cross browsers

After working on web development for the past months, it has become a peeve of mine to see misaligned contents on Internet browsers. Let's take a look at the FB's home page on the 2 browsers - IE8 and Firefox 3.6. The home page looks fine on IE 8, but the same page looks pretty ugly on Firefox 3.6. I make a mental check to not download Firebug to edit the source codes on Firefox (a habit I developed over the course of work).

"in Explorer 8"-cj

"in Firefox 3.6"

I know what you are thinking right now. You are thinking that IE is a better browser than Firefox? I will try to help make sense of what happened. If you read the forums regarding cross browsers compatibility, you would heard the same speak over and over again. IE is a developer's bane. While the rest of the browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari runs on the same kind of engine, IE runs on an entirely different engine. IE browsers are smart browsers, Microsoft's developers have made it such that minor errors are self corrected and when no command is given for the styling is given, the browsers will present a layout style which it assumes you would want. On top of that, IE browsers are less standard compliant than the other browsers.

So the question now is: why do the developers make websites that looks nice on IE but ugly on the other standard compliant browsers like Firefox? My guess is FB started in 2004 when IE holds the majority of the market share and it still does now. So it makes more sense to develop a website compatible for a browser that the majority of the market is using. So voila, as more and more users cross over to use other browsers and Microsoft making arrangement for anti competition in Windows 7 in Europe developers are finding more of a need now to ensure cross browsers compatibility.

cross browsers.. brings back nightmares.

bombastic words

"I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused such pericombobulation."

someone please explain this to me...

library

I do know know why I keep getting more books even though there are still a few books unread in my personal library. Voila! my new add on. A quick glance and you will notice that most of them are from the same author.

1. Blink
2. Outliers
3. The tipping point
4. What the dog saw
5. The upside of irrationality
6. The curious incident of the dog in the night time.

.. getting soon..
7. Eat, Pray, Love

I think i the feeling of knowing there's still plenty of books to read.

so

i pushed the envelope.. literally

development ftw!

offer

So the call came and I was offered a job, a decent pay, a career in IT and 2 weeks to decide. Hesitation is because I have not even began searching for work yet. Without any other pending offers, it is not possible to gauge real my market value. It's not really possible to put any value to the opportunity cost of accepting the offer. I shall accept it first.

so bird in hand is really worth two in the bush?

Big Mac Index

Though I have already decided not to pursue an even higher degree, I do agree that research do come with some perks. There's a substantial amount of free time... and as a result, I end up reading up on fun stuffs like this -> Bugernomics. The dear people in the Economist came up with a measure for currency valuation based on the theory of purchasing-power parity. Theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP) argues exchange rates should move to equalize the price of an identical basket of goods between two countries. In their case, their basket consist of a single Big Mac hamburger and the fair-value benchmark is the exchange rate that leaves burgers costing the same in America as elsewhere. So they aptly named it - the Big Mac Index. Below is a result of their findings.

"oh no. based on this results.
burgers should cost 18% more in Singapore!"-cj

Before you frantically try to dump your euros just because this results says that its overvalued. They have kindly added a disclaimer. "The Big Mac numbers should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. They are not a precise predictor of currency movements. The bulk of a burger’s cost depends on local inputs such as rent and wages, which tend to be lower in poor countries. Consequently PPP comparisons are more reliable between countries with similar levels of income."

i would stay away from hamburgers if i were to go to Norway. 7.20 usd for a Big Mac. seriously?!?

lines

tanned marks.. next time i wear long sleeves.. ouch..

donthitmeitispainful!

sunday ride

You know what is more dangerous than cycling on Nicole Highway at night? It's the homeward bound ride from Changi along East Coast Parkway on a Sunday afternoon. Those kids are dangerous. They dashed across the road with their kite chasing behind them in mid air, cycle in the opposite direction on the wrong lane et cetera .. Imagine having to duck the kids, then their kites and then kiddy mobiles oncoming traffic. These crazy kids have no qualms about letting you brake abruptly and risk getting physical injuries while trying to save their little butts from being knocked over by you. And darn their ultimate weapons.Their angelic faces make you do a double take about being angry with them and their parents. Their innocent blank stares makes you wonder if you should still be riding at that speed at this age. After you successfully peeled your eyes from their toothy smiles you find yourself looking at the angry parents behind them. They stretched out a protective arm to shield their poor victimized babies. Their shaking heads pour guilt into you until tears almost flowed out of your eyes. You can only alternate your glances between the children's faces and their parents for so long before tucking your tail between your legs and paddle away.

oh how they trumped me..

p.s. before you guys think i bully kids. the above didn't happened. i just find it more interesting to type out my opinions as narrative..

wikileaks

This could be an interesting read. Wikileaks leaks and verifies sensitive documents from organizations and governments while protecting the sources of the anonymous submissions. If you want to read more about the motivations behind such a controversial website, click here. Some of the notable leaks include the apparent Somalia assassination order, from kaupthing bank regarding Icelandic banking sector, Sarah Palin's yahoo email contents and a Baghdad air strike video titled: Collateral murders.

