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Archive for January, 2008
links for 2008-01-28
Posted in: My Links by Steve on January 28, 2008
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Reviews are outstanding on this antenna
Decluttering the Desk (Part I)
Posted in: General by Steve on January 23, 2008
After getting sick of my old desk (which wasn’t a desk at all, it was a 6 foot plastic top table from Sam’s Club), I decided to upgrade to a corner desk. In doing so, I recalled a website I saw a while ago about a guy that took all of the peripherals and attached them underneath his desk. This sounded like a great idea since I had so many wires underneath my desk before.
So I started my investigation of different desks that were available. Many people have recommended the IKEA Jerker desk. There’s even a website dedicated to it! Too bad the Jerker is no longer made and it’s replacement, the Fredrik, isn’t as friendly. Jeff Atwood’s post on computer desks also pointed me in the IKEA direction so that was where I was going to start.
Looking on their website, there was not many choices for types of desks. Either a slab or a modular slab. So I opted for the modular slab model, the Galant. I saw some people posted their desks and they looked like they would work in my room layout. Unfortunately, I could only use 1 corner of my office for a desk since one corner was a closet, another was the door, and the other had a window right in front of the corner, so it would end up being right behind the monitors.
I got my new Galant on Sunday, crammed it into the Rendezvous, and rolled home to put it together. Step 1 was complete. Step 2 was to get all the pieces into the house, which was sort of a challenge to do by myself since the wife can’t lift anything. After getting it all into a central location, I needed to remove the old “desk” and move all of the equipment off to the side. I never realized how much stuff and money I have invested in my computer equipment until I laid it all out on the ground.
Once it was all out of the way, I was able to put the desk together. I ended up getting a wrong color piece, so I had to return to IKEA to exchange it. So Monday night, I officially got my desk in place. Here, you can see the first picture of it with my UPS and stick power installed:
The wife wants to paint the office, but I want to keep the teddy bears on the wall
Part II will show how I attached pegboard to the bottom and attached the peripherals to it, Part III will be about how the wires are hidden.
Creating a Yellow Fade with ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit
Posted in: Programming by Steve on January 20, 2008
I’ve always thought that the Yellow Fade Technique has been a great way to present changes to a web page. It’s used in all of 37Signal’s applications such as BaseCamp and CampFire. It highlights the changes in a page using a yellow background, then fades out to the normal background. This gives a visual cue to the user that something has changed on the page. You can also use it to get the user’s attention (which is what I use it for).
I searched to find the JavaScript to use in my own application and couldn’t find anything that was easily integrated into the “controls” structure of ASP.NET. Anything that I was going to use would need to hack into the body tag and the header tag to place functions initializing it. Here’s a quick way to accomplish this using ASP.NET Ajax and the Control Toolkit.