when I'm reading a long passage in a really small font. My first instinct is to use the browser to increase the size but I've noticed that often doesn't work. Now I know why.

Font size can be defined a number of ways on a site; by percentage, pixel size, keywords, etc.. If the font is specified in pixels, especially, Internet Explorer will not resize it whereas FireFox will. I took some time just now to compare the two and not only was Firefox able to resize the text but it doesn't limit the resize to five settings the way IE does.

I have IE 6.0 installed on my main machine so, to be fair, I loaded up a virtual machine with the latest version, IE 7, installed. IE 7 does have a new magnification feature which magnifies the entire page as if it was magnifying an image and it's pretty flexible in the sizes. Still, I find the FireFox resizing more usable since it only resizes the text, leaving the relative formatting intact so you don't have to scroll back and forth to read the page.

Any fair feature comparison would have to be between Firefox and IE 7 and that's the only one that I've been able to do so far but it has my attention.

Tangents ...

Last week, I wrote about how given enough time and interest I was confident in my ability to learn anything. After years of kicking myself for not doing enough with that ability, I seem to be making up for lost time in testing it out.

I've added a new book to my Safari Bookshelf on ASP.NET 2.0. Despite the experience I have with .NET, web design and the other concepts involved, I just hadn't played around with it yet. I've never been too proud to start out with the beginner's books when it came to a new subject so after looking at the user reviews on a few of the books, I chose Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed so far. I'm into Chapter (Hour) 3 now and it really does make it easy for the absolute beginner to get started.

The book relies heavily on Microsoft's free web development program, Visual Web Developer which I'm also getting to be impressed with after downloading and installing it. I had Visual Studio 2005 installed already and thought about trying to work through all the examples using that but Visual Web Developer comes with a small development web server for testing and the alternative was installing IIS on my machine which I didn't want to do right yet.

Unfortunately, my current hosting service, which I'm very happy with, doesn't support ASP.NET so I won't be able to use it with the eventual overhaul of the site.

Of course not everything is about Drewslair.com ...

Design Abstractions

A few years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote a wonderful article for his site called The Law of Leaky Abstractions, the general idea of which was that while new technologies such as high-level programming languages might make things easier for the average professional, they will never replace a solid understanding of the technologies they are built on top of. This is because the tools that do so much work behind the scenes never offer the fine control that the lower level tools will. They also provide an illusion of power that makes it easy to avoid learning the real substance. Joel provided some good examples in his article and now I have one of my own to share.

When I started working on the site back in 2000, one of the first things I did was to figure out what software I would use. I'd used Adobe PageMill on an earlier website attempt but that was no longer available and Microsoft FrontPage seemed to offer everything I needed for the right price. I came up with a theme for the site, put together some content and was pretty happy with myself for building a site and registering a domain name to go with it without having to do any of that tedious stuff like learning HTML. This would seem kind of surprising for a programmer like me but that's the way it was. I just wanted to focus on the content and look and feel of the site and besides, I was busy with Access at the time.

It wasn't until a friend of mine started designing a site of his own and went straight to manually coding the pages that I was more or less shamed into learning the basics of HTML. Even then, after I realized how simple it was and how I could have some finer control when I needed it, I was just as happy to keep using the code generation features in FrontPage.

Now, aside from the way FrontPage writes its own, rather verbose, HTML behind the visual designer interface, there's another aspect to the abstraction. FrontPage also offers features that would often be done with other scripting tools like PHP and ASP. Instead of using these scripting options, FrontPage uses its own proprietary code. I have my theories about the reasons for this but what it means to the user is that in exchange for the ease of setting up something like a hit counter or dynamic navigation, the pages need to be published on a web server that has the FrontPage Extensions installed which will translate that proprietary code and display it as intended. That was fine with me as it wasn't too hard to find hosting services that provided FrontPage support.