[update] day after i posted this entry, i saw this in the Straits Times 'Leaks show war details'. haha guess i'm right on top of the news curve.

Free press? Whistle blower? Or troublemaker? The Palin one makes it looks like gossip girl..

cuteness

Once a while I would need to include a tinsy whinsy bit of cuteness on my blog for my young readers.. yes, the 12 year old, together with her kakis ,who is using my facebook account to play restaurant city and hotelville.

"sugar rabbit"-cj

"Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Poor bunny! These little bunny shaped sugar lumps are so precious they should be in a stop-motion animated feature about the dreary malaise of living in the modern world. In the end of course they would meet their inevitable fate, being dunked in coffee for the edification of sadistic cuteitarians. But isn’t it worth it? Aren’t we worth it, slogging through this life, searching high and low for cute? We deserve to have cuteness be a part of our everyday routine, and if that means sacrificing a few sugar bunnies along the way, so be it"

- Found on epicute.com. Submitted by: Unknown

i rather have some mashmallow rabbits to grill..

M Night

I have always enjoyed watching the trailers that are being shown before the movie. The one for The Last Airbender by M Night didn't intrigue me enough for me to want to watch it. I had caught all his older shows until The Village and I would say they are pretty decent films. Lady in the Water and Happening, were they shown in Singapore/ Paris? Then I chanced upon this graph that shows the box office results for M Night, I thought 'the trajectory pretty obvious..'


let's hope i get my mind blown away by inception tonight!

stop and read

Google play packs a whole lot of fun into one page. Here are some of the interesting stuffs i found.

"passively aggressively"-cj

"anti gravity"-cj

"kids these days are gg to die from boredom
cos they can never jut sit and stare."-cj

got to go to school..

Marina Bay Sands

On our last week, we decided to make full use of our company pass and take photo of the marina area. Here is the result of our time in the pantry.. all the time ignoring the funny stares we get from the FI OPS team who was having meeting behind us. ignore the tiny specks in the sky.. we were indoors behind a glass window.

"from our ORQ office."-cj

thanks to m, k and km.

tuesday. grey sky.

Tired as I may be, it is F's last day in Singapore. Her handphone-less state in Singapore has made me realized how reliant I have become on handphone technology. I waited for her for hours on ends. I make a quick check of my bank account. Satisfied that there will still be a healthy balance after the insurance payment is deducted, I make a quick count of the possible expenditure. I put on a smile and dragged myself skipped all the way to Sentosa.

the grey clouds part and no longer hide the blue sky!

cathay 75th

Today as part of cathay's 75th anniversary, you can redeem a pair of free Cathay movie tickets with a copy of today's Straits times Life section page C8.

update: i had a movie marathon.

Treat yourself to a free movie now!

a few good people

I met a lot of people over the course of the 10 weeks. People who have made the term so much more enjoyable.

m for sharing your experiences of running a modeling agency, your photos and the long dinner conversations. hope you enjoy your europe trip. k for solving all my programming problems, the pantry coffee breaks and buying the nikon D90 with me. km for being my reliable source of entertainment and jokes and playing pool in the lounge. m, k, km for hanging out with me at ORQ office till late at night to take photos of marina bay sands. c for being grumpy, for the open conversations which you gave a more than what I am willing to listen and for having so much in common with me. ph for supporting all the wrong teams during world cup and for keeping me company on saturdays. a for talking non stop and for thinking we are actually listening. zc for her books. s for the early morning breakfasts and bus bay chats. dm for punching into the air during out presentation and rallying the crowd for the perfect ending. yh for just sitting pretty and smiling. m for working european hours and making it flexible for us.

a few good people to whom i am grateful.

Gakkenflex 35mm twin lens reflex

I got myself a new toy to celebrate the end of last week - the Gakkenflex 35mm twin lens reflex (TLR). This TLR is a super cool functional toy camera and it comes with the 25th edition of the otona no kagaku magazine (i loosely translate if from the seemingly chinese words into "Adult Science Magazine"). Yea aa.. you can now go around and tell people I enjoy adult japanese stuffs.. tsk. Why is it a toy camera? The camera is made of plastic and is 100% DIY. The kit comes with all the assembly parts and an instructions manual in japanese. The japanese manual doesn't pose much of a problem to anyone with some cognitive ability to associate pictures with the individual parts. The only thing that is going to slow you down is probably the pretty model in the front cover.

Some specifications:-

The fixed f-stop is f/11 and the single shutter speed is 1/125. The camera uses standard 35mm film cassettes and exposes a 24mm x 36mm frame in portrait orientation. The lens is a single element plastic meniscus lens. Focusing of the taking and viewing lenses is synchronized by external gears, in the same way as the geared lens Ricohflex.

