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Archive for February, 2009

Windows bug in week numbers

27 Feb

Today is a joyful day as we found a bug in the Windows Outlook Calendar.
We are currently working with week numbers and wanted to know what the correct standard was for this subject, so we searched for the ISO Standard and we found this explanation:

The ISO week-numbering year starts at the first day (Monday) of week 01 and ends at the Sunday before the new ISO year (hence without overlap or gap). It consists of 52 or 53 full weeks. The ISO week-numbering year number deviates from the number of the calendar year (Gregorian year) on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or a Saturday and Sunday, or just a Sunday, at the start of the calendar year (which are at the end of the previous ISO week-numbering year) and a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or a Monday and Tuesday, or just a Monday, at the end of the calendar year (which are in week 01 of the next ISO week-numbering year). For Thursdays, the ISO week-numbering year number is always equal to the calendar year number.

So for 01-01-2010 this will give us as result week 53.

We did a little test and came up with these results:
PHP: 01-01-2010 — 53 weeks
Windows Mobile Outlook: 01-01-2010 — 53 weeks
Windows Vista Outlook 2007 SP1: 01-01-2010 – 1 week
It seems that outlook doesn’t follow the ISO-standard… LOL

After a bit of research we found out that this so called bug isn’t a bug, but an option you can select (check full week as first week of the year). Damned, we thought we found a bug….

 
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why emails get blocked by spam filters

06 Feb

How is it possible that my emails are blocked by spam filters?

I got this question from a few friends and a client and this are the things you can do:

Check your newsletter/email on a spam checker tool
Programmers heaven spamchecker
Lyris contentchecker

The problem for the client was the subject line, in order to get a correct and acceptable subject you need to think carefully about it.
A spam filter recognizes capitals and exclamation marks and blocks your mail on them, so try to avoid that.
Make sure your mail/subject doesn’t contain the words on the list you can find here
And also a few others:

  • Try not to use attachments
  • Avoid bcc (blind copy) to send your mail
  • Don’t create an all image email, this big email, that contains all the text in your email, will probably be blocked. Another important issue is that a firewall sometimes removes images from emails so your recipient gets a blank email.
  • So try to create a text-based email. Best thing to do is to provide an html AND text based version of the email.

Good luck.

 
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layout inspiration

05 Feb

designA lot of programmers seem to hate the layout part of the job. Well if you work in a big company you probably won’t do the two jobs, but in some cases, or when you work in a small company (ex 1-5 employees) you have to do them both (layout and programming). And for those guys, it isn’t always easy to have inspiration right away, well there is a solution.

Here are a few sites that have a huge portfolio with nice layout sites. You can grab the css in some cases, and that’s the interesting part of it.

Take a look at them.
cssmania
cssremix/
cssimport
designsnack
Anyone got a better idea to get inspiration? Feel free to add your way of working in the comments.

 
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Green programming – contribution to the environment

04 Feb

Everybody seems to be talking about a green and environment-friendly job. Well I wondered how we, as IT guys can contribute to this phenomenon and came up with these answers (after a bit of research).
In our workspace we can do these things:

  • Write correct and OO code, to save seconds of processing time
    If you save 3 seconds in a code and this gets executed 1000 times a day for 1 month (30 days) you’ll get a total time of 3*1000*30 = 90000 seconds = 1,1 day per month of execution time saved.
    That’s a huge difference isn’t it? And that’s only what 3 seconds does….
  • Don’t print out everything but use digital copies. Share books, instead of buying two or more copies.
  • Use servers that are hosted in green data centers (more info)
  • Live close to your work and use public transport (if possible), ride a bike or walk.
  • Be sure to shut down air-conditioning and heating at night.
  • Switch off you system and monitors.
  • And the best one: try to work as less as possible.
 
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John Resig: the messy DOM

03 Feb

Take a look at this: a very interesting video of John Resig on the DOM.

 
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Posted in All Articles, DEVelopment EXPerience