Thursday, 30 April 2009, 21:34:17 EDT
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After my post on not being able to find a job some things started picking up for me. I got a message back from a job I had applied for (but nothing from them since), a call from someone else about a job that I can certainly do (and have applied for it), and, most exciting, I've started a web design/development business with a friend.
I was going to wait until we had completed our first project before writing about it here, but this site needs some new content. So, I introduce you to Platypus Web Productions. Our site is still undergoing heavy development, but it is in a decent enough state to unveil (hopefully Chris agrees). It looks great in every browser except one — Internet Explorer 6. Actually, it looks just fine in IE6 after the fix for transparent PNGs is applied, but that takes place after the page has finished loading.
Which brings me to a question: why are you people still using IE6? Almost 50% of the traffic to this website for the month of April has been from user agents claiming to be IE6. I realize IE8 has only been out for a month, but IE7 has been a "critical" update for Windows for a long time, now. Are that many of you really using Windows 2000? Can you not upgrade? Or install any ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 02 August 2006, 20:34:06 EDT
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We have been upgrading the wireless access points around campus the past few weeks. The new access points are dumb terminals that talk to an access point server. The server manages all aspects of the devices; what ESSIDs they have, the channels they broadcast on, etceteras. There is a software package that is used to connect to the server and manage it, and the devices. The company only provides it for Windows (2000 SP4 and later) and two Linux distributions — SuSE 9.1 and Red Hat WS 3. So, today I loaded Windows XP on a Dell laptop so that I can manage these access points. As I was installing the software I noticed that they wrote it in Java! Why they don't have a Mac OS X client is beyond me. It makes no sense to write something in a language that was designed to generate programs that can run on any platform and only offer it on two. Oh well, maybe one day they will wake up and realize their stupidity.
Since I installed Windows on a machine I intend to use only rarely, I installed the latest Internet Explorer 7 beta. After a little testing, I determined that IE7 will display this site correctly (mostly) if the stylesheet is sent to it. It does what Opera 8 was doing; it shoves the buttons off to the right a little too far, but that is acceptable. So I am not sending the stylesheet to IE7. Internet Explorer 6 and earlier will still get only the HTML.
I don't recommend you upgrade IE to version seven just yet. It will be forced on you soon enough via an automatic update. It is still a beta, and people have had problems uninstalling it. But, if you are an Internet Explorer user, you should soon get to view this site as the rest of the reader ... (view rest)
Friday, 18 November 2005, 10:10:36 EDT
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Oh you pitiful people who continue to use Internet Explorer. Maybe you can't help it. Maybe you can't install anything else on the computer you use because of access restrictions. That really sucks. I am sure you can see why if you are using IE. For those of you that aren't, let me fill you in. I am no longer sending a stylesheet at all to IE users. They only accounted for 16.9% of the traffic last month so it shouldn't be too bad.
I am no longer sending a stylesheet to Internet Explorer users for a couple of reasons. One of them I won't be talking about just yet; let's just say some people may be viewing this site soon whom I don't want to get the impression that I don't know what I am doing. This site looked wretched in IE. The second reason, though, I don't mind going into right now. Whenever someone viewed the site with IE they were supposed to get an error message at the top of every page that redirects them to a warning explaining why they get the error. It didn't impact the user from being able to view the site, it would just be an annoyance for the user. Well, it stopped working for some reason. I think an update to IE broke my check for the browser and thus disabled the message. I have now replaced my detection script with a better, more complete, detection script.
When I initially wrote this current design I wanted to do this very thing. I just never got around to doing it. I will probably write a stylesheet specifically for Internet Explorer that makes it a bit better, but not for some time. I just realized that what I have ... (view rest)
Friday, 05 August 2005, 20:13:16 EDT
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New design. How do you like it?
I started this design last Friday when I got home from work. I worked on it all day Saturday and then as much as possible during the week. When I wasn't working on this new design I was preparing for my calculus final. I rewrote the whole of the HTML and CSS from scratch. Doing so allowed me to cut out a whole lot of unnecessary markup and styles. If I may boast for a second, the way I wrote the new stylesheets is amazingly clean and the markup is almost pretty, minus the spacing as a result of the template engine. Okay, boasting over. Every page has been updated in either content, appearance (aside from the overall theme), or both — including the rarely used search page! Okay, that is a lie, the archives page didn't change but that is the only page. While I was at it I even fixed the news feeds. I threw away the third party class I was using to generate them and wrote my own implementation. So, the dates are correct on the feeds now. Rejoice.
More so than ever before you need a browser that supports CSS2 very well to view this site. While Internet Explorer mostly gets it right, it leaves out quite a bit and gets just as much wrong. I extensively tested this new design with Safari, Firefox, and Opera. Opera has a small problem with the width of the view port but works well enough for the ten people that use it; seriously, Opera only hit this site sixty-four times last month. If you are using Opera and haven't ever changed the user agent string from Internet Explorer to Opera then wake up and fix it. I digress; the reason you need to use a decent browser is because the stylesheets are a good bit more complex than the old ones. I moved all of the navigation content to the bottom of the markup so that search engines can rank the pages better and textmode browsers can view the content first. What that means is all the buttons to the side, more on those in a second, the menu at the top and the archives link, along with the feeds links, load last but are positioned first, visually, on the page.
