Clientcopia

For anyone who's ever worked in consulting... or at a helpdesk... or with people. Clientcopia is a place to vent. A lot of stupid stories, but a few humdingers that make you wonder about the future of the human race.

iGrep

iGrep is a new (to me, anyway) search engine focused specifically on developers. Not sure how helpful it will be; all the content comes from Developer Shed, which I've never explored.

Super DragAndGo (firefox extension)

Thanks to Julian at nsftools.com, I now have a spanky new Firefox extension that I don't know how I've lived without. He listed all of his Firefox extensions in his list of computer rebuild settings, and Super DragAndGo, while cheesily named, sounded like a must-have. I installed it right away, and will now install it on every computer I have. If you use Firefox's tabbed browsing like I do (I often have 11 or 12 tabs open at a time), it's really convenient to be able to drag a link up off the page to open it in a new foreground tab, or drag it down to open a new background tab. Not that ctrl-clicking on a link was really all that difficult, but this allows me to choose where the tab opens.

Using tables

Jake over at Codestore (new window) has admitted to using tables for form layout. My techniques have finally been validated! I love tables, and use them all the time. CSS is great in its place, but nothing can beat a table for a clean form layout that scales with the window size.

A few comments to that post mention that Notes tables are easier to deal with, and this may be true, but admittedly they create horrible code. So it's time to start taking advantage of R6 features. Create your table using the Notes properties box, then select it and choose Edit-->Convert to HTML. You can then choose View-->HTML Pane. From there you can tweak the code as much as you want, and see the results in the HTML Pane immediately. Very convenient.

Certification

I've finally decided to go ahead and take the R6 update exam... 5 years after getting my R5 certification. I know that certification really doesn't mean much to most companies, despite the CLP salary survey that says otherwise. But for me, it's like having a bit of Stuart Smalley on my cube wall. "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me." All this for a measly $125 and a lost Saturday morning...