Mozilla 1.5 alpha:: Posted 56 minutes ago
I’ve just downloaded Mozilla 1.5a to give it a whirl. I love getting new releases of Moz. It serves as a frequent reminder of all the work those good folk put in to such an excellent product.
In contrast with IE, it’s positively refreshing.
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Greatest Cars:: Posted 4 days ago
The Land Rover has been voted the greatest car of all time by the viewers of BBC Top Gear. As a Land Rover owner, this makes me very proud.
For those interested (that’d be just me then …) here’s my hippo pictured, as all good Land Rovers should be, in a field.
By the way, I blanked out my registration plate in that photo because that’s what they do on tv … anyone know why? I mean, a quick whois will give you just about all the info you need to come and murder me in my sleep, so why did I bother doing that? heh. humans.
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“Javacode”:: Posted 5 days ago
So I was shopping for a new TV. My TV is starting to act up, as well as not always showing NTSC DVDs in colour and having a nasty old fashioned square screen.
Whilst looking around the Currys website I noticed a great big button in the left-hand menu marked “Netscape Users”. I can’t link to the page because of the Broadvision content management system they’re using, but here’s what it says:
This site has been optimized for Netscape 4.5 and Internet Explorer. Users of Mozilla based browsers such as Netscape 6 and above and the Opera browser, will experience compatibility issues while trying to browse our site, this is due to the inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Netscape’s handling of javacode and certain html tags.
ooo get that … javacode and misbehaving html tags! Let me point out at this point that Currys are part of a retail giant called Dixons Group PLC who also own PC World and Dixons electrical retailers, whose sites appear to be based on the same system and therefore also fail to work in any Mozilla based browser. (Presumably also due to nasty javacode.)
The problem would actually appear to lie with their DHTML menus. Standards compliant, cross browser DHTML menus are not difficult to implement. I bet they’d blame it on the CMS as well as the browsers if you pushed them. I bet it doesn’t work in Safari either.
It’s not like these guys have no money to invest in their online stores. In fact, it’s not like it would even cost any more to get their sites right if they’d bothered to think about it from the outset. From the mere fact that they are capable of putting such an idiotic statement on their website is a fair indicator that whoever was responsible for this project on behalf of the Dixons Group was insufficiently qualified, and whichever development company was hired to produce this string of monstrosities was, at best, badly chosen.
It is immensely frustrating to see this sort of thing amongst big companies who really should know better, and certainly have enough clout to demand more. If the agency you’re using can’t deliver a site that will allow its visitors to use the site to its full, then umm .. change your agency. If your content management system prevents you from achieving this goal, then what the hell is it actually achieving for you? Get the vendors to fix it. Demand that the vendors fix it. If they can’t fix it, return the damn thing and change your vendor.
First and foremost, however, be sufficiently educated to know when you’re being taken for a ride. Make it your business to know that there ain’t no such thing as javacode, because if that isn’t your business, what is?
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Optimizing ASP:: Posted 7 days ago
I spent a chunk of my day today optimizing an ASP script for performance. Here’s some observations I made that affect page build speed in a practical way.
The page I was working on was originally part of a prototype build to use an MS Access database. Therefore, the code was doing a rs.movefirst after opening each recordset on the page. This isn’t required for the SQL Server database we’re now using, and removing this line shaved a whole second off the build time. Neat.
After closing recordsets, it’s good practice to destroy the recordset object (by setting it to nothing) to release memory on the server. If you don’t manually destroy any objects, they get destroyed by the server on completion of building the page. Because of this, I have tended to be a bit sloppy in the past and allowed the server to do the hard work for me. What I discovered today was that manually destroying recordset objects as soon as you’re done with them has a positive impact on the page build speed. I’m not sure whether this has to do with the practicalities of resource handling or the efficiency of the server’s own trash collection code, but it certainly made a difference. I think I saved about 4/10 second on that alone.
If you think that saving one second here and 4/10 second there doesn’t really sound worth the effort, consider that an average ASP page will probably build in about 5/10 second …
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Scrubbin' and soapin':: Posted 8 days ago
After trialling Mailwasher Pro for the last 30 days, I took the plunge (geddit?) and registered today. I’d previously been using the free version, but Mailwasher Pro is significantly better. I’d recommend it to anyone currently using an earlier version of Mailwasher.