While working on the design I came across several things that Safari gets right which Firefox doesn't. For example, I really wanted to use upper case Roman numerals on the links page. Safari numbered the links correctly whereas Firefox labeled every one of them as "0" which isn't even a Roman numeral. I also wanted to put a text shadow on the menu text but Firefox doesn't even support the "text-shadow" CSS property. I don't know if it is just the poor version of Firefox for OS X, but Firefox doesn't even scroll the content window on this page smoothly. There are a few more things that I can't remember right now. Basically, Firefox turned out to be disappointing but it is still worlds better than Internet Explorer.
About the buttons, I have been wanting to add them for a long time but there wasn't anywhere in the design to add them. The number of buttons is going to grow slightly over time so you might as well learn to live with them. Actually, if you really don't want to see them then they can be turned off by adding the right code to your browser's default stylesheet. The buttons are all contained within a single element with an id named, appropriately, "buttons". If any of that makes sense to you then go for it; I won't be telling you how to do it. I could really use any revenue generated by people using the clickthru ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 03 November 2004, 15:12:54 EDT
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Yep, Internet Explorer is stupid. If you are using IE to view this page do not complain to me. Once again, I will not do special things to make IE behave properly. I am, however, thinking of implementing a "theme" switcher so that you can choose between the old theme, the current one, and any future themes. I am unsure how I want to implement it though so it may be a couple days before it is available. I also want to tweak this stylesheet if it needs to be tweaked before I work on that.
Any way, you may need to clean out your browser cache for this page to look like it should now. If you are using Firefox then just hold the "control" key and press 'F5'.
Please, feel free to leave ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 01 September 2004, 21:57:10 EDT
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I would like to thank everyone who wished my birthday well yesterday. I was greeted with "happy birthday" just about every where I went and that was strange for me as it has not happened in a long time. It is odd how such a small thing can make a day better. That and the time spent with friends Saturday evening was certainly a good end to my twenty-fifth year. Yes, that is right, I have lived a quarter century now; it is amazing how quickly the time is starting to pass.
Any way, let's get on with the geek portion of the post shall we? It seems that Firefox is slated to reach version 1.0 on October 11. This release is going to incorporate some really nice new features. If you are not yet using Firefox I don't know what is wrong with you. The browser is really living up to its namesake (it used to be called Phoenix) - it is ... (view rest)
Sunday, 08 August 2004, 21:43:14 EDT
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I have converted this web site back to HTML 4.01 Strict. I have been meaning to do it for a long time now but decided to quit putting it off. Why HTML 4.01 and not XHTML 1.0? That is a good question and one that will take a bit of explaining. The first thing you should do is read http://xrl.us/ba4c from start to finish.
Done? Good. Now let me explain what it said.
HTML is marked up text, hence, Hypertext Makrup Language. That means a web page is, or should be, nothing but text marked up so that user agents, i.e. your web browser, can interpret what the text means. A good example is the <h1> and the <p> elements. The first element denotes a heading level one; this is typically rendered as very large bold text by most web browsers. The second element indicates that the text is a paragraph, just like a paragraph in a book. The idea here is that a user agent can pick up certain elements and do magical things with them. Theoretically a user agent could pick out the heading elements, of which there are six, and create a table of contents for the web page. The user agent could then present you with the table of contents and allow you to navigate through the document like a book. Basically, a web page is nothing but plain text with elements describing the text. That is the most basic idea about HTML and if you can grasp that you will better understand why there are standards for web technologies (HTML, CSS, XHTML, et al).