If you are interested, you can easily find one in the japanese magazine section of Kinokuniya. Priced at ard 50sgd, it is pretty affordable.

"otona no kagaku magazine."-cj

"here is where the fun starts."-cj

"first we screwed the left and the right sides. be warned they do not give many extra screws."-cj

"this aperture control is the tricky part. the springs are quite a handful."-cj

"there. the box frame is up."-cj

"missing the lens."-cj

"the completed camera!"-cj

i'm in for some analog fun.

brain feed

You must be wondering why am I up so early in the morning right after my job ended right? It's a simple explanation, it's a habit to wake up early. I usually read news and not blogs/ books in the morning. Perhaps, in the morning, the brain is more atuned to reading factual stuffs without processing. Or perhaps, the heart is still not in sync with the head yet and thus making it more sense to read about news that do not tug at your heart strings and conscience so much.

This morning, however, I read a blog. A mind bogging entry in - Dilbert.com. Here is it.
"
Coincidence Threshold - by Scott Adams

You probably saw the story about the woman who won the lottery for the fourth time. Some say the odds of that are 1 out of 18 septillion. I think almost everyone who reads this blog assumes it wasn't luck, and that there was some criminal activity involved. But it made me wonder if humans have some sort of innate and similar view of where coincidence fails as an explanation. Let's test that.

Let's say a mysterious man appears at your door and tells you that you have a special power. If you write the name of a person on a piece of paper and put it in a sock overnight, that person will die. You try it once out of curiosity, picking the name of some scoundrel from the news so you won't feel bad if it works. And sure enough, that person dies of a heart attack that very night.

Your first thought might be that as a general rule, scoundrels live risky lifestyles. You might have gotten lucky on that one. So you try it again the next night with a new name, and that person is also dead by morning. You try it twenty times, never telling anyone else of your experiment, and each time it works before sunrise the next day.

You can imagine a variety of explanations for your experience. You might be crazy, or dreaming, or experiencing selective memory. Maybe the mysterious man who told you of this method is somehow watching you and putting out the hit order on the name you choose, for reasons that you can't understand. Maybe you're just good at recognizing when people's time has come. Maybe you are part of some sort of science experiment or reality show. Perhaps there are a dozen other explanations.

My question to you is this: How many times could you repeat this experiment alone, with whatever controls or privacy you could muster, before you believed your actions were causing specific people to die?

For me it would be somewhere around the fourth person. "

for me. it would be the 3 guy. how murderous are the rest of you?

relaxz

End of a tiring exciting week. Here's something light to kick start the weekend. Turning in early to go for ISE orientation tomorrow. Give me an EEE - NNN - GG - IIII - NNN - EEE...

"subway humor"-cj

Hahahah princess edition. nice.

Could not help but post another one.

"Who you gonna call? ghost buster!"-cj

Hahaah they actually picked the library to do this.

drink

It's part of the job to mingle with senior managers. It's part of the job to hold a glass of wine in your hand and not drink from it. It's part of the job to smile and talk about bit's and pieces of what's happening around the world of banking and finance. It's part of the job to arm wrestle with your COO. Dipping your finger into alcohol, lighting it up and passing the flame around the table with your fingers is part of the job too.

One lesson I have learned. It's not so much the work you do for yourself that earns you recognition, it's the work that you do for other people that earns you recognition. Apps developers like myself spend a lot of time doing our complex self contained task and concentrating on releasing quality results. It is, however, people who do take on task with moderate difficulty, but organizes welfare events, charity events, sports events and bonding sessions that will get recognize.

Such is a the job.. will i ever get use to it.

last day

It's finally the last day of work. Not really my style to want to end it with adrenaline pumping in my blood, but it can't be help. The QA's creativity in coming up with ways to break my codes is amazing and defies logic. Who would click on a button, leaves the pop up box open and click on a second button to open another pop up? Who will put in 55 trades into the apps? Well if the QA is able to think of it, I sure there will be some users who will do it. It's been an eye opener talking to the QA as he really tested the robustness of the system to make it 100% idiot proof. Hahaha experience or personal experience? In the end, I am still not able to meet the deadline.

Still.. dev ftw. I respect apps developers.

last week

I submitted the codes for QA again; hoping to score a QA sign off at my second attempt. If all goes well, the program will go into production and I can spend the rest of this week wrapping up my work. With so many social events in the final week, I'm starting to think it is going to be the most hectic week of all! To do list for this week..

1. Walk through with QA on monday night
2. Pick up F from the airport + colleague's birthday dinner on tuesday night
3. Night shoot at ORQ with M and K on wednesday night.
4. End of work social event on thursday night
5. Send C off at the airport and dinner on friday night + ISE orientation camp
6. ISE orientation camp for whole of saturday
7. New Paper big walk + bird park (maybe?) on sunday

i wonder why things always come together at the same time. courage.

change

Work has changed some of my friends. I cannot reach out to you if you think you are a better person than me and if you think your opinions are worth more than what I have to say.

