Samsung Galaxy 3 is awesomeness in a phone

I recently upgraded my phone from the Droid X to the Samsung III and it is absolutely the most amazing phone that i have owned. It is ridiculously fast and has a beautiful screen. I find myself doing more things than I ever did with the Droid X. You can actually use the web browser on the phone without waiting 500 years for the response to render.

I highly suggest picking one up if you are looking for a new phone. I am NOT going to post a review because there are 5 billion reviews available on the internet. YouTube or Google Samsung Galaxy S3.

Development Virtualbox VMs

I added a bunch of new images to the Virtual Machine folder that I am sharing. I added several PHP development images, centos 6.2, and an Oracle 11g XE image.

You can find the images here: (please consult the readme.txt on the desktop)

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B37iWxTxZVl8cFhSVURpdUsyQzA

Render Issue with IE 9 and HTML Layouts w/ Empty Elements

I ran across an interesting problem with IE 9 and empty HTML elements. I am maintaining a project that was originally maintained by a different consulting firm.

There was a requirement to update the footer of one of the websites. The footer layout ended up exploding on me and was stretched down the page. I only noticed this issue with IE 9.

I dug around through the source code a bit and noticed that there was an empty table element. It was like this <table />. Apparently, IE 9 did not handle the rendering of the page correctly with the trailing DIV element. The layout was perfect for all other browsers.

I removed the empty element and viola! The layout renders out appropriately. Take a look for empty elements if you encounter any strange rendering issues with IE 9.

Google Drive has been released

Google docs and Google storage has been around for a long time. One of the biggest drawbacks to Google storage in comparison to Dropbox or any other online file storage system was a file synchronization client.

It looks like Google has released the Google Drive with options for a file sync client for your computer. You can go to http://drive.google.com to see if your Google Drive is available for your account. You can choose to be notified when the Drive is ready if it is not ready.

One warning: DO NOT UPGRADE OR CHANGE YOUR STORAGE if you have already purchased a large storage plan. You can retain your current storage plan as long as the following remains true:

• The account stays active.
• The credit card in your Google Wallet does not get declined. (not sure if this includes transactions not related to renewal of your plan. Ex: google music transactions)
• The plan does not get upgraded.

It is too late to go back if you upgrade your storage plan. I wonder if this will become the Dropbox killer.

Dev Virtual Machines

Star log 9000654998.0025.... I have arrived at a strange planet. There are creatures moving and speaking in strange tongues. They use strange keys on devices that have some kind of visual peripheral. They communicate through this place called "The Internet".

Finally, I have joined the current decade and I have created my own blog. This is the first post.

I figured I would post a link to the folder that contains development virtual machines that I maintain. There is only one PHP dev machine available right now. The PHP dev machine has two IDEs installed and also contains Drupal 7, Wordpress, and Joomla. You will need Virtualbox to run the vm. I will be adding more as I continue to work.

You can access the virtual machines here:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B37iWxTxZVl8cFhSVURpdUsyQzA