Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Reading Heiroglyphics

From an email:


Symbols found in a cave in Jerusalem
Written across the wall of the cave were the following symbols:
It was considered a unique find and the writings were said to be at least three thousand years old!

The piece of stone was removed, brought to the museum, and archaeologists from around the world came to study the ancient symbols. They held a huge meeting after months of conferences to discuss the meaning of the markings.

The President of the society pointed to first drawing and said: "This is a woman. We can see these people held women in high esteem. You can also tell they were intelligent, as the next symbol is a donkey, so they were smart enough to have animals help them till the soil. The next drawing is a shovel, which means they had tools to help them."

Even further proof of their high intelligence is the fish which means that if a famine hit the earth and food didn't grow, they seek food from the sea. The last symbol appears to be the Star of David which means they were evidently Hebrews.

The audience applauded enthusiastically.

Then a little old Jewish man stood up in the back of the room and said,
"Idiots! Hebrew is read from right to left...
It says: "Holy Mackerel, Dig The Ass On That Chick!"

Monday, January 18, 2010

th (table header cell) has not been deprecated

Two programmers I'm working with seem to not know what th is or how to use it. One went so far is to put a div with a class in order to make something bold. The other only used an h2. Why they couldn't use th and changed text alignment in css is beyond me. Note that all of these contained headers and th is specifically used for table header cells.

Both of them also used span and div with a class inside td instead of just assigning the class to the td. Again, no idea what the logic was.

Another pet peeve is assigning a class to every single child of an element instead of assigning a class to the parent and using inheritance.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Bad HTML - img tag

<IMG style="WIDTH: 710px; HEIGHT: 207px" height=830 alt="" src="https://www.somesite.com/UploadedImages//red%20banner%20with%20sign.jpg" width=1946 border=0>

Developer was wondering why image was getting stretched and asked me to take a look. Always make sure your coder knows what s/he is doing.
See how many errors you can spot and then scroll down. Have in mind that this is from a newsletter sent in email.















  1. Tag name is uppercase.
  2. CSS is uppercase.
  3. Values not quoted.
  4. HTML width and height different from CSS width and height.
  5. https instead of http.
  6. Extra slash in url.
  7. Tag not closed.
  8. Pointless inline CSS.
  9. alt not set.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

ColdFusion - Getting the total for a query column

Here's how to get the total for any number column in a query without using loops:
total = arraysum(listtoarray(valuelist(query.column)));

Monday, January 11, 2010

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

CafePress - Pole Bearer

Always stuck holding up the chuppah while your friends are getting married? Sure, it's an honor, but how about honoring you with the bride's sister or best friend instead.

Goyim have "Always the bridesmaid, never the bride."
Here's my Jewish version, "Always the Pole Bearer, Never the Corpse."

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Castle Age FAQ/Guide

UPDATED: 1/05/10
Added stats

Oracle -> Demi-Power
  • Make sure to receive your blessing every 24/48 hours.
  • Stick to one Demi Power, preferably the one that gives you a +5/+10 bonus.
  • Each Demi grants a different item as a final reward, these are very important for duels and monsters.
  • Besides rewards, you get stat bonuses: Ambrosia - Energy, Malekus - Attack, Corvintheus - Defense, Aurora - Health, Azeron - Stamina.
Town -> Land
  • Buy land in sets of 10 only. Price goes up after each purchase and buying 10 at a time gives most land for least money.
  • Don't buy too much of 1 type of land. I recommend 10 towers, 10 temples, 20 marketplaces, 20 mountain keeps and 10 each of all the rest.
  • Before buying, sell whatever land of that type you got for free from monster fights to amount owned to 0 or 10.
Quests -> Quest
  • Don't jump too fast from land to land. You need to build up enough income to offset upkeep costs.
  • Do each quest and subquest 4 times. Each time you complete a quest, you get a stat point. Also, you get achievements for completing a certain number of quests.
  • Do Demi Quests. This is one of the ways to get magic and also you can get energy potions and upkeep free units.
  • Make sure to use the general shown in the picture or you won't gain influence.
  • SubQuests don't have a general requirement. Use Sano to do these to gain influence faster.
  • Use subquests to quickly level your best generals, Celesta, Sano, Dante and Vanquish.
  • Switch to Sophia, Elena, Terra or Elizabeth Lione before doing a quest that will push you to next level to get some free energy.
Keep -> Achievements -> Monster Achievements
  • You get achievements for doing assists so do these even if you're already in the middle of a fight.
  • To get a monster achievement, you need to slay a certain number of monsters, but, you need to also deal a minimum amount of damage or the kill will not be counted.
Heroes
  • Use Sano for subquests.
  • Use Celesta when defending in monster battles. Switch to Dante once you're able to get him.
  • Use Zarevock when attacking in monster battles. Switch to Vanquish once you're able to get her.
  • In each land, there's a general that gives a max energy increase. Use these before leveling for some free energy.
  • Use subquests to quickly level your generals.
Keep -> Monster
  • Don't fight too many monsters at once, you need to deal minimum damage for a monster to count towards an achievement and you need to deal enough damage to get good loot.
  • The more damage and healing you do, the better loot you get once the monster is killed.
  • Power attacking deals more damage than attacking 5 times.
  • It's possible to get items, like Poseidon's horn or Dragon Charm, from a loot drop and not have to craft them.
Battle
  • You can earn 10 demi points per demi power per day.
  • Invade uses army size, Duel uses stats and best items.
  • Don't attack players who's rank will give you no or very few batle points.
  • As you gain more Battle Points, you'll gain ranks and will be awarded skill points and items, however, you can get much better items from monster fights.
  • Winning a certain number of invaasions and battles will grant you achievements.
Keep -> Stats
  • Never, ever spend skill points on health, ever. Having more health just means it'll take longer to kill you, you'll still lose the battle.
  • Don't waste favor points to increase your army size. You need to friend real people who will send you gifts and will help you with boss battles and vice versa.
  • I tend to put 2 points in Energy, 2 in Defense and 1 in Attack.
  • Don't forget to increase Stamina, but don't waste all your points on it. It's good to have enough Stamina so that it's recharging while you're not playing.
  • Don't forget you get free stat increases demi powers.

Friday, January 1, 2010

2010

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.