John Lai   [RSS Feed]

Top Ten Reasons why Design Firms Fail

I’m making the mistake of underquoting (due to lack of experience) and not charging for project modifications.

Another good article recommended to all freelancers, start up founders and workaholics..

Manage Your Time to Include You

Another great site launched!

Girls Can Do Anything Magazine

Here’s a great Toronto Star article that describes what GCDAMagazine.com is all about - “Mothers work to counter-balance corrosive influence of pop culture”.

GCDAMagazine.com has so many great articles.  Here’s one I like, even though I’m not a girl…

How Do Siblings Stop Fighting and Start Getting Along

From my experience working with a couple of co-op students, I’d have to say the two most valuable skills a new employee should have are: 1) to be able to read between the lines and 2) to be able to program software. The latter skill is obvious. The reason it takes a backseat to the former is because by the time you get to work with me, it’s a given that you know how to code or that you’re a quick learner.

Reading between the lines and anticipating future problems are extremely important skills. Many managers are over-worked. They manage several dozen concurrent projects and reply to hundreds of emails daily. So when a manager debriefs an employee on the details of a new project, s/he may forget to mention important project details. A good employee should be alert and s/he should ask the right questions to acquire the information s/he needs to successfully complete a project.

Many new grads think, “As soon as I know Subversion, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, I’ll be eligible for the job.” No….Not yet. You also have to read your boss’ mind and be one step ahead of him.

This is a note-to-self.    Sometimes when I want svn to ignore a whole bunch of files in a directory (example, I want svn to ignore files in my ./user_upload/ directory), I should follow the instructions below, which came from another forum.

$ svn mkdir spool
$ svn propset svn:ignore ‘*’ spool

—-

The value of svn:ignore is the list of file patterns to
ignore. See:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s02.html#svn-ch-7-sect-2.3.3

So you have two options, depending on whether you want the spool
directory itself to be in version control and have its contents
ignored, or whether you want the directory itself ignored as well.

If you want the former, create the directory, add it, then set the
svn:ignore property of that directory to ‘*’ to ignore everything in it.

$ svn mkdir spool
$ svn propset svn:ignore ‘*’ spool
$ svn ci -m ‘Adding “spool” and ignoring its contents.’

If you want the latter, do not add the directory, but rather set the
svn:ignore property of the parent directory to ’spool’.

$ mkdir spool
$ svn propset svn:ignore ’spool’ .
$ svn ci -m ‘Ignoring a directory called “spool”.’

If you had already added the spool directory but now realize you did
not want to, but want to preserve its contents, you can fix it this way:

$ svn export spool spool-tmp
$ svn rm spool
$ svn ci -m ‘Removing inadvertently added directory “spool”.’
$ mv spool-tmp spool
$ svn propset svn:ignore ’spool’ .
$ svn ci -m ‘Ignoring a directory called “spool”.’

Note to self, use the following tools to test query performance:

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/using-new-query-profiler.html

I had trouble putting youtube videos in TinyMCE while using Internet Explorer.  I turned on the Media Plugin and followed these four steps to post a video.

Step 1: Get link from youtube

Step 2: Click media button

Step 3: Insert link

Step 4: Resize the video if necessary and save

We finally moved The Dashing Fellows off of Wordpress and on to Evermight.   Now I feel much more comfortable maintaining and upgrading the system.   Take a look!

http://thedashingfellows.com/

I injured my right ankle back in October 2006.  Today, I did the aerial for the first time in three years, and I’m so happy I have my ankle back.  I can flip again!  I don’t want to suffer another long term injury ever again.