{ StevenHaddox.com }

So I spent an extra hour over the last few mornings (Thursday and Friday) as well as a half hour Friday night working on a small tweak to my current blog.  I added a “splat” image whenever you move your mouse over an icon at the top of the page.  I did this primarily as I kept losing my mouse when I’d use the icons and I wanted to more clearly distinguish where you were on the menu.

I also did it as I need to use similar code on a few other projects I’m working on, but this site was the most suitable for it to be implemented in first and it was one of those things I could leave and pick up fairly easily without a huge loss if I didn’t finish it all in one sitting.

As to the process I went through it was fairly simple once I figured out how to best do it. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a quick sample of what one simple plugin (wp-wetfloor) and a few minutes of research can do. Now instead of having to redesign all of my icons at the top of my blog, I can simply upload the actual images and apply the class=”reflect” to them and they will automatically become reflective and transparent in the exact same manner as they are now, but they will do it on any color of background dynamically changing to fit their environment.

I LOVE CSS & JavaScript :)

So while I was updating financial information last night I came across the need to print several pages, scan a few checks in, etc. We have this supposedly amazing Hewlett-Packard c6180 all-in-one printer. When I first got it back in December I had it set up via a physical Ethernet connection in my custom-built office. However, when we moved into our current apartment we needed to set it up to be wireless as our current arrangement is not conducive to a wired network in any way. The perk is, this wireless printer is supposed to support WPA2 wireless networks… well for six months it seemed it has not. No matter how many times I manually entered our WPA2 key and network name with static IP address into the computer via it’s LCD interface it would _never_ connect.

HP c6180 All-in-One Printer

So here’s how I finally got it working:

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I’ve bit my tongue a long time and tried my hardest not to criticize others because I personally don’t like being ranted on by someone more elite than myself. I’m not an expert in the subject-matter of hacking. In fact I merely dabble in it as a hobby. But there are some people out there who try REALLY hard to pretend like they know what they are doing and make the common user buy right in (such as the organization that previously developed a home-made content management system for the site I’m currently redeveloping).

Anyway, the current setup has been altered from its “barely functional” state into a completely useless state on a production server. That’s right, whenever I put in some material into the hideous WYSIWYG editor they have provided I am greeted on the website not with my text and HTML code, but rather with “YES” and on one line below it “YES”.

My best guess is that since the data I enter into the WYSIWYG editor is not being saved as it was in the past month or two, I’m assuming they are probably debugging their crappy system. Great for them. Why the HELL are the DEBUGGING on a PRODUCTION SERVER WITH LIVE SITES?!?! Web Development 101 - DO NOT DEBUG ON A PRODUCTION SERVER. This is why you always have a development and a production server. Why the title of my job is “Web Developer” not “Web Producer with a magical production server that never breaks even though I do development on it!” WTF?

On to the next topic. I’ve updated my blog’s title. It’s now entitled “Hacking Life 101″. This is because that is pretty much what I do. I take my life one day at a time, do the best I can with every day I am given, and hack my way from there. Sometimes I get harder obstacles than others. I’m an impulsive person. This I’ve learned. I went many years saying I hated Windows, wanted to be a politician, and wasn’t a fan of Macs or that I’d never get a tattoo. I gave up politics in a matter of weeks even though I got my B.S. in Legal Studies. I gave up hating Macs overnight after I spent less than 24 hours with Katie’s iMac in a hotel room playing on it. I got a tattoo within one week of deciding on a design I felt would be worth having as a permanent symbol of my affection for my wife. I’m impulsive and therefore I treat my life the same way I code - one obstacle and one challenge at a time doing the best I can with the resources I have around me. I hack my way through life.

If you can’t even hack a website URL to view their comments or friends on MySpace or embed some video that a corporate organization doesn’t want you to use, or you can’t create your own website code to manipulate items the way you want to on a page or from different pages into a single location, or if you can’t create some kind of decent mechanism for encoding plain text other than a dual layer plain text to base 16 and base 2 conversion system then you are not a true hacker. Let alone a cracker.

As I stated before, I dabble in web-oriented hacking and did not give myself the title of hacker. I consider myself an ethical hacker when I do hack and I hate and despise cracking unless absolutely necessary. Look up the definitions according to the New Hackers Dictionary - they are very different.

And that my friends is your basic introduction to what a hacker is NOT. It also gives you some good advice about programming - keep your development on a different computer/server than the place where your actual code for rendering the pages / program / data lives. Use some common sense (many people can tell you that I don’t have much common sense, but even I know that much!)

Until later crackers,

<Super Stevie>

Here’s the basic summary of why I switched to Apple (pros vs. cons my friends):

Primary cons I used to claim about Apple computers:
1. Expensive
2. Mostly targeted towards designers and artists
3. Expensive
4. I thought upgrades were hard -> impossible (NOT TRUE)

Those are the main cons I could think of back in the day - which is why Apple was always WAY above Windows, but a step below Linux. Now that I’ve been opened up to Apple from Katie I have done research and concluded the following pros about Apple systems:

1. Amazing operating system based on *nix variant - this means I can run all my Linux commands, have the same built in tools as Linux AND still program just as easily (very important to me!)
2. Beautiful interface
3. Really good reliable hardware
4. Controlled hardware = no driver woes
5. NOT WINDOWS
6. Upgrading RAM, hard drives, and other basic compenents is easy (I was wrong in the past and have already upgraded 3 out of the 4 Macs I own to 2GB of RAM)
7. Price! The price of a Mac is comparable to PC equivalents with the same kind of hardware and quality!
8. Apple has pushed for DRM-free music through iTunes and now 20% of iTunes music can be bought WITHOUT DRM. This alone would persuade me to support Apple from now on!
9. It is hott with the ladies (who can resist a man with an amazing sense of style - you need it man!)

Once again, I was biased in the past and was basing my opinion off my personal experience with OS 9 versus the new OS X which is based on Linux.

So I say to all, admit it - Apples will always taste better than broken Windows glass! Eat up my friends, Apple is the new superior OS in my book (and we haven’t even seen the release of Leopard yet!)

Until next time,

<Super Stevie>