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So I went to Fog Creek’s Open House last night and I had a good time.

Strolled in knowing nobody and introduced myself. There were a good few people
there and surprisingly a few pretty ladies – I found out later that they were all friends of the receptionist.

The Office

Very nice. We could learn a lot from it. They say the office space isn’t too expensive but
they’ve made a great job of it. Entrance – glass door with logo. Buzzer. Reception area
on right, office opens out ahead. New side of office through corridor on left.
Microwave, fridge, etc in what is like a living room area with long table ending with TV/monitor.

All offices at angles – not cubes! Very cool cabling system. New offices have 30” screens!!! (Talking to the guys, they prefer 30” screens to having 2 monitors). The constructed office walls look like cubes of semi-transparent plastic. The doors slide across. Offices are roomy. They created a second window in each office which looks at an angle into the next office – it’s a nice effect.

There is a shit-hot fish tank in the entrance of the new side of the office (which I was told about in detail).

Servers  room on RHS in short corridor to new side. 2 racks loaded down with servers. I had to ask Joel why there was angled plastic sheeting on top – there are water pipes overhead; they had a minor disaster once and don’t want to take any chances. They have one machine running 4 non-critical servers via vmware - we all agreed that vmware is the dogs bollocks (going to have to set that up on my laptop).

I told the guys that I had been looking forward to trying out their Aeron chairs and they invited me to have a go – yeah there good - they are very supportive. As one of the guys said, you don’t appreciate the chair until you’ve been sitting in it for a few hours.

The Fog Creekers

In a word, sound. No less than I expected. As expected, Joel had nerds hanging on to his every word of course so I decided not to plague him too much. What little I did talk to him, he was insightful, interesting and good-humoured. I slipped away when there was 8 nerds about him asking all manner of ridiculous questions.

Some of the “interns” I seen on the DVD of the Co-Pilot project are now working there now. They didn’t want to say but I figured out that they gave 3 of the 4 a job – they left the “marketing guy” go. Good call methinks.

Joel thinks $10,000 was fair price to play for the co-pilot.com domain. It’s a damn good domain name.

I told the tomato guy (tom-a-toe not tom-ma-to ) that I didn’t want to see his bloody tomatoes on the DVD and he said he didn’t understand their prominence either. The film maker had some kind of hard-on for his tomatoes.

I told the guys, Joel included, that I’d like to have seen more design and programming on the DVD. Some of them agreed that the film maker didn’t “get-it”. I told them I wanted to see all the internal arguing involved in making the Co-Pilot project – they leaked that there was 2 good “debates” during development, something about somebody being called a lair – I probably shouldn’t be blogging this. Now that would have been good to watch.

Damn, just thought that I forgot to check the ledge they were thinking of jumping to on the DVD.

I should mention the wine and food but I won’t.

In the lift on the way out, I met a gang of people, all friends of Alice, Fog Creeks receptionist and website designer. They were going to dinner and invited me to come along. Not knowing anybody in New York, I did just that,

We went to some Thai restaurant and the food was pretty good (I left ¾ of my portion behind – it was massive). Some of us exchanged blog addresses so if you’re reading this thanks for that guys.

The Fun

Wine and food. Reminiscing about the childhood programming (the bouncing ball), pong, spectrum, Commodore 64, the day we first seen Doom (I couldn’t sleep with excitement - if you’re not a gamer or programmer, I realise that all this will sound strange and sad to you ). General chit-chat; great ideas. The wine. Taking shop. Debating the merits of the mac versus the PC; the usual. All in all, it was a good experience – I’m glad I came down.

Later On

Back at the hostel, the French guys I thought were soulless turned out to be great fun. A gang of us (2 Ozzie's, 4 French, 3 Spanish and more) stayed drinking vodka in the common room until about 11pm. Then we went clubbing. Well some of us didn’t make it
– you know who you are .

We went to some exclusive Manhattan club. Exclusive. Exclusive. What a queue. “Celebs”/VIPs skipped right in with friendly greeting from head bouncer. I talked to the bouncer and became a hero by getting all 7 of us in the door.

Then they wanted me to buy a bottle of drink – the cheapest was $310!!! Flabbergasted I explained to the assigned bouncer/guide that he’d
better suck my cock for that price. Fortunately he was Irish, recently departed, from Galway so he sorted us out; moved us from the VIP table and guided us to the cheaper bars. Bottles were only $7 at the cheap section. Shit I just remembered,
I paid $20 for a double JD and coke.

As always, New York rocks. I've Decided to stay for the weekend.

If your a web developer, no doubt your ran into the height/min-height problem. The problem is basically that Internet Explorer treats the CSS height property like the min-height property and doesn't not support the min-height property.