...

drivers

Every time before I get around to talking about the class of honors saga, I will find one of these funny pictures which I feel compelled to post on my blog. Is this one of those few times where Singaporean do not join queues? Wrong..

"my sentiments exactly."-cj

they cut queues like a good heartlander.

wicked technology

From hyperbeast.com.

"iphone 4 with DSLR lens. Apple’s new iPhone 4 has exceeded the expectations of many, yet its 5-megapixed camera is outdated compared to some of its competitors like HTC’s Evo 4G, which has an 8-megapixel camera. A recent prototype around the net shows how a distinct character created a special tripod to attach a DSLR lens to the iPhone 4. A creation like this can certainly help a traveling photographer who is not keen to carrying equipment around or interest one who wants to enter the world of photography."

"A techie's mana"-cj

"I can imagine how space efficient this is."-cj

there's so many things I want in life... not that I need it. I just want to play with it.

thank you

There's a lot of people I would like to thank for this. My family, especially my parents. Everyone in the French DDP. Friends in NUS and Supelec. Though there were not many familiar faces there, it was a happy occasion today.

"nice piece of work"-cj

excuse me for today. im just happy and proud of myself.

crap

mortar board too small... Zzzzz...

don't care.

graduation

I sat in my room, heaved a sigh of relief. Finally I can close this chapter with a satisfactory ending. Studying in an institution like mine is getting pretty tiring. The school is now filled with strangers. Modules taught are no longer challenging and research without a direction is disheartening. It took a while, but I will be graduating tomorrow. finally.

Tomorrow's a quiet affair.

remember

As an apps developer, you have to know the golden rule of development. It's going to save you a lot of time, get you out of a lot of trouble and improve your technical skills.

"google is your friend. IE is your worst enemy."-cj

totally agree.

cooking lunch

when the chef is out, guess who's the sous-chef for today's lunch ..

results

As the Germans systematically tore apart the Argentinians, I begin to believe in a new style of football. The clean and simple football. One without fanciful dribbling, without any prima donnas, no diving; simply no frills. This world cup, the Germans seemed to have found a formula to winning - and with a large goal margin. Their style of soccer was not fanciful, but it did not make their matches any less exciting. I'm not so sure if I can say the same for all the fans out there, but found it terribly exciting to see big teams desperately try to hold their ground as the Germans knock in 1 goal.. 2 goals.. 3 goals.. and 4 goals. Merkel seemed extremely happy during yesterday's match. Maybe she's a football fan. Or maybe she's thinking maybe the people will cut her some slack from the budget cut and president candidacy issues. Fans of Spain - watch this space.

Go Germany!! Bring pain to Spain!!

ndp preview

Rainy day. No photos as I do not want to take out my camera. :(

wedding

His wedding was like a mini class reunion. Familiar faces and the same unforgiving humor. One thing we discovered, in retrospect, after these 10 years of friendship. All these people we made fun of when we were in secondary schools, they were not actually a bad as we had made them out to be. Everyone, from the more effeminate to the sharp comb ah beng, had taken an ego knock from us back then for their mannerism. But, in fact, all of them were just minding their own business and singing their own self written songs. They were not giving anybody any problems at all, but instead we were. Haha. Actually, I am not going to feel bad about it all. We had good fun. We all did. I wonder how's the rest of them.

.. thy sons are we..

QA testing

Completed all the function checks. Aesthetically, the web program didn't look too bad on all browsers either. It's fit for testing! I uploaded the program into QA and wait for the review results. If all goes well, this baby is going 'live' worldwide.

Now, I can look forward to the last day.

right after the win

Right after Netherlands win, the Brazilian football team wiki site got hacked into. Click for bigger picture.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/5429/brazilnationalfootballt.jpg

don't f*** with the orange lions. roar!!

open source

"developer's humor. I am a .NETer."-cj

dev ftw.

in the mirror

I woke up early this morning and took a quick transformative shower. It perked me up almost immediately. Despite the lemons that had been thrown at me these past few days by NUS, the matter would have to be push to the back of the head, at least for now. For Today; would be the most exciting work day. Ten and a half more hours before close of business. I looked at myself in the mirror.

"GO GET THEM, TIGER!" ROAAAR!!

Satisfied. I walked out of the house, proud, focus and purposeful.

it's going to be a great day. I can feel it.

learning experience

steep learning curve + high expectations = lots of over time + lots of coffee.

money does not fit into the equation for now.

cab fare

15.40 sgd. It would have been more expensive if had I gotten off work past midnight.

deliverable due at close of business on friday. my rush hour 11pm.