Dear Mr. Microsoft,

I have a few gripes:

• Outlook sucks. If I click “Reply”, but then decide not to reply and close the window, it still marks the message as being replied to. That’s stupid.
• Also in Outlook, when I am composing a new message you like to save my drafts in the Inbox, even though there is a beautifully labeled (and empty) “Drafts” folder right next to it. That’s just bad form, good buddy. Thanks Matt!
• Why, for the sake of sweaty donkey balls, does Windows limit the total path length of every file on my computer to 256 characters. What the hell is wrong with you Windows?
• Explorer doesn’t allow me to create/rename files that begin with a period. I can think of numerous programs that use this naming convention (”.project”, “.cvsignore”, “.classpath”, etc). However, when I ask Explorer to create or rename a file to begin with a period it tells me: “You must type a file name.” Well I did, dumbass. The file name is “.project”. Just because it starts with a period doesn’t make it an invalid file name. Even your sorry excuse for a command prompt allows me to create/rename files that begin with a period. Stop being such a douche, Explorer.
• Hey Explorer, I’m not done with you yet! How about when I am renaming a file and accidentally make a mistake (such as including an invalid character or typing the same name as an existing file). Do you keep what I have entered so far and allow me to fix my error? Oh no, my friend. You declare that if a single character was mistyped then ALL of my changes must be erased and forgotten. Yeah, good decision there chief.
• And finally I come to cornbread. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

love,
Mike

As many of you probably know I develop websites as a fun side project. A website that I created just launched a few weeks back and I wanted to share it with you.

The website is an online store called “It’s All About Mie-Mie“. I created it for a neighbor’s mother who has these fabulous jackets. They were selling very well at various local craft fairs so she decided to make the big leap to online retail. The jackets have fun names like “I’m Too Sexy For This Jacket” and “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner“.

This was my first time creating a store from scratch, and overall it was a fun and interesting project to work on.

I use Fortes’ excellent Post Levels Plugin on this site. The latest release of WordPress (version 2.3.x) broke this plugin, so I took it upon myself to fix it (since Fortes is currently unavailable).

You can download the updated version here:
Post Levels 1.1.2

If you are curious, the problem was due to a regular expression that was not expecting the SQL “FROM” clause to use an alias for the “wp_posts” table. My solution, which is a bit hacky, was to insert expressions to create and then properly handle this alias. I wish a better solution exists, but to my knowledge WordPress doesn’t expose these SQL statements through hooks.

Please let me know if you have any issues.

I work on a computer for a living: in my current position I code Java, JavaScript, and SQL. The codebase in this project is very large, so many different groups across several different companies are constantly modifying something.

Usually the incoming code we see from these other coders is ok. But occasionally we see some astounding bad code that deserves to be put on a wall of shame.

I give you Exhibit A, a nice little snippet of JavaScript stupidity:
if ((document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
.... (continues for 30 more lines!)


Yikes! I sometimes make small mistakes or typos, but this… this is insane.

It’s more than incompetent: the programmer should have their keyboard access permanently revoked. I wouldn’t trust this person to write an e-mail without accidentally formating their hard drive.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, the picture in this post is Bill Gates posing for a teenie magazine spread (back in the day).

Tim is a good friend of Shannon and mine that is currently training in preparation for service in Iraq. His mission is to provide medical evacuation capabilities to soldiers on the battlefield. They evacuate the soldiers by flying their Blackhawk helicopters unarmed into the battle to extract the wounded soldiers.

I helped Tim and Tiffany set up a site so they could share a sort of public diary of their lives as they both walk the difficult paths ahead: LettersFromTim.

It just occurred to me that I haven’t yet posted about a big web development project that I just wrapped up: NathanielEdmunds.com. Nathaniel Edmunds is a brother-sister wedding photography team in the Indianapolis area. They regularly travel all over the midwest shooting weddings, and have often been brought along to destination weddings.