XHTML is completely different. To understand what Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is and why it exists you need to understand what XML is and what its purpose is. XML is a textual representation of data. Let me repeat that, it is a textual representation of data. XML can be used to store settings for applications to describing the visual structure of applications. For example, in a couple of the projects I am idly working on I use XML to store user settings and such; I also use XML to describe the user interface — where the buttons should go and such. XML is very portable and quite human readable. An XML file written on one platform can very easily be used on another platform. The programs just have to be written to read it. This feature lends itself very well to the internet; at least in theory. Writing web pages in pure XML, like this one, would not be very efficient. However, writing normal web pages that can make use of XML is. Imagine for a minute if you could write a web page that works just like a normal web page yet has portions that are much more advanced than just text and images. Wouldn't you like that? Well, that is what XHTML is for. XHTML allows you to write an average run of the mill web page yet take ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 16 June 2004, 16:14:36 EDT
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Maybe it is just the geek in me but I love reading good articles by fellow programmers. Joel Spolsky is one of the best; his articles are funny and usually spot on. His latest one is about the direction software development is heading and why he believes Microsoft is in danger of missing out, or rather, why Microsoft's biggest product is not looking so good to developers any more. He states that more and more developers are moving to web based development because their work is just easier in the long run. When one develops for the web he knows that the users are all going to be using the same version because he controls which version is used at all times. The user can only access the application through a web agent. This also gives the benefit that the user does not have to use the same operating system as the developer nor any of the other users. This is why I have grown to enjoy web development. I can write some decent applications that, while not as interactive as I would like, work everywhere. I don't have to worry about the platform the user is on, although I sometimes have to work around IE bugs and lack of support. Recently, though, I have started wanting to write some "rich," to put it in Joel's words, applications that work in conjunction with web applications. For example, I am currently writing a web application that will allow users to log ... (view rest)
Saturday, 22 May 2004, 14:27:13 EDT
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After reading an article on the past, present, and future of a standards based web, and reading through some of the comments associated with it, I decided to add something to this site. If you are using Internet Explorer you should see a small graphic at the bottom of the left-hand menu that says "Get Firefox." I could have put it there a long time ago but I didn't really want to make this site an advertisement. After reading the article I came to the conclusion that the only way to get people to demand more from their web browser is to suggest a better one to them if they are using a sub-par browser. I came to this conclusion because one of the comments said something to the effect of, "the only way to get people to use standards compliant browsers is to get the word out about them." I then started thinking about some of the phone calls I receive at work where I ask the person what web browser they are using and they don't have the first clue what I am talking about. I then have to ask them a series of questions to determine what web browser they are using. For most of the stuff they need to do Internet Explorer is the only one that will work "properly" as that is the browser targeted by the people that wrote the software they have to use; so, if they are using the AOL or MSN browser (or whatever) then I need to get them to use IE if possible. I also need to figure out which version of IE they are using, if they are even using it, from time to time. Enough digressing, the point is is that people will blindly use whatever until they are told to use until something else is recommended to them. If they try out whatever else and find they don't like it as much then they can always just not use it. When I talk to people I recommend they use FireFox, unless I am at work and then I recommend standard Mozilla, just to see if they like it; I just haven't ever done so with my web site.
So, if you are using Internet Exp ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 05 May 2004, 19:43:05 EDT
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Earlier today I decided to write an example web page to reference in the web design course I am writing. I came up with a, what I think to be, rather nifty design that shows the advantages of a CSS design. It is a design that would be rather tricky to do effectively with tables but is actually quite simple with CSS. The markup is negligible and much smaller than it would be if done without CSS. So, I had this design all made up and ready to begin writing about it when I decided to check it in IE. It was at this point that I said "what the hell?!?" and began working on a nice little hack that renders the page appropriately in IE and Mozilla. My "hack" is slightly eloquent and works just fine; I went on with the rest of my day beaming with pride at my little accomplishment.
After lunch I went around campus taking pictures hoping to get something useful for a Zen Garden design. After deciding that what I was trying to do wouldn't work right I started browsing through the designs already available. I came across the The Question Why design and was instantly dumbfounded because it works exactly like the way I designed my simple example page. There is one slight difference; the Zen Garden design is positioning e ... (view rest)
Thursday, 12 February 2004, 11:08:55 EDT
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Internet Explorer is now just about the most secure browser available, says Microsoft - because so many security holes have been filled. ... (view rest)
Sunday, 02 November 2003, 22:15:41 EDT
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I finally got around to implementing an "archive" system on this site. Instead of the posts section (the section you are currently reading) being generated from all the posts I have made it is now generated based on the current month. This should be a cleaner arrangement. In the process I had to tweak the CSS file a bit so, even though IE likes to make the page "taller" than it should be, the site should look better on all browsers.
In case you all didn't know, the new Indiana Jones DVDs rock. They didn't add new stuff to the movies or take anything out. The movies are just touched up to look and sound their best. And the bonus disc is really cool. It points out all kinds of stuff that I never noticed before. For example, in the heiroglyphics on the column next to Indy when he and Sullah are recovering the Ark there is a scene with C3P0 reaching out to R2D2.
If you haven't seen the new Alien re-rel ... (view rest)
Thursday, 25 September 2003, 00:53:00 EDT
If you are viewing this site in Internet Explorer you have probably noticed that these news items are not centered and are not as wide as one would think they should be. It seems that Internet Explorer's !Doctype support does not like the XHTML !DOCTYPE definition. Don't know what I mean by !DOCTYPE? Read here.
Basically, I am not going to go out of my way to make IE work like it should. I know of a way to get the site to look proper with IE but then I have to maintain two stylesheets. If you want to view this site as it should be get a more standards compliant browser like Mozil ... (view rest)
Saturday, 16 August 2003, 22:22:19 EDT
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I just fixed up a couple of the style sheets for this page to look more like it should in Internet Explorer. Some of you may be wondering why a horizontal scroll bar shows up in Internet Explorer when it doesn't with other browsers such as Mozilla or Opera. I will tell you why, it is because Internet Explorer has shitty standards support. I designed the page to fit in the width of your browser ... (view rest)