Patrick’s Blog(2)

This past weekend I took a swing at reworking one of my sites using XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1. Everything was going well. Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 were happy campers as was Opera 9.0.2. In between I goofed around a bit and bumped into a truly amazing script called “ies4linux” made by Sérgio Luís Lopes Júnior that installs IE 5.0, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on a Linux box. It even throws in Flash if you want to. In my case I installed it on my laptop running Fedora Core 6 and Wine. You can find the “ies4linux” script on his website at tatanka.com. First I installed Wine with yum, downloaded the script, started it and answered a few simple questions. The script went on its way to download some files and installed all three IE browser versions. Once finished I had 3 IE icons on my Desktop. I double clicked on the IE6 icon and lo and behold IE6 started fine and browsing websites worked like a charm. I quickly tried the two other versions and they worked too. Kudos to the Wine folks and Sérgio.

But then came the agony. I fired up IE6 again and browsed to my newly reworked site. Oh the horror. It looked awful. The entire layout was messed up and margins and padding took a whole new meaning. Next I tried IE5.0 and IE5.5. Both made an even bigger mess than IE6. I had read about all the IE horror stories and this time I had my own to tell. What were the Microsoft developers thinking when they released these abominations into the wild?! How is it possible that they got the crystal clear box model wrong?! Even IE6 is chock full of embarrassing bugs (have a look here for a nice overview). Do the Microsoft developers take no pride in their work? One can only hope that IE7 will fix this mess but googling around it seems they still have some work to do. Sigh.

It took me more than 2 hours to find, understand and fix all the ugly hacks for IE’s stupid bugs. And that was only in the front page. Now it looks fine in Firefox 1.5.0.7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0.2 on Linux and IE5.0, IE5.5 and IE6 on Wine :-) I don’t have a Mac to check but I’m sure I will hear about it soon enough once the reworked site is launched.

Microsoft has announced here the end of support for Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows XP Service Pack 1. According to several articles on the Net, like this one from Zdnet, this will boost Desktop Linux. It remains to be seen if consumers will flock to WinXP or will decide to try Linux. For those that have finally had enough of the trojans, malware, virii and security leaks in Microsoft products there are a number of great free Linux distributions like Red Hat’s Fedora Core, Novell’s OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. Try them out and if you need help, just ask in the abundance of mailing lists, forums or your local Linux User Group (LUG).

Checking my blog tonight I noticed two things. One, it was in a desperate need of an upgrade. And two, those idiot spammers had found one posting that had comments turned on and spammed it straight into oblivion. Thanks to “Mass Edit” in WordPress they went straight to /dev/null. Anyway, the reason I checked my blog was that I had stumbled on a new blog client called Drivel. Definitely worth a try. Have a look for yourself here: http://www.dropline.net/drivel/. If this little posting actually makes it to the blog I may very well keep it up more frequently :-) Update: posting this message with Drivel worked very well. Guess I’ll keep them coming now.

Ever since mobile operators shelled out billions for those overpriced UMTS licenses they have been trying to convince everybody and his dog that 3G will bring fabulous services. Reality doesn’t seem to agree. 3G has been wobbling towards memory lane for a while now as an expensive service that never seriously saw the light of day and successors/alternatives like HSDPA are already being rolled out. In the mean time the market place has changed considerably too. High speed Internet access is now just a utility which is something operators are hardly comfortable with. Denying the consumer choice is like writing your own death warrant. Makes one wonder why any operator thinks they can lock in the consumer by forcing them to use their messenger solution instead of Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo etc. This whole IMS business and the thought process behind it seems to have derailed considerably. Time for a rude awakening and who would be better suited to do that than the world’s market leader in the GSM handset space: Nokia. At the 3GSM show Nokia showed the world’s first mass-market dual-mode wi-fi handset. The implications are major: no more expensive GSM calls if you are in the vicinity of a WiFi access point. Read more here.

Anybody who wants to get a better idea what the Digital Rights Management fuzz is all about should definitely read Cory Doctorow’s excellent article on DRM here. DRM is bad for the consumer and this document clearly explains why we, the Consumer, are getting screwed by the media industry. Spread the word to your members of parliament and any influencer you can think of. Your kids will thank you for it.