(beat)
Today I was making some amendments and adding additional functionality to a web application my team wrote about 18 months ago. Compared to my current standard of working, what we did back then was simply horrendous. It works perfectly well, of course, but I wouldn’t code it like that again today. Don’t you hate it when you go back to your old work to make some changes, and don’t have any time available to fix it up and bring it up to scratch?! Drives me absolutely potty.
(beat)
I think the small-person has chicken pox.
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Textpattern Users:: Posted 9 days ago
In the absence of the Textpattern discussion board, I’ve set up a list at Yahoo! groups. Anyone running TXP, or interested in discussing problems, helping each other out etc, is more than welcome.
The list page is here and the list address is textpattern_users@yahoogroups.com
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Hot:: Posted 9 days ago
I don’t know what it’s like near you, but here on the outskirts of London it’s hot, hot, hot. The sort of hot that’s fantastic if you’re on holiday and have nothing to do but enjoy the weather and relax, but when you’re cooped up behind a desk in an office with a broken air conditioning system it’s not so much fun.
There are supposed to be storms tomorrow. Summer storms are even better than sunshine.
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Flirtations with Windows XP:: Posted 11 days ago
My Sony VAIO boasts a proud “Designed for Windows 98” sticker. I’m not sure it really should be that proud of its heritage. At the time I purchased the laptop, two different versions were available. One shipped with Windows98, and the other with Windows 2000. I already owned a copy of 2000 which I could use on the machine, so opted to save a few pennies and bought the Windows98 version. Apart from a quick BIOS flash, the only remaining difference between the two was the sticker.
This week I reinstalled the laptop with Windows XP Pro. In fact, that’s a lie. I tried to reinstall with Windows XP (after reading positive things in Google Groups about compatibility and performance), but couldn’t get the CD image I had to boot on startup. Eager to discover if I had a poor burn or a hardware fault, I chucked a Windows Server 2003 disc in and booted up. This worked. So much so that before I could do much more about it I was half way through installing Windows Server 2003 and past the point of no return.
So for a short while this week, my aged Sony VAIO PIII 650Mhz 256Mb laptop was a Windows Server 2003 Server (stupid new naming convention…). It ran quite well, and was perfectly usable, but, really …
I managed to find a better Windows XP disc in the end and reinstalled (again). So now it runs XP, and does so very nicely. I’m not sure why my Dell Optiplex at work ran slower after installing XP, but this little laptop runs much more smoothly. So much so that I might even consider reinstalling my main box too.
Mind you, it’s still not a patch on OS X…
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Sleight of hand:: Posted 16 days ago
I’m sure most readers are aware of of youngpup’s Sleight code snippet for achieving PNG alpha transparency in Win IE 5.5+. If not, go look. You may find it useful.
On a project today, we wanted to implement a translucent PNG effect on some dropdown menus. Youngpup’s code only deals with inline images, not background images so I had to role my own. You can download it. The instructions are just the same as Sleight.
Kudos to youngpup for the neat code, some of which I borrowed, some of which I replaced. It uses browser sniffing, which I’d normally avoid, but I think it’s okay in this context. It should fail gracefully if the sniff goes awry.
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Echo, Charlie, Bravo:: Posted 17 days ago
Jeffrey comments on the scope of RSS for publishing a flavor of your site to the world. His comments make sense, and this take on the uses of “syndication” formats is well balanced.
However, consider a site which has no site. If I had valuable content to publish (perhaps if I were a fashionable, high-flying freelance columnist) I might publish my content for syndication on a number of sites (or physical publications), who would pay me a sum for every article received. Such publications could be spread across the globe, making the internet an obvious choice for communication. Suppose I make my living this way, and each of the organizations that publish my work conduct business this way with each freelancer they commission work from. I think we’d find RSS limiting.
The flip-side of the coin is where I, as a struggling freelance hack have to electronically submit my articles to my local rag else I don’t get paid. I’m not technical, so I need support in the tools I have on my desktop for this publishing mechanism:- hence the need for a standard publishing API (read: mechanism).
Those are just two basic examples, but they’re not unrealistic. Look at the standards we have in place for money transfer, postal delivery and so on. This isn’t a brave new world. This is the stuff that we humans have been working on for ages now – simple standards to allow us to get to the pub more quickly at the end of the day. This is why we need Echo.
(There’s no Charlie or Bravo I’m afraid)
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