This is an open admission, I procrastinate a lot. I wouldn’t be able to put a figure on how much I procrastinate per day or week, but the very fact this blog post was drafted inbetween working on two projects further drives the point. Even though I am writing this article, I’m way ahead on both projects. I know how long it takes to do most things, how long I have before a project is due and this blog post amongst my other favourite procrastination activities like browsing Hacker News or Github repositories make me a better worker.

Not only am I much happier, I’m way more productive than I would be if I were being forced to only look at websites related to my job and undertake activities related to my job. A developer (or to generalise any worker) who doesn’t procrastinate is a bad worker in my opinion. If you focus only on one thing for too long you make bad decisions and don’t take the time to reflect on your decisions and think twice.

There are numerous studies that have found procrastination makes you more productive in the end and of course it’s not always the case, but if you know what you have to do and have other people relying on you (like being a part of a small team) you should know how much you can procrastinate and when to do work.

Any employer or team leader who believes procrastination is the devil and results in less worker output needs to seriously re-evaluate their stance on things because they most likely procrastinate, everyone does.

While not all designers would care if their dotted borders don’t look the same, like I did recently the difference can really affect a design. I came up with a crafty solution that allows you to create dotted CSS borders the Photoshop way. This only works if it’s a line on top or bottom, not a dotted border that wraps around an element.

The following code is what I recently used on a project, tweak to suit your tastes:

/* This is most likely a DIV element that uses this class, but it can be anything */

.dotted-rule {

/* Probably unneeded if the element using this class is a DIV */
display: block;

/* This helps stop the element being taller than it should be */
line-height: 1;

/* A space of 5px top and bottom of our dotted border */
margin: 5px 0 5px 0;

/* Overflow hidden will stop the :after pseudo dots extending past the width of our element. */
overflow: hidden;

/* We don't want any padding */
padding: 0;
}

/* Inserts a whole bunch of dots after the dotted rule element */
.dotted-rule:after {

/* The colour of our border */
color: #FFF;

/**
* Use as many dots here as you like, I put more than I need and let the overflow: hidden above restrict it to only display the width of the element.
* Try experimenting with different characters for awesome borders like triangles or something, be creative.
*/
content: '.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................';

/* This is very important, our text won't flow or display correctly without it */
display: block;

/* Letter spacing helps space out our dots. It controls the distance between them. */
letter-spacing: 3px;

/**
* A negative margin will most likely be needed to bring the rule border up an acceptable position, otherwise by default it might sit lower.
* This negative margin matches the amount of margin we've put on-top of the dotted rule above.
*/
margin-top: -5px;
}

Okay, I digress for a moment: responsive design looks cool when done correctly, but it adds an extra level of unneeded complexity to even the simplest of websites unless you use some kind of framework that has done most of the hard work for you. But in all serious, who wants their precious deadline left in the hands of some kind of framework (CSS in this instance) forcing you how to structure your sites markup and what you can and can’t do?

If anyone ever tells you that building a responsive website is simple, punch them in the face about 5 times and then tell them: “That’s what it feels like to build a responsive website, still think it’s simple or should I punch you another 5 times?” responsive development is hard, especially hard when the designer recreates the interface for mobile devices to the point new menus are added in, it’s not impossible but it’s an unneeded complexity that has the potential to blow out deadlines for even a seasoned web developer.

Taking a desktop browser website and then scaling it down for mobile visitors is not responsive development, it’s stupid. Do you really think hiding all of those unneeded elements from your desktop version on a mobile phone screen makes a difference? No. Unless you build for mobile first and scale up (and seriously, who ever does that?) your mobile visitors are loading the same scripts, unneeded styles and other crap they don’t even get to see on their mobile devices. Do you know how expensive mobile data is in a country like Australia or the UK? Stop wasting my bandwidth you bandits.

Responsive design is the new Internet Explorer 6. If you want a site that works on an iPhone? Build a mobile site or better yet, build a friggen’ application. If you want a site that works on an iPad or other tablet device: build a tablet version of your website or build an application. There’s no need to go making a site work for desktop computers at anything under 1024 x 768, even the shittiest of computers these days at least support that resolution. So where does that leave responsive design?

