Write code.
Test in Firefox: Works. Test in Chrome: Works. Test in IE: Fails.
Edit code.
Test in IE: Fails.
Edit some more.
Test in IE: Works. Test in FireFox: Fails.
Tweak a few more lines.
Test in IE: Fails. Test in FireFox: Fails. Test in Chrome: Fails.
GIVE ME SOME STANDARDS!!!
I’ve just run into one of jQuery’s thornier issues.
While creating a map viewer for the S:GTC I found my code worked in FireFox and Chrome perfectly but refused to budge in IE7. Some of you may know that the map in Space currently only works correctly in IE6 – not good when most of the planet uses something other than. I thought with standards being pretty much standard these days and the bits that are not yet standardised being abstracted away by jQuery (and the ilk) I thought it would be plain sailing.
Until I tried to get the value of background-position. Turns out that IE doesn’t support background-position for getters but supports background-position-x (and -y obviously). So you can suppose that concatenating the strings would get us to the point where we want to be. Yes? No.
In my humble program I need values. Pixel values. I don’t want em, %ages and I certainly don’t want it as a string. What use is that to me? Okay I can create a big switch statement for top, bottom, left, and right but what about center? To cope with that I’d have to check ahead to see what it is and then convert accordingly. So much for ‘Write less, do more’.
There is a whole raft of information on the Net about this very issue and I’ve ran into it after a couple of weeks but amazingly no one has offered a viable solution. There’s a handy test to see it in action. View it in your favourite browser and then check it out in IEx. That’s right Microsoft hasn’t fixed IE8.
Personally I am so frustrated with the whole situation that I feel like browser-sniffing for IE and banning them outright – not just inform them that they have a substandard browser. If all devs did that then MS would have no option but to fix it. Sod backwards compatibility – if you rely on a bug to work then expect the fix to ‘break’ your mark up. Eventually standards really would be standard, people would learn to write compliant code and dirty hacks be a thing of the past.
In an attempt to create cross-browser support for S:GTC I thought that learning jQuery would help in making the map work in more than IE6. So instead of getting frustrated at the abysmal PHP code I have to work with I decided to sit down with jQuery and de-stress.
Or so I thought.
I did what anyone does: Skim read the documentation and immeadiately attempt something they have already done in another language. The project I attempt was the map viewer I created in GWT which was based upon the one in Pragmatic Ajax. The Pragmatic Ajax code was simple in it’s design, but refused to work in FF if you enabled any DocType. My GWT version worked with any DocType (admittedly I only tried with XHTML 1.0 Trans, but it should of worked with any of the HTML 4.01 DocTypes.) and also supported scroll wheel zooming to boot.
So with something to aim towards, progress should of been quick. Unfortunately things didn’t go to plan. I scaled back. That didn’t work so I read the docs closely. I then scaled back even further. I now have the same code as the docs. Still it doesn’t work.
Gah. I feel like giving up and stacking shelves for a living. Why doesn’t it work!?!
Okay first it is a 65.5mb download and requires 200mb of space. For a piece of software that plays music and video. Even this day and age of bloat, that is a tad excessive.
I have a large music collection on a different machine – it is a slow connection (see previous post) and I told iTunes where it was – now my machine is unusable while it indexed the 2000 tracks in that folder – and I have another two folders to go. You can’t minimize iTunes while this is going on due to the modal dialog, you can’t inform it of other locations that you want indexing. But it doesn’t stop there, once the modal dialog box finally buggers off and you tell it of the next folder you want indexing it has started on a “gapless playback” and now your machine really crawls as it tries to do two things at once. My fault for having a slow network? Maybe that is part of it, but I can set the folders up in Winamp and have it index at the same time and Winamp is a fraction of the size and I would hazard that Apple can afford to hire better programmers.
When you first index your music iTunes claims it is getting album art automatically. Cool – that’s neat. However I have this other folder to index, you can get the art later. So you index the album, let the gapless playback work out its stuff and then select all and then tell it to ‘Get Album art’. No can do – you need to be signed in. What? You didn’t need that a few minutes ago why now?
