I’m not actually looking for a job, by the way. But sometimes it all gets to me and I get fired up and visit Trademe or Seek or whatever. After reading a few of the job descriptions I tend to realise that I am one of those arseholes who doesn’t appreciate what they’ve got.
Hot on the heels of IE7, Mozilla have released Firefox 2, and yeay, twas downloaded twice millionfold. What is new in Firefox 2?
So, nothing too exciting in there (the rendering engine is basically the same as Fx 1.5). But that’s fine – why go changing something so good? The people, they love it. (See the Firefox crop circle on Google Maps!) The latest statistics tell us that the gains continue – various sources suggest Firefox is approaching a global share of 15%.
Anyway, perhaps you remember Firefox Flicks? Efforts are now underway to, with the community’s help, get those ads on TV. And do you remember Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox project? He has since been working on another project, along the lines of a web-based local operating system for desktop PCs. Doesn’t sound that great to me, but then, he is Blake Ross. Fear him.
Yeah, no one ever talks about Thunderbird, so I only have one piece of news: future Eudora Versions will be based on Mozilla Thunderbird. However, I did find this buried in my linkpile: Thunderbird with tabs! And there’s some info about that at this broken link.
Yeah, pretty quiet on this front too. However, Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 released recently. I dunno, I use a text file to do my calendaring.
At the heart of every Firefox beats a Gecko. You may need to be hardcore to find these interesting, but I really enjoyed these words from two of Mozilla’s most important contributors: Boris Zbarsky and Brendan Eich.
Yeah, so I was in The Warehouse the other day and saw CDs on special and bought everything on the spot. Specifically, The Ramones – Greatest Hits, REM – Greatest Hits, and Foo Fighters – The Colour and the Shape. However, when I got home, I realised I was one of those losers who buy music that they already own. But what, I hear you asking, does this mean for you? Specifically, what can you get for FREE?! Well, here at Rambleschmack we’re pleased to present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a second-hand CD for, yes, FREE!! Get nostalgic about the Foo Fighters before they were shit! Call now for FREE!!, and we’ll throw in a bonus FREE waterfront stadium! Our operators are standing by! CALL NOW!! FREE!!
Internet Explorer 7 was released on October 18. How the last five years have flown by. So, let’s begin with the good news:
Alas, the bad news:
Here’s an Internet Explorer 7 Review by CNET. While it’s generally positive, basically every paragraph ends with ” … but Firefox does it better.” Is there any reason to use IE7 apart from ignorance? Well… the toolbars are very shiny.
I feel very sorry for the IE team really. They were on a hiding to nothing. There wasn’t the time to really fix it, so they were tasked with taking what is quite possibly the most widely despised piece of software ever built and somehow patching it up to be as good as browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari, all of which are rocketing along the cutting edge at the moment. It was an impossible task, and they were going to be abused just for trying. You only need to read the comment thread on any of the IEBlog postings to get an idea of it – sometimes dozens, often hundreds of comments, the majority just outright dissing them, their product or Microsoft. It’s not cool.
Mind you, you get that when you peddle the corporate line on your blog. For example, we constantly asked for a way to run IE6 and 7 side-by-side on our PC – you know, so we could support their browser – and constantly got told to either buy another computer or get Virtual PC. Now, again, this was all they could do, so I’m not holding it against them. But what they consistently failed to do was finish it with ” … yes, this is shit, it’s the best we can do right now, we’ll try to do better in the future.” If they had just said that, people wouldn’t need to keep screaming at them about it all the time. The internet is full of angry, nasty people, but you know, if you don’t treat us like shit, we can actually be pretty cool once you get to know us. (By the way, you can get unofficial standalone IE builds.) So it was pleasing to see this, finally, in the latest chat transcript:
Q: Any word on supporting developers who need to run IE6 and 7 concurrently? I’m currently running the IE7 RC1 standalone hack.
Tony Chor [MS]: As we’ve mentioned before, we suggest users who need to run multiple versions of IE use virtualization technology like Microsoft Virtual PC (available for free download now!) or multiple machines. We know this is a pain point for everyone (including us!) and will focus on providing a good solution in a future versions.
From the same chat, this was my favourite bit. Sometimes, you only need one word:
Q: Will IE7 work with Windows 98?
Tony Chor [MS]: Sorry.
So yeah, if you want to get IE7, I guess you can download it from here or something.
Now, we all know how important it is to back up, right? Just realising this is the first hurdle – well done, you are already ahead of the majority of computer users. (Who will one day discover that while ignorance is bliss, it also comes with a shelf-life.) Now, actually doing it. Ideally you want to back up to two kinds of media, one of which will be in a geographically different location than your computer. A webserver would be good, but that would take just a little while, and who wants all their personal stuff over on someone else’s internet-accessible server? Burning to a CD or DVD, or saving to an external hard drive, is more realistic. Or, you can be like me and just copy from one of your internal hard drives to the other. This is really easy, and covers the most likely problem (isolated hard drive failure). Note though that it isn’t very reliable, and backing up to external media from time to time would be the smart thing to do.
