Author Archives: Kurt Wolf

Why the iPhone 4 on Verizon is not interesting

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imageVerizon and Apple announced today that the iPhone will be available to Verizon customers in February.  From my perspective, if you are an AT&T customer it may be best to wait before switching.  The Verizon iPhone (vPhone…) will be using the CDMA network, not Verizon’s new LTE network.  This means that the device will still be on a 3G network.  Some may say that this network is still faster than the AT&T 3G network, that may be so, however these are my concerns.

CDMA does not allow for simultaneous voice and data traffic.  This means no web browsing while you are on the phone, including getting new email alerts.

Apple announces new iPhone equipment in June, at least that has been the trend.  If you switch now, you may be locked into a device that will be top of the line for 3-4 months until the iPhone 5 is available.

The big plus is that an included Verizon app is included to turn the phone into a hotspot (read: without having to jailbreak).  This is exciting EXCEPT if you get a phone call.  Then it is good by data connection.

Thanks for trying Verizon.  I’ll stick with my AT&T service.  I can count on one hand the number of dropped calls in the past year.

Feather Text in Table

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I have been working on a project at work to create a status board display of important company metrics. Since this will eventually make it to a large LCD display, I am doing everything I can to make sure it is as perfect as possible. Now, I’m no professional designer but one of the things that really bothered me was the tables of information running together and there was no easy way to distinguish the data columns. I wanted to feather (fade) the text at the end of the column before the start of the next.

It seems there is not too much about this on the good old inter-web so I was off to hacking. Like most of my good ideas, they come to me when I stop thinking about them and just allow a moment of quiet. That came tonight at the dog park.

I was really consumed with the idea that I had to address the column that I wanted to feather, when in fact I needed to add the feather to the column I did not want to run into. The picture above shows to table rows, the first does not have the treatment, and the second does. Code to follow…

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<html>
    <head>
        <title>Sample Table Layout</title>
 
        <style>
 
			*, HTML {
				padding: 0px;
				margin: 0px;
				font-family: verdana
				font-size: 12px;
				background-color: #000000;
				color: #FFFFFF;
			}
 
			TABLE {
				table-layout: fixed;
				width: 675px;
			}
 
			TD {
				white-space: nowrap;
				overflow: hidden;
			}
 
			TD SPAN {
				background: url(feather.png) repeat-y;
				background-position: right;
				position: absolute;
				/* Set these both to the width of your feather image */
				margin-left: -20px;
				width: 20px;
				height: 100%;
			}
 
        </style>
 
    </head>
 
    <body>
 
        <table>
            <tr>
                <th>Col 1</th>
                <th>Col 2</th>
                <th>Col 3</th>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>The quick brown fox jumped over the log</td>
                <td>This is the start of a second column.</td>
                <td>Parker</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>The quick brown fox jumped over the log</td>
                <td><span></span>This is the start of a second column.</td>
                <td><span></span>Parker</td>
            </tr> 
        </table>
 
    </body>
</html>