The following web post and my reply is from Jenn Dolari’s LiveJournal. I hope she doesn’t mind me posting it here, but I wanted to make my reply into a blog entry and I figured she wouldn’t mind if I presented the post to give some context.

Style and comfort for the discriminating crotch!

Websites that “punish” you for using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox or Netscape (usually by putting in malicious “Operation Aborted” javascripts or forcing our CPU cycles to run through the roof while brwosing) usually end with me still using Internet Explorer, and me not visiting your site anymore.

Bleh.

Single-browser support asshattery irks me more than anything else. As the old saying goes, “Code to standards, not to browsers.” It’s rare that I encounter a website that’s IE-only or Firefox-only, though. The only time I have encountered one that affected me was this one banking website I went to that temporarily wouldn’t let me in because it didn’t recognize Firefox and would only allow MSIE or Netscape 6 or higher. They must have gotten a lot of complaints, as that only lasted for a month or two.

As for what happened to you… it sounds like what happened when we first introduced V.7 of MK Online. (MK Online, for those not in the know, uses a CMS/forum/etc. written entirely in-house.) We wanted to add stuff like transparent PNG files and the like so that it would make switching themes and news headers extremely easy and painless for us. The only problem became the fact that even though Internet Explorer was the most used browser on the planet… it was also the only one that didn’t support the features we wanted. During that time CCShadow went from IE’s biggest supporter to its biggest detractor, because he was so pissed off that MSIE wouldn’t support standards several years old that other web browsers did.

Eventually we did keep it the way it was but had the site load a Java library for MSIE users that would implement the functionality that was lacking. However, it made the site run EXTREMELY slowly for IE users, and we got no end of complaints. We finally gave up and had to hack a new system together using ImageMagick that would merge images and whatnot when new headers were created, and get rid of transparent PNG files altogether.

My point is the fact that these websites might not be trying to “punish” you, but actually have good (but misguided) intentions: they’re trying to put their websites together as they see fit but are trying to work around MSIE’s lack of functionality. In the end, hopefully they’ll realize such shortcuts are rather detrimental.

Then again, even more hopefully, MS will put those damn standards in IE7. Personally, I think MS’s monopoly was one of the worst things that could have happened to web browsing. MS never saw a need to add newly developed standards until they got real competition in the form of Firefox, and these are standard that are several years old. The web might actually have been much more advanced than it is now had it not been for IE’s stagnantion.

(Sorry for the long rant, BTW… heh.)

Well, it appears that Google might be releasing an IM system after all. I’ll go ahead and link to the Slashdot story here, but it appears that it will be based on Jabber, which is an open instant messaging protocol. This should be interesting, as there are already several Jabber IM clients out there, and most of the multi-IM programs support Jabber. I probably won’t get on it quite yet, as one needs a Gmail account to actually use their IM service, and I currently lack one. (I never needed it.)

I’ve actually been using Jabber extensively, myself. How, you might ask? Well… when V.7 of MK Online was being developed, one of the ideas I had in mind was a private IM system. So, Joe and I worked together and got a Jabber server working on the site. I don’t know how popular the IM system as a whole is, mind you, but it’s worked very nicely for me. It’s tied into the site PM system, so whenever someone sends me a PM on the site, I get it on whatever IM program I’m using at the time (Gaim, Fire, or CenterICQ). There’s been a couple of glitches, but on the whole, I like to think it was one of my better ideas.

On the downside, it appears that AOL has been messing around with the TOC servers for AOL Instant Messenger. For those not in the know, there are actually two protocols used for AIM. The one that most of the clients (especially the GUI-based ones like Gaim, Trillian, and the official clients) use is called Oscar, and has all of the nice nifty features. The other one is called TOC, and is a very minimalistic protocol. However, TOC is an open protocol and last I checked is specifically kept open for the outside clients to use. Anyway, CenterICQ (which is the IM program I use at work) stopped working this weekend, and it turns out the TOC servers are to blame. The program naim has apparently gotten a working version going by using an updated protocol called TOC2, but CenterICQ’s lagging behind. (I don’t even think it’s being actively developed nowadays.) So, what I’ve been having to do is use CenterICQ for ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and MK Online Jabber… and use iChat for AIM. It sucks, but what can I do?

Oh, well… here’s hoping they fix the issue relatively quickly. I’d like to go back to one program for all of my IM needs. In the meantime, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing and work from there.