Then, last year, came the announcement: Now that FrontPage was no longer available, Microsoft had dropped support for the FrontPage extensions on Linux servers which meant there would be no more bug fixes or security upgrades. My hosting service has decided to keep supporting them but will drop them if there are any security problems. That's pretty nice of them, actually.

So, I finally decided to get off the FrontPage fixation which meant getting back into HTML and figuring out how to do on my own all the things that FrontPage does for me now. I talked to a co-worker who has his own pretty impressive site and he talked about languages like PHP and JavaScript so I figured I'd be looking at those and other options.

I checked out at a couple other page and site generation packages and wasn't really impressed. The best one I found turned out to be buggy and I didn't want to deal with that. Then there was the issue that I'd already paid for FrontPage so I started to look through it to see how I could use it without using features that would require the extensions. I was pleasantly surprised to find it has some nice features that speed things up once you're ready to move to the next level of web development and actually do some of the coding yourself.

I won't be able to use HTTP to upload the site without the extensions which means that I can't just point FrontPage to www.drewslair.com and let it sort everything out. FrontPage does upload through FTP, though, and does a decent job of synchronizing the files. My hosting service provides a good control panel interface and I was able to setup a subdomain for testing and an FTP account that would point there so FrontPage could still handle things. The borders that are shared by all the pages and include navigation and the credits are also things that I'll have to do on my own. FrontPage also made it pretty easy to manage the theme for the site but when I look at how it does it, it's really just a jazzed-up version of CSS so, given some time, I can do that on my own.

There are other features that I'm not sure how I'll do on my own yet but I'm sure I'll find something. It will be a lot of work and take some time since it's not the only thing I'm doing right now but in the end, the site will be better for it and I'll be a bit smarter as a site owner.

Speaking of libraries ...

I've always liked getting new books. It might have started with the book club that we had in elementary school. At least once a year, they would distribute these catalogs with all the latest books for young people (including movie novelizations which I imagine were really popular) and we were allowed to pick out a certain number of books. I think they were partly subsidized by the school and our parents paid the rest - I don't remember all the details. I just remember drooling over the catalogs and then six weeks later coming into homeroom and seeing all the packages of books stacked on the table at the front of the room, waiting to be distributed. It was like Christmas ...

It probably started before that when my mother would read to me and then I read the books on my own afterward. I remember her telling me to ask if there were any words I needed help with and I still remember going to my parents and older brother asking them what certain words meant.

The library was one of my favorite places when I was growing up.

All these years later, I still like browsing in Barnes and Noble or Borders and I often have to stop myself from impulse buying. When I moved into my current apartment, I had to buy a second set of bookshelves to hold all the books that I was able to pull out of storage and they're now full to the point where I'm seeing what I can stand to give away. I'm thankful for Amazon.com's Wish List feature. It's helped me curb my impulsiveness.

The problem is I don't always get around to reading the books. I get distracted by the computer pretty easily and the Web really does do horrible things to the attention span.

So it's a little ironic that just a few months after I remember thinking about how I didn't do much reading anymore, I've managed to plow through a few of the books I'd been putting off. I also have a habit of starting one and putting it aside while I go on to another one and then put that one aside in favor of another one, etc ... A couple of the books are ones that ended up buried in my truck when my attention wandered. Somehow, I finally got back into the mode of wanting to read every day.

Some of my recent adventures...

I recently finished Alan Alda’s autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. Very good.

I also finished All the President's Men, the Watergate account by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It was a bit dry in spots but a good perspective on politics and I admired their tenacity in their investigation. I felt good for having read it.

I also finished Band of Brothers which a friend sent me after I'd told him about watching the mini-series. I recommend the mini-series but you can only appreciate the story if you read the book and get it in the words of the soldiers themselves.

I never did finish the Dune series all those years ago when I started reading it in high school. So far this year, I've read the first two books; "Dune" and "Dune Messiah". The first book is even better than I remember it and I think that's because I'm so much different than I was when I last read it in the early 90s. Maturity brings perspective as well as the ability to appreciate more.