So you can get the behaviour you want in IE, but it looks like shit in Firefox. Or vice-versa.

But Dustin Diaz came up with a solution:

selector {
  min-height:500px;
  height:auto !important;
  height:500px;
}

I've finally released the flash upload component - the development of which I was blogging about here. Took a while for myself and Dan to come up with a good name. We were throwing all sorts of crazy ideas out there. Anyhow, please please go ahead and try it out. The demo is fully functional apart from a banner that asks you to purchase it.

I'm selling this baby for $50 per website - a fair price I think given the amount of work that went into this sucker.

• Download the fully functional demo on CFTagStore.com.

What Is CF_ProFlashUpload? This widget creates a interface that allows your site user to easily upload multiple, even hundreds of files to your server. Each file has an individual progress bar and there is also an overall progress bar. The upload rate is also displayed.

The component allows you to use a multiple file upload component of any size as part of any ColdFusion application. It is extremely easy-to-use. You can call the component passing in just the upload directory and nothing else. Or you can use any of the advanced options to customise security options, file-type options and the look-and-feel of the component.

One of the nicest features of this component are per-file progress bars. The upload rate is also displayed along with the overall progress.

The demo is completely functional - just download it and you'll be up and running in minutes.

Myself and Cormac had nothing better to do in Dublin city yesterday so we looked up some old friends at Digerati.

We were well received. In fact, we went for coffee, followed by a trip to check-out the X-Box live gaming centre, followed by a few pints. Cheers guys. When your in Cork next, I'll try to be as good a host.

It's great to see these absolutely sound guys making a name for themselves and I wish them every success.

I just got a professional accessibility audit report on a website I recently developed. I didn't fare too badly - an average score.

What really impressed me was the thoroughness of the report - wherever there was a red flag, there was a very good suggestion on how to fix this as well as notes on why this is an issue.

I've learnt a lot about how to make a website truly accessible and look forward to moving the websites score from average to excellent. It's important to keep learning and strive to be the best developer you can be.

I'm at Dublin airport and I'm just after paying Eircom's extravagant fee of €5 for 1 hour of wireless Internet access - the thieving bastards. I'm on my way to Boston for 4 weeks. The flight leaves in 2 hours time.

One of the highlights of my trip to Boston will no doubt be attending the Boston CFUG meet tomorrow night. I've been in touch with Brian Rinaldi and he says I welcome. He might even be able to arrange 5 minutes for me to show off the multiple file upload component I recently developed.

Aside from all that, I'm wrecked after Ireland's biggest festival, Oxegen, at the weekend. The Red Hot Chilly Peppers rocked. I was also impressed by Feeder.

Saturday was a mud-ridden wash-out but Sunday was great. We were camping and it was hilarious to intermittently see tents take-off in the strong gale with 2 screaming girls jogging after them.

Update

Dan I KNOW you'll get a kick out of this. Some goth style Linux nerds just came up and said "here ya go" and gave me an Ubuntu Linux installation disk. Looks like there are walking through the airport giving them out to anybody with a laptop. I got a strange look from the cute girls across the way when I took the CD. Reminds me of the sandals - you'll know what I mean.

At Digital Crew we are busy. So busy our own website is badly neglected. Hell, it's so old, it uses font tags! And it uses our original CMS solution so its pretty hard to manage also.

We've wanted to make the mother-of-all websites for over 2 years now and last year we couldn't settle on a mother-of-all design and so the project stagnated. And eventually was forgotten under our heavy workload.

Recently we made the decision to put up a simple showcase site in place of the current embarrassment. Anything is better that what's there now. Our top priority is to showcase our recent work which I think (somewhat biasedly of course) is pretty good.

Aside: I'm watching Portugal Vs France right now.... Portugal is losing 1-0 and they just missed a sitter.

Adam, our graphic designer has put together the temporary showcase website design for Digital Crew and its not too bad at all for a temporary site. I'm looking forward to putting it up. Here is a tiny preview.

Aside: Update: The match is over. Well done France for getting to the Final.

Aside: Can somebody tell me why Firefox is putting a load of whitespace at the end of the first blog post on this site?

Google Checkout is here! Google Checkout is here! Google Checkout is here!

For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. For example, if you spent $1,000 on AdWords last month, this month you can process $10,000 in sales at no cost. The more you spend to promote your business through AdWords, the more you save on transaction processing fees with Google Checkout.

If you exceed your free transaction processing for the month, or you don't advertise with AdWords at all, you'll only be charged 2% plus $.20 per transaction.

https://checkout.google.com/sell

Happy Days - they are only charging 2% + $.20 per transaction! I can't wait to change CFTagStore.com over to using this. At the moment we are using WorldPay and are simply being raped on the transaction costs.