Author: Bruce Elgort

You’ll find this technology professor – an award-winning instructor at Clark College – working hard to inspire and challenge his students with meaningful web development and programming experiences. With a skinny vanilla latte (no foam) in hand, Bruce loves to tinker and test the boundaries of existing and emerging technologies, to then guide hungry minds through memorable, educational journeys to showcase with passion the ever-evolving innovations of society. An industry leader, Bruce is known for co-developing Elguji’s IdeaJam software, and is recognized by IBM as an ‘IBM Champion’ for being an innovative thought leader in cloud technologies.

Yes this has happened…

A few months ago I quietly relaunched my consulting services and have have had several productive engagements. Having stepped away from the day-to-day world of all things IBM Collaboration Solutions, I can now say that I have a very clear and objective viewpoint on what companies should be doing with their Notes/Domino/XPages/Connections apps and deployments.

I am also offering the following services:

  • Provide an honest assessment of your information technology operation
  • Offer executives a “plain English” explanation of technology
  • Personalized executive technology coaching and training
  • Help you answer the question “IT tells me everything is perfect, but is it really?”
  • Offer you the cold hard facts about social media
  • Provide opinions and constructive feedback for new software and hardware initiatives
  • Help you learn more about the “cloud”, its benefits and how it can be implemented
  • Assist you in determining if your company’s data is secure
  • Provide you a motivated and expert speaker for company events and conferences

Please consider using my services. You will not be disappointed.

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A quick and simple image placeholder service

Have you ever needed to insert an image placeholder into a web page? Well look no further. placehold.it is an easy to use service that can provide you with placeholder images. You can specify the image dimensions, background color, image format, text and text color:

An image placeholder service

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UPDATE: Here’s a list from tuts+ of the top 8 image placeholder services for web designers

Parallels Version 11 – Important changes that you should be aware of

Prior to Parallels Version 11 you were able to use the Parallels software on any of the Macs you owned and used for non-commercial work. With Version 11 you are no longer allowed to do this. So you need to purchase a license key for each and every Mac.

VMWare Fusion has a completely different policy that states the following:

Can I use a single license on more than one Mac?

VMware Fusion for personal use:
You may install and use VMware Fusion for personal, non-commercial use on any Apple-branded products running Mac OS X (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control.

– See more at: https://www.vmware.com/support/fusion/faq/licensing.html#sthash.Y452Lrq1.dpuf

I’m going to ask Parallels for a refund and make the move to VMWare Fusion. Don’t get me started on Parallels annoying pop-up dialogs.

A Complete Guide to Flexbox

The Flexbox Layout (Flexible Box) module (currently a W3C Last Call Working Draft) aims at providing a more efficient way to lay out, align and distribute space among items in a container, even when their size is unknown and/or dynamic (thus the word “flex”).

The main idea behind the flex layout is to give the container the ability to alter its items’ width/height (and order) to best fill the available space (mostly to accommodate to all kind of display devices and screen sizes). A flex container expands items to fill available free space, or shrinks them to prevent overflow.

Most importantly, the flexbox layout is direction-agnostic as opposed to the regular layouts (block which is vertically-based and inline which is horizontally-based). While those work well for pages, they lack flexibility (no pun intended) to support large or complex applications (especially when it comes to orientation changing, resizing, stretching, shrinking, etc.).

CSS Tricks – A Complete Guide to Flexbox >

My Fall 2015 Schedule at Clark College

Here is my class schedule for the fall 2015 quarter:

Monday – API & Advanced Integration (CTEC 228) 6:30-8:50PM, room SHL 124

Tuesday/Thursday – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving (CTEC 121) 10:30AM-12:50PM, room SHL 125
Tuesday/Thursday – Business Web Practices (CTEC 165) 4:00-5:50pm, room SHL 125 (Tueday) / Foster Auditorium (Thursday)

Check the Clark College website to see when you can register.