Well, it’s been a semi-long and semi-interesting week as far as stuff I’ve been working on technology-wise. If you’re not interested in that kind of thing, I’d advise you skip this post. :-)

Anyway, I got my Powerbook back on Wednesday evening. I was hoping that they didn’t wipe the hard drive and just replaced a couple of fans, because while most of the stuff on there was disposable, I had forgotten to save this one program I bought called Slick Vol. 3 & 4. The Slick volumes are add-ons to iMovie; in particular I use Matte-tastic in volume 4 for watermarking videos for MK Online. I was handed the Powerbook back, and looked at the paperwork. Unfortunately, the one part they did replace was the hard drive. *sigh* So, while I was there, I figured “to hell with it” and also bought a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I took the machine home, and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had put the factory default install of Mac OS X 10.2 on. So, the first thing I did was install Mac OS X 10.4. I ended up spending the next few days installing all of the software I use regularly on the Powerbook, including iLife 05, MS Remote Desktop Connection, rdesktop, fink, Fire, Xcode, ImageMagick (through fink), minicom (also through fink), and Slick. (The people at GeeThree were nice enough to send me a link so I could redownload the software.) After a lot of reconfiguring and setting up, I was ready for anything.

… or so I thought. It ended up Friday that I should have reinstalled Virtual PC and put a Windows XP guest OS on it. I had to make a day trip out to Corpus Christi to troubleshoot a printer and a phone issue out at our location there. Unfortunately, the phone switch had reset itself to factory defaults… and while it was on our network, one of the settings lost was the default gateway. So, only computers on the local network could reach the switch, and I had the only actual computer at the location. To make matters worse, the software to reconfigure the switch is Windows-only. Our phone system vendor’s going to have to send someone out Monday because we weren’t able to get into the switch. In the meantime, I spent last night reinstalling Virtual PC on the Powerbook, and will install Windows XP with the phone switch management software Monday. I am NOT going to get caught unprepared like that again.

Tonight had me doing some hardware changes in the network that ended up being for the better. We had a Brother HL-645 laser printer that had served us faithfully since 1993. However, it’s gotten to the point where it needed a new drum, and that would have cost something like $150. So, we went to Office Depot, and found they were out of the drums anyway. Instead, Dad picked up a new Brother laser printer that ended up costing less than the drum for the old printer. In addition, I picked up a D-Link print server with two parallel ports and one USB port. Up until now I had the laser printer hooked up to Tyrande (my main server) and served it out to the client machines via Samba. Frankly, that was a pain in the ass, and I wanted to do something different.

Anyway, when we got home, Dad and I spent about thirty minutes or so getting everything hooked up and configured. Dad had two inkjet printers hooked up to his laptop, so we removed those and moved them over to the shelving next to the servers. So, now there’s a decent laser printer, a cheap inkjet printer, and a decent photo printer hooked up to the print server. I’ve already reconfigured both my PC and Dad’s laptop to use the new printers, so all is good. (Mom has her own just-about-as-cheap inkjet printer, and she didn’t want to go ahead and get the network printers installed on her laptop.) So far, I guess I can say I’m happy with the new print server.

Anyway, that’s about it on the tech front… heh. Now I’m just going to go downstairs and have myself a beer…

Bleh. I would really like to have Nova back by now. I just checked the Apple website to see what the status of its repair was, and the status is the exact same as it was a week ago: “Hold – Awaiting Part”. I might be tempted to step into the Apple Store tomorrow and see if they have any more information than that. I’m getting to the point right now where I’m beginning to get a bit impatient. Samus is working great for me right now, don’t get me wrong… the problem is that I still have Louie’s iMovie project that needs to be burned to a new DVD, and I don’t have a video editing program on Samus at all, much less one that would support iMovie files. Furthermore, I don’t even have a DVD burner, and I have 6 GB of files I transferred off a server that needs to be burned to DVD. I have a DVD burner on my home PC, true… it’s just that life would be a lot easier if I had a DVD burner on my actual laptop. Oh, well… like I said, I’ll contact Apple in the next day or two to find out what the holdup is.

Yesterday was quite a bit of fun… when I finally got home, I decided to spend the evening in the kitchen so as to keep Chase calmed down. I set up Samus in the kitchen, got logged into the wireless network, and was good to go… or so I thought until I checked my email. Turned out there was a new GameSpot video concerning MK Shaolin Monks posted, and I needed to do a news story on it. So, I needed to find a way to take screenshots of videos, seeing as normally video players use an overlay on the screen which prevent normal screenshots from working. Fortunately, I had installed mplayer on Samus, and I was able to find out in its FAQ how to make it run with no overlay. So, I ran it, paused it at the requisite places… and then used the Gimp to acquire a screenshot of the window, crop out the non-video parts, and export it to PNG. In a way, it actually turned out easier than my procedure in Windows does (which is virtually the same, except that I use VLC). So, all’s good there for now…

I’m also waiting on my new monitor to arrive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824163129

It should take up less room, consume less power, and put out less heat than my current CRT. The only downside is that I very likely will have to get a longer DVI cable for it so that it will reach my PC, which is a bit of a reach from the monitor. As soon as I have it up, I’ll take a pic. :-)

Anyway, time for me to check back on this other laptop I’m working on (in between coming to and from this post). Fun fun…

Well, Samus (again, my Compaq Presario laptop running Linux) is at a state where it’s pretty stable and running smoothly. It took a couple of days, but it’s at a point now where it’s usable and not slow as hell like it was before. I had mentioned putting IceWM on it before, but once I finally got it installed, I realized it was TOO minimalistic for my tastes. So having given that one up, I decided to do some research to find a different, more appropriate desktop environment. I finally found that a desktop environment called Xfce was available as part of Fedora Core 4, but the reason I had missed it when installing it was because it had been moved to the “extras” part of the distribution. So, I installed it, tried it… configured it to my tastes, and now I’m good to go. Granted, it took a little searching to find how to get one thing set up correctly (namely, switching my default terminal from xterm to something like gnome-terminal), but otherwise, it’s been far less painful than I would have expected. It definitely runs a lot lighter than GNOME did, and frankly, I’m happy now.