Nate is the perfect wedding photographer, able to capture moments without you even knowing he’s there. He’s young and fun and just a damn good person. And Tiffany is also an extraordinary person, able to coordinate and organize everything from the initial concept meeting to the final album design (and everything in between). Shannon and I highly recommend their services.

Here’s a screenshot of their new site:

Yesterday, after months of intense development, Firefox 2.0 was finally released for public consumption.

There aren’t major changes to the user experience, but the tweaks they made are well worth the version bump. My favorite feature by far is the built-in spell checking. For bloggers (like myself) this is a beautiful thing - I can now spell check right here in the browser, automatically.

If you are still using IE 6, go download and install Firefox now. If you have the newly release IE 7 (which is a laughable half-ass copy of Firefox) consider trying out it’s free, open source, faster, and more friendly competitor.

Over the past couple years I have been doing a little web work from time to time for various smaller websites. It’s nothing special, but I enjoy it. One of the sites I have designed and help maintain is MakeItForMe.com.

MakeItForMe.com - which creates cute custom notepads, baby announcements, and cards - was just recently updated with a lot of new samples. Just thought I would let you guys know.

I attended the pre-conference “Networking Gathering” last night, mostly because there was free food provided, and was glad to see that most people were just like me: technology geeks. So when I awoke this morning I was looking forward to an interesting opening day at CHI2006.

Scott Cook (co-founder of Intuit) gave the opening welcome speech. He focused on how his company has found innovations through allowing employees to innovate without management breathing down their necks. Like all good CEOs he was able to say the obvious, but in an entertaining manner. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy who ran a genuinely nice company.

Around 11:30am Tom (my adviser) and I met to go over my presentation. I was still a bit nervous, but my experiences at the conference so far were positive and I wasn’t intimidated. After we finished I snuck into the “Navigation” session, catching the only remotely interesting paper titled OrthoZoom Scroller: 1D Multi-Scale Navigation. Not terribly amazing, but probably useful for well-index material (e.g. text with chapters).

My session, called “alt.chi”, started around 4:30 and I was told that it often drew a large crowd because papers in this type of session were usually entertaining, diverse, and not always mainstream CHI material. Judging from what the room looked like ten minutes before the start of my session I was a little disappointed with the turnout. Luckily the room filled up quickly, and by the time it was my turn to take the mic the room was standing room only (sorry, I would have taken a picture of the audience but I don’t have large cojones).

The presentation itself (PDF, or PPT if you want my notes) went smooth enough; my voice cracked twice during the first three slides, and I almost made a comment about going through puberty again before thinking it inappropriate. I came back strong though and by the end I felt very confident that I had done a “good” job. The audience seemed to enjoy the presentation as well, and it felt very rewarding afterward as people came up and complimented my work. Cool. If you’re curious you can see a picture of all of the presenters from my session.

I returned to the conference hall during the evening for a reception. They had entertainment to go along with the posters and other booths being presented. After eating my fill of the free finger food and imbibing my two free drinks I slumped off to our hotel room for a good night sleep. I still had 3 days to go!

[note: This post has been backdated to correspond with the date of the events described]

Shannon and I will be traveling to Montreal for CHI 2006, a fairly large annual conference on human factors in computing systems. The weekend will be spent exploring the city with Shannon (though it looks like rain on Sunday). On Monday I will present work that I did (from last year) during one of their alt.chi sessions, which are like the regular CHI sessions but much less important.

The paper I am presenting is about RoomBugs, one of three “embedded phenomenon” that my small tech group at UIC have created for use in classrooms. If you’re interested you can read my accepted paper, but I assure you it’s nothing earth-shattering. Up until this morning (when I found out that the hall I will be presenting in can hold 250 people) I wasn’t very nervous about my presentation. Now I’ve got butterflies in places that butterflies shouldn’t fly.

I’ll keep you guys posted on any interesting projects I run across - I’m signed up for a few interactive labs and panels, and I am looking forward to the experience.