A State Gone Crazy
By wfrench | April 1, 2008
I wish I could take credit for the title, but Daniel Bader had beaten me to it and in my opinion he has earned it. California’s bureaucratic BS runs deep, but Daniel’s story takes the cake. Can you say government facilitated extortion.
Daniel posted an ad on Craigslist.com for an apartment available for rent. The state, on behalf of Fair Housing Counsel of Orange County, is now suing him for discrimination because he said, the apartment was “Well suited for 1 or 2 professional adults.” Without being able to confront his accusers Daniel was subjected to a $4000 fine and required to take Landlord classes. Surprisingly, $4000 is still less then what it would cost to fight these accusations. To make matters worse, the state did a full investigation and found that Danial HAD NOT discriminated against anyone, but the ad on its surface was discriminatory enough. Intent does not matter in this case.
I own a condo that my wife and I rent out. This story really hit home and helped me realize that I don’t want to look for a new tenant. Heck, maybe it’s time to sell the condo and invest the money in Oil. They seem to be doing ok lately.
Read more about it on Daniel’s site, http://www.stategonecrazy.com. Keep up the good fight Daniel!
Topics: Rant | 1 Comment »
Time Warner Cable Sucks
By wfrench | March 13, 2008
I know, I know, who doesn’t already know that Time Warner Cable sucks. However, but most recent interaction with Time Warner customer server really pissed me off. It’s a cable company and I should have expected it, but I’m an optimist.
Topics: Rant | 8 Comments »
14 Firefox plugins for today’s web developer
By wfrench | March 7, 2008
When it comes to bells and whistles I tend to be a minimalist. All that eye candy is just too expensive with regard to system resources. So when rebuilt one of my workstations I was shocked when I found 15 plugins installed. The only saving grace is that I acutally use almost every plugin installed on a daily basis as a web application developer.
Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Development | 2 Comments »
EZ-FAQ 0.1 for Wordpress Released
By wfrench | March 4, 2008
My latest plugin for Wordpress is ready for release, beta that is. EZ-FAQ is a documentation styler for generating FAQs. If scans a page or a post for paragraps with the class ‘ez-question’ and then formats the questions as requested. Then using a quick tag you can add a FAQ table of contents to the page. It’s a pretty simple plugin, much simpler then SmugPress.
For more information see the EZ-FAQ documentation.
Topics: Development | 1 Comment »
SmugPress 0.2.3 (beta) Released
By wfrench | March 3, 2008
I’ve completed my initial development of SmugPress, a SmugMug plugin for Wordpress. I think most of the major issues taken care of thanks to a little help from some eager users. Check out smugpress to get more information or download the latest version.
Topics: Development | 1 Comment »
Sprint HTC Touch With a Broken LCD
By wfrench | March 3, 2008
A broken LCD on my HTC Touch with no insurance from Sprint and I almost had a good experience with a cell phone company! In November I got an HTC Touch from Sprint and boy was I excited! When I bought the phone I though I had signed up for the insurance plan, but after calling to get a replacement I was told otherwise. My phone is pictured to the left. Sorry about the quality, I was a little upset when I took it. At that point I had just gotten off the phone with Sprint customer service.
Topics: Technology | 1 Comment »
How to Setup VMWare Server 1.0.4 on Debian (etch)
By wfrench | February 25, 2008
How to setup VMWare server 1.0.4 on debian stable (etch) system. Once complete we will have a VMWare server system that can be access from anywhere on the local network and authenticated via LDAP.
Topics: Howto, Systems | No Comments »
Debugging Javascript in IE Without Visual Studios
By wfrench | February 24, 2008
Go figure that Firefox, with the help of Firebug would make it easy to debug javascript for your web applications. However, if you are writing production caliber web applications you MUST ensure it works with Internet Explorer as well. Whether we like it or not, IE still has the numbers.
Unfortunately, debugging Javascript issues on IE is a pain in the rear because you really get NO useful debugging information by default. “Error on line 38 Character 1″ isn’t really useful if you have 10 files include on your page. What I would like is a full fledge Javascript debugger with step through, breakpoints, watches, and relevant error message. So how can we more effectively debug Javascript?
Topics: Development, Howto, Javascript | No Comments »
A new blog for a new day.
By wfrench | February 24, 2008
Well, after over twenty years of messing with tech I figured it was finally time to write something down. I think the real issue is that I could actually remember this stuff when I was younger, now I have a hard time remembering the variable name I just defined at the beginning of a new method. The other reason I set up this site is because I wrote a plugin for Wordpress that I found pretty useful. I needed a place to host the source and documentation.
Anyways, here it is. I give you Kong! ummm … I mean Grepsedia …
Topics: Blog | No Comments »