I used to just use drag-and-drop, but that got old real quick, so I looked up some docs and wrote myself a batch script. Behold, bup.bat:
XCOPY "C:\dave\downloads\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\dave\downloads" /e /i XCOPY "C:\dave\images\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\dave\images" /e /i XCOPY "C:\dave\music\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\dave\music" /e /i XCOPY "C:\dave\stuff\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\dave\stuff" /e /i XCOPY "C:\Program Files\EditPlus 2\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\editplus" /e /i XCOPY "C:\Documents and Settings\DB\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\firefox" /e /i REM XCOPY "C:\Documents and Settings\DB\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\*.*" "E:\BACKUP_latest\thunderbird" /e /i PAUSE
The /e does subdirectories (I think of it as “everything”) and the /i will create the destination folder if necessary. Interesting options that I decided against include /D:m-d-y (Copies files changed on or after the specified date. If no date is given, copies only those files whose source time is newer than the destination time.) and /Y (Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file.) The Thunderbird line is commented out because I don’t have that installed at the moment, and the PAUSE is entirely optional – I just like to see everything went OK. You might want to have a look at the Microsoft documentation, although I can’t say it was a very pleasant experience.
I run this once a week on Sundays. The magic formula with regards to frequency is to think would I be okay with losing all my data since my last backup? If the answer is no, start backing up more often. Oh, and remember to keep your data in accessible formats.
Good design is not fragile. You can change your screen resolution without it falling apart. You can even view it in a completely different way and good design will still be beautiful. Some genius has come up with a test for this: Websites as Graphs. Be sure to check out the screenshots – especially Boingboing, Apple and Google.
I’ve done a few of my own. See if you can guess which site they are before reading the caption. (Note: this is more of an exercise in psychology than HTML. For example, the first site I did had to be…)
Ok, kids: make your own!
Javascript is an interesting little language. In terms of people who have used it at least once, it is probably amongst the world’s most popular languages. And yet very few people have anything more than a bare minimum understanding of it. Generally you get pretty good at HTML, CSS and maybe PHP etc, but Javascript tends to only come up when the client says something awesome like “I want it to pop up in a little window!” or “dropdown menus would really make my site better!”. In fact before the proliferation of CSS it seemed that Javascript was a language that existed purely for the purpose of constructing image rollovers. Because you could never raise a million dollars in venture capital without image rollovers on your site. You can’t sell usability.
In fact a lot of people don’t even realise that Javascript is not Java. Simple mistake, but a pretty big one. Java is the one that occasionally throws errors and will take down your entire browser, and possibly your operating system, with it. Javascript, on the other hand, throws errors constantly and you wouldn’t even know. Seriously, have a look in the Javascript console now and chances are better than 50/50 that at least one of the pages you have visited will have thrown a JS error. That’s how critical Javascript is to your browsing experience. I generally use it about 5 lines at a time for clever little usability improvements. I pity those poor bastards who have to develop entire applications in it.
The other thing about Javascript is that even people who use it know almost nothing about how to. Sometimes I have to do a separate Google search for every line I create. And always I thought, is there, like, an API? A hitchhiker’s guide? Anything?
Not as far as I know. But here, have a look at Javascript in Ten Minutes. It is a great little primer on the basics. The first half is anyway. The second half, I got a bit lost, but once again I pitied the poor bastards who develop entire applications in it. All the complexity of OO, with all the ugly of procedural! I love you PHP.
This is Microsoft’s way of saying, “you’re fucked, buddy.” A quick Google revealed that the problems could be anything from misconfigured software to incorrectly connected cables to faulty memory or power supplies. It was indeed a chilling read, like I was browsing the menu at the Inquisition buffet.
If you have arrived here via Google suffering the same dilemma, here’s what fixed it for me: uninstall BootSkin. Here’s what most definitely didn’t fix it for me: turn off caching and shadowing in the BIOS. If I knew anything about hardware (and I have a C- to suggest that I don’t) I could tell you why that mattered. However, all I can tell you is that with those turned off, your computer will slow down by a factor of 100. This can seriously disguise the fact that you have fixed the actual problem. Thanks, Microsoft!
During the period that I thought I faced a hardware problem, I mused over whether I wanted to go through dealing with that crap. I’m really not into hardware. And I mean, I could get a whole new computer for less than $1000. At one point I turned to my torturer and said, “how about I throw you in the fucking bin? How would you like that?”