If you want to see what it looks like for me now, well, see below…

I’ve also done a bit of checking to find out the status of Nova (my Powerbook). Apparently there must have been something wrong with the hardware as I suspected, as the current status shows it at the repair depot waiting on a part. Oh, well… the main thing I’m concerned about is whether it’ll come back with the hard drive wiped or not. If it does, it’s not that big of a concern… as I’ve said before, it provides me with an excuse to upgrade it up to Tiger. I also hope to have it back soon as I’m going to need access to iMovie soon for a project that I’ll need to work on.

Finally, I’m pondering acquiring a 19″ LCD monitor my friend Shinnokxz pointed out to me on Newegg. I’m seriously tempted, as he got one and says it’s “ORGASMIC”. At $300, it’s a hefty chunk out of my wallet, but considering the current 19″ CRT monitor I have is a serious power drain, it might be worth it. Besides which, Dad will probably take the old monitor if I ask him. We’ll see.

Anyway, back to the grind here. Fun fun….

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

I want. :-)

Bleh. This weekend was rather eventful, both in the technical and the social side of things. Not that it was bad, mind you… I just had a long weekend is all, and now I’m sitting at work and wishing I could have gotten a bit more time in bed. In any event, I’ll start with the technical. I’ll get up to speed on the social one in the next post.

My big project this weekend was to get wireless networking operational on Samus (my Presario running Linux; I name my machines after female video game characters). This turned out to be MUCH easier said than done. Now, don’t get me wrong… I love Linux. However, with Linux, hardware support is either feast or famine. In other words, the hardware is either immediately supported with no issues whatsoever, or it’s a complete and utter pain in the ass to get operational (if it’s even possible). I have a Linksys WPC54GS card that I use for wireless networking in Samus. However, there were no Linux drivers available for it. I ended up needing to download and install a program called ndiswrapper. ndiswrapper acts as, well, a wrapper to allow Windows wireless networking drivers to operate under Linux. In addition, my home wireless network and my AirPort Express’s default “travel” configuration use WPA for their encryption and authentication, and apparently the distro of Linux I’m using (Fedora Core 4) doesn’t natively support WPA. So, I had to download a second program called wpa_supplicant in order to get WPA encryption working. Bleh. The end shot of all this is that unless I want to do some serious screwing around with some of the scripts on here, I have to activate wireless networking manually. Of course, that’s not really an issue, considering I only need the wireless network support when I insert the Linksys card into the PCMCIA slot manually…

At least wireless networking isn’t as much as a pain in the ass as power management. Apparently Linux doesn’t like the version of ACPI that’s on this laptop, even when I try to force it to use it. Power management was a big reason why I gave up using Samus as my primary work PC two years ago and switched to Nova (my Powerbook). I was running Red Hat Linux 9 at the time, and was watching the MK movie on a flight to E3… and the battery died after 45 minutes. Needless to say I wasn’t a happy camper at the time. What I wanted was a top of the line laptop running a UNIX variant that had decent power management, and Linux wasn’t cutting it. So, I switched to Mac OS X, and have been extremely happy with it. At least everything WORKS with it.

My next project on Samus will be trying to get IceWM working on it. As much as I like GNOME and KDE as desktop environments, they tend to be a strain on this machine. (Samus only has 128 MB of RAM, and I’ve never felt the need to spend money on a memory upgrade for it.) At least IceWM runs lighter than either of those two environments. The main challenge will be to make it where IceWM is a choice on the list of desktops one can load when you log into the machine. That so far is what’s frustrating me the most; most of the information I’ve been finding as to how to do that relates to Fedora Core 1 or 2, and it’s changed as of 3 or 4. *grumble*

Oh, well… I might keep Samus around after Nova gets back from the shop just so I have a second laptop I can use for different tasks, like checking network ports or doing security audits. We’ll see. The sooner I get Nova back the happier I’ll be… especially seeing as I have a fresh copy of iLife 05 ready to load on it. (iLife 05 = iMovie HD, iDVD 05, GarageBand 05, and iPhoto 05.) There’s some stuff I need to work on as well regarding the movie project Dave and I have been doing, so that’ll be needed. Oh, well…

In any event, that’s enough tech rambling from me. I’ll post later with my social experiences this weekend.