I picked up Stephen King's On Writing which is a good combination of autobiography and writer's guide. I've put it aside for now in favor of the time I've been spending with some technical manuals but I'll pick it up again.

My mind is more active now that I spend less time with the TV and more time on the reading that I've always enjoyed. It feels good.


My college education was an accounting diploma from a local college that helped me get an entry-level job. In the years since, I've managed to work my way into an I.T. career and now work as a computer programmer certified on the .NET platform. I didn't spend four years at a university but I have spent years learning how to work with hardware and software tools, analyze problems and be resourceful when it comes to solving those problems. I now pass on my knowledge through articles on my site, one of which was re-published by Microsoft last year, and through correspondence with visitors to the site.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a genius and there are some things that I'm not very good at and may never be. Even when recognized in my chosen field, I often think there are people who outshine me by far. That's a good thing as it leaves me with some inspiration for improvement. Still, I'm happy with what I've accomplished so far and I have a solid confidence that given the time and the interest, I can learn anything I need to. That's a REALLY good feeling.

I don't think I could say any of that if I hadn't learned to appreciate what could be said in books.

Let me recommend ...

... If you're a techie like me and you want to beef up your library, Safari Books Online is something you have to check out.

From their website:

Safari Books Online puts the power of your own personal, fully searchable reference library at your fingertips. Safari contains a breadth and depth of technical content for IT, developers, web designers and creative professionals found nowhere else. Instant access to entire collections from respected publishers like O'Reilly Media, Adobe Press, Peachpit Press, Microsoft Press, Wharton School Publishing, Que, Sams and Addison-Wesley, to name a few.

A free trial is actually available at http://www.safaribooksonline.com/.

Safari offers full the full content on thousands of books and articles on a full range of technology subjects. Being able to access them online not only means that I can save money on the books but that I don't have to lug them around and store them when I'm done. (It also means I won't have to deal with the type of shoddy binding that I got on the last one I bought from a certain press that will remain nameless.)

Their individual subscriptions start at $22.99 a month which I thought was a good replacement for my Netflix subscription and a restaurant or two. Then I found out I still had a membership discount from my MCP certification so it got even better. I have a basic bookshelf subscription with five spaces for books. Some of the smaller ones only take up half a space while some larger books take up two full spaces. Right now on my bookshelf, I have:

CSS: The Missing Manual
David Sawyer McFarland

Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Step by Step
John Sharp

Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes
Chris Newman

I'm spoiled with two monitors so I can kick back and read the books on one screen while working through the examples on the other.

I just looked at their main site, http://www.informit.com/, for the first time and it also looks like a good resource with free articles and chapters from the publishers who run the site.

Search Manager

Today, I was going through some of the materials on the site and doing some updates when I found a manual that I'd written for Search Manager 1.0. Search Manager is a job search tracking database that I designed in Access a few years ago when, I'm sure by coincidence, I happened to be looking for a job myself.

(Click for larger view)

I haven't worked with the program for awhile, especially since I no longer have a dedicated downloads page so it doesn't have the exposure on the site that it used to. I never did get that much feedback on it, either. The majority of people who are looking for a job probably don't have a copy of Access other than at their current job they're trying to leave where they probably don't want to spend a lot of time tracking job leads.

That's okay. It's still a really good program, at least by my own estimation. The fact that I had to use it myself, extensively, ensured that it was tested pretty thoroughly both for quality and ease of use. It also does a great job of demonstrating many of the things that can be done with Access. I have a neat reporting interface in there that I was particularly proud of. The program is a good sample application to accompany my series on Microsoft Access.

You can find it here and, as always, I welcome any comments and questions.

http://www.drewslair.com/downloads/access/search/installs/SM2002.zip

Also available on the main page of the Access for Beginners series.

http://www.drewslair.com/desk/access/beginners/intro.shtml.