At the end of the day, it’s a matter of preference and what your clients want. If your clients want a responsive site, give them a responsive site. If they want an app, give them an app and if they say nothing then build a site that is at least usable on a mobile or tablet, don’t go spending 3 hours shouting at your screen and debugging CSS only for no one to even notice the extra effort you spent on the site.

Scenario #1

An outside influencer perhaps made a sly deal involving lots of money with General Motors in exchange for pulling their Facebook advertising account. How long have GM been advertising on Facebook before even a couple of months is enough to determine if your ads are working or not. It’s not unlikely that something like this could happen, if someone wants Facebook to falture in the lead-up to its IPO, they’ll no doubt find a way to craftingly sabotage the chances of it being a record opening IPO.

The question is, who would want to see Facebook’s IPO be jeopordised? My money if such a scenario is likely would be Google, but it could also be a financial institution that wasn’t lucky enough to get a slice of the Facebook investment pie.

Scenario #2

GM tried negotiating a deal with Facebook to get cheaper advertising rates knowing that once the IPO goes live, advertising rates will increase as all eyes will be on Facebook to make a profit every which way they can. Facebook most likely rejected GM’s call for cheaper scale advertising and like a 2 year old child, pulled their account and made a big public tantrum because they didn’t get the candy that they wanted.

Scenario #3

It’s all just an unfortunate coincidence that GM decided to announce they were withdrawing their Facebook advertising spend. The call to cut back on advertising spending was made long before Facebook decided to go public.

Are there any other potential scenarios that I’ve missed here?

How is this possible? The screen-shots speak for themselves. I would love to hear a response from Blizzard in regards to why the SEA price is so high.

While I agree that Bittorrent is definitely faster, I did a test of my own on a basic cable connection here in Australia downloading an official Ubuntu installation .iso from the official website in Google Chrome, the below screenshot speaks for itself. I would recommend downloading it via Bittorrent because you can resume and pause your download amongst other advantages like not costing the hosting provider money by downloading it from the official website.

No application on Windows RT will have access to the Win32 API, see the blog post on this here. This kind of behaviour is no different to what Apple do in iOS, it’s for security reasons and rightfully so. At least Microsoft are allowing another browser on Windows RT, unlike Apple who disallow any third party browsing engines, don’t start an argument saying they do the browsers you see in the Apple app store, aren’t browsing engines.

Firefox might be quick to come out swinging and crying foul-play here, but it’s not just Firefox but ever single other web browser not explicitly developed for Windows RT will have the same restrictions; Chrome, Operate and whatever other obscure web browser you use.

What most people fail to realise or admit is that Microsoft has no mobile or tablet monopoly, basically zero. Apple own what 70% of the tablet market and a somewhat high mobile share as well, if there is any anti-trust behaviour going on here it’s not Microsoft people should be targeting. There is nothing stopping Mozilla from making a Windows RT version of Firefox, it sounds to me like Mozilla want a free pass past restrictions to the Win32 API Microsoft have put into Windows RT which means everyone else will want a free-pass thus making Windows RT insecure in the long run.

I don’t think the intentions of Microsoft here are to block anyone from doing anything. What Microsoft are trying to do is basically force people to write apps for WinRT, this isn’t anti-competitive behaviour, it’s the same as WordPress making a major update and breaking almost all 3rd party addons, it’s the addon authors responsibility to make sure the plugin works with the new version.

Bottom line: every single third party application has the same restrictions placed upon it, Firefox isn’t being singled out it’s everyone. Why is it so hard for these companies to harden up and develop a new version?

I didn’t think I could do it. Chrome has always looked nice to me, but I could never bring myself to actually try a new browser, the age old problem of being stuck in an abusive relationship and not wanting to leave because you still love the person, in this case a web browser called Firefox.

What actually drove me to make the switch is the memory leak issues. Firefox for a very long time has had a nasty habit of taking ram and not giving it back, mostly due to plugins leaking memory like a bucket with holes in the bottom. I know a fix has just been submitted that will be out soon, bit it’s a little too late to make amends. In fact just recently my Firefox has been using after a few hours 3.5gb of ram that continues to climb.

Thanks for making other browsers innovate and take note of web standards, but you’ve become the old station wagon and Chrome is the new shiny sports coupe with the all leather interior.