There are many lessons to learn. First of all, don’t be emotionally decisive. I suspected from very early on that BootSkin was at fault, but didn’t uninstall it straight away because I really, really like BootSkin. (Well, not so much now.) In fact it is only the fresh feelings of trauma that stop me immediately reinstalling it. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold out. (Oh, I shame me.)
Anyway, guess what the first thing I did afterwards was? A full backup. It goes without saying that this would have been only the second best time to do so, had this been a hard drive failure.
On a related (if you happen to be in the know) note, are you aware that there are easter eggs in the home of Bartleby? For example, the Windows XP Silver theme has been available as an alternate stylesheet since earlier this year. That was, of course, hardly user-friendly, so with a little inspiration (from none other than Mr GrayModern) I whipped up a stylesheet switcher. You can access it in the (and here’s where it gets confusing) View menu. No, not that View menu. Well, actually it is still there, but now it is in the other one as well. And it is better there. In fact, it uses Javascript to do the switch and set a cookie, and PHP to read it back and set the sheet for subsequent page loads. If I may say, I feel that NotePress is pretty much my coolest project ever. Thank you, Bartleby.
I started my DVD collection today (assuming you don’t count those bonus discs that come with CDs), and already it has swelled to three titles:
Oh and Filthy’s back, if you didn’t notice. He’s got right back into his work, giving one finger to Aeon Flux. Good man.
There are many things to like about Firefox (and a few not to like) but the real killer feature for me is the power unleashed by its extension mechanism. In fact, I have a page where I link the best Firefox extensions. It is probably worthwhile for me to highlight some of the greats in my blog from time to time, in order to share the goodness.
Download Statusbar has always been one of my favourites. I think it is an extremely good solution to the unobtrusive-yet-informative download manager problem. A few days ago I got the latest version which solved my only gripe: visuals. The new look is very sharp, and very customisable. You can even set the colours to vary by download speed. Here are a few action shots:
In the old days, downloading a file used to be a bit of a hassle. Now, all I have to do is Alt-click (the built-in Firefox shortcut) and everything else just happens. This is why I love using Firefox: highly evolved UI. Elegance. Get yourself some Download Statusbar today!
By default, WordPress doesn’t seem to have an archives page. It just stacks up all your months of writing in the sidebar. This strikes me as an inelegant solution (interface clutter, anyone?) It also strikes me as a solution that does not scale well. I haven’t yet come across a WP site that’s been going for, say, five years (in fact I don’t think its been around anywhere near that long), but just imagine.
It’s actually remarkably easy to make your own archives page with the power of WordPress templates (AKA themes.) Being a little familiar with these helps, but is not necessary knowledge. You’ll also need to grab the Clean Archives plugin.
Begin by making the template for your archives page. Create a file named (say) archives.php in /wp-content/themes/currentThemeName/.
<?php
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
/*
Template Name: Archives Template
Description: A template for archives pages.
Note: requires Clean Archives plug-in
http://www.sporadicnonsense.com/2005/04/28/clean-archives-plug-in/
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<h1>Archives</h1>
<!-- You may wish to add a search box here -->
<?php echo srg_clean_archives(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
The second and final step is to create the “page” in WordPress. Go into your WP admin area then Write > Write Page. Give it a title (eg. Archives.) Down in Page Options you will see Page Template. Select Archives Template, and click Create New Page.
Important! If you are using permalinks, make sure your .htaccess file is writable (eg. chmod 777 it) before doing the above step!
And that’s it. You should have a nice page like so. Remember to make sure it’s valid XHTML.
Acknowledgments: this post drew heavily on Secrets of WP Theming Part 1.
So you’re doing a quiz about movies in Excel. It’s pretty hard, and you decide to give up (I don’t usually approve of this, but it’s pretty hard when you haven’t even seen the flipping thing.) You still want to know the answers, though. You need some sploitz.
A quick Google finds a protection FAQ which links to a VBA procedure. You look at it and recoil in horror (does VB suck or what?)
Note that I have Excel ‘97 (I swear, Office gets worse with every version) so YMMV. Basically, you wanna go Tools > Macro > Record New Macro… or something and go into the Visual Basic Editor. Paste the aforelinked procedure. Press play on cassette.
It’ll give you a password (something unbreakable like AAAAABBBB+) in one of those stupid fucking Windows dialogs that don’t allow you to copy-paste (I guess that’s because the errors are usually useless.) I keyed it in to Notepad – save yourself the trouble, as the sheet has actually been broken already.
The tricky part is figuring out where the info you want is. Click on the “type your answer here” cells to observe their formula. It might reference some other cells. They could be in hidden columns – select a range of columns and right-click, unhide. Or it might be a self-contained formula. At any rate, you should be able to figure it out from here. And then you can embark on many happy minutes of saying “nnnhh! I can’t believe I didn’t get that!”
