blog.aaziz.org

I could make a silly joke about taking rifle shots at ants, but I’ve had enough cheese today. I usually download some small programs and utilites at work and home, so I decided I’d share my finds. A lot of them are inspired by LifeHacker posts, but some I find on my own. I’ll either post about something I downloaded that day, or failing that motivation, something I think you should download today. I hope to give people some nice tools they find useful, and also motivate some comments to similar or better tools. So, first in the series:

Bug Shooting is a small little application that sits in your taskbar and gives you better control over screenshot taking. It allows for customizable shorcuts for the three different commands it has: whole screen capture, box selection capture, and time-delayed capture. You can specify “servers” to send the shots to, which included some bug tracking systems, skype, or mail application. You can also define custom commands, though I haven’t looked into that.

Once the capture is taken, a window pops up allowing you to crop, rotate, or add things (lines, text, even images) to the screenshot, then save it or send it to that “server”. It’s pretty handy, and while I have found a couple of flaws (it likes to keep the last taken screenshot open, which can have a memory impact if took a large shot), it’s a pretty decent utility, and I haven’t seen any better.

Check out Bug Shooting’s website, http://www.bugshooting.com/web/ and let me know what else is out there and your experiences with this program and others like it.

We just got our OSAP estimate in after making the change that we’re living on our own. The amounts aren’t as high as we’d like but not as low as we feared either, considering that we both will be make at least $100/week during the school year and we both have about $3000 in other investments (GICs, RESPs).

Together we’ve got about $12k. Tuition and other school fees are about $2500 each and we need to put away about $3600 for rent up until April. With about $2500 for books, bus pass, and other school supplies, I’ve got a little bit of extra cash to stow away. Hopefully that can stay save for gifts, etc.

My concern is the monthly costs. Utilities are included in rent, and the only real needs are food and gas – with gas being about $35/week for going to work across town and getting large groceries, we’ll use the bus for other travel.

I have absolutely no idea how much groceries will cost. It’s just the two of us. We’re not too heavy eaters but we don’t like eating crappy cheap stuff all the time either, and we’ve gotta have lunch-packable items for school. I’ve thought no more than $75 a week (after the initial cupboard stocking, of course), but Laura seems to think that it’ll be closer to $100, if not more. I’m more inclined to believe her, as I don’t cook or do shopping whatsover.

So, this I’m calling for comments. Any ideas on what our weekly/monthly costs are gonna be (keeping in mind we’re in the Windsor area) are welcome, and just general living costs and issues and discussion.

I’ll have some geek stuff next post, I promise.

At work I’ve been developing a inital draft for the new company website. Based on some browser statistics, Firefox holds 41% of the browser market, with IE6 and 7 close at 26.5% and 27%, respectively. However, I’m willing to bet a good 30% of the people using Firefox (a statistic pulled out of my ass, of course) are geeks and/or in the IT profession (including web designers). The company I work for is a manufacturing company, who sells machines that make gel capsules. So I have to assume the a larger percentage of the audience will be using IE7 and 6 (IE6 is still out there – there’s a lot of companies still using Win2000).

That about puts them all on the same plate, which means I have to develop for three different browsers, all with their own little perkiness. Of course, I could just use tables – hell, tables work anywhere. Or I could make a navigation bar with images only. But as a geek and supporter of standards, I of course have to use CSS only. And the navigation menu isn’t in a line of text. No, it’s an actual list element. And it’s floated and horizontal, with no bullets.

And the best part – it’s a rollover, drop-down menu. Without Javascript. Of course, that was the point, except in order for IE to accept rollovers properly, I had to use some Suckerfish javascript. Well – at least it was tidy, and worked. Sprinkled throughout the code are little hacks and tricks to make everything fit in place, like !important flags and .margin-top: -2px tricks. In my quest to achieve standards compliance and full accessibility, I have broken my core religious believes and broken my balls over gettings everyone to play nicely. Isn’t it just easier to say eff that browser I don’t care about you? Well, certainly. But then I’d be a rational, productive person.