Now comes the really insiduous part of it. Okay lets’ create an account, and this is what I really don’t agree with. Why does Apple need to know my house address, what I do for a living, and my telephone number? And I am never going to buy stuff at the Apple Store so I don’t want to give you my credit card details but I can’t sign in without handing over my details. So I did a google search for a way and now I definitely don’t want to hand over my credit card details.
Fortunately I found a tutorial on YouTube that details how to get an account without handing over those details.
Update: I’ve now got my account by the above method. Something I didn’t mention was that I indexed my collection with a wired connection, but the wired couldn’t stay as it was laying directly across the living room, so I am back to my slow-ass wireless. Whether this is what is affecting the album art updating and causes it to crash out about the 1200th cover (which happens to be where my compilation albums exist). Perhaps crash was a bad word, how about hang, or just stop. Whatever. The point is it hasn’t finished the albums and there doesn’t seem to be a way of kickstarting it.
Not only that the only way of getting it restarted is to shut down iTunes. This brings up a dialog box telling you that you are get the album art and whether you are sure you want to stop this. Naturally you click yes and as iTunes shuts down a dialog flashes up for the briefest of seconds – looks like one of those ‘Do not show this dialog again’ boxes. But does it get all my albums? No. And the albums it get are pretty varied. Missed The Chemical Brothers, but did get Blutengel.
Final thing: The iPod has an update available a 57.8mb download. What?! It’s a software update!
You gotta love user written instructions – especially when they are down right wrong and you know it and the person writing it has to know it (since he has enough intelligence to actually create a blog and use it) but it is still put out there for the universe to see. This is even more bizarre when the instructions that come with the software is pretty explicit and correct. Hell I am also guilty of it.
Case in point: Getting Apache2 and PHP4 working together. I generally ignore the given instructions – my experience up until this point is that they are pretty terse and work on their systems and their systems alone. The best way is to ask google and see what the masses think. Well the masses think that this is a good set of instructions. Well they are right, up until the part where they install PHP and then it goes horribly wrong.
Why would you want to copy everything into a directory of another item and then start to copy various files all over the place – makes upgrading a painful experience: I know this as in a previous life a colleague wrote some software using a 3rd party source library – an expensive one at that. I came to work on it and was wondering why we were still using the several year old version despite the fact that everyone got the update messages forwarded to them from the library authors. What about the 30% speed increases that one of the mails raved about, what about the vulnerability that was fixed? Well they went out of the window when the muppet who wrote it took the decision not to bother with fixing the problem with his configuration and make the code fit the configuration. After that it was all down hill from there.
Anyway I eventually decided that the internet is full of muppets and read the actually instructions shipped with PHP. My god – they have instructions for getting it working on webservers I have never heard of and it is all very clear and well written, if a little terse.
So I now have a working installation of Apache2.0 and PHP4.4!
Just checked my stats and while the traffic has been constant for the past few weeks, a couple of days ago there was a massive (2x) spike in traffic which disappeared just as quickly. There wasn’t an increase in spam which usually coincides with this type of event – in fact with 1 spam that day it is one of the lowest I’ve ever had. Drilling down via the wordpress stats plugin it appears that most were legitimate hits too.
I hate installing eclipse.
I’ve got a problem and none of the online solutions seem to work. I can’t install any modules. Or rather the tool that allows me to install them won’t display. So I am left with the reinstallation of eclipse.
Eclipse is one of those wonderful open-source IDE’s that has broken the shackles of singular development environment and now does anything you can imagine – pretty much like NetBeans and the IDE that comes out of Redmond.
However the Eclipse developers can take a lesson from the Redmond developers. First make a tiny installer that is about 2mb in size. Then have that display a wizard that asks question such as: Check the boxes of the languages you would like to develop in (I’d tick Java, Python and HTML). Please check the boxes of the databases you like to connect to (I’d tick MySQL and SQL Server). Please select your Source Control (I’d select Subversion).
What so difficult about that. Any time I try to upgrade anything in Eclipse I always get the “This needs org.tools.eclipse.acronyms.128.2586.20945.20070923″. Where is that located? If it was so bloody important ask me if I want to add that to the download!!!
NetBeans doesn’t have these problems and it looks nicer, but isn’t (or rather wasn’t – it’s been a couple of years) as quick.
A while ago I purchased a 320gb hdd for my media center. When it arrived Windows recognised it as being 298gb in size. I didn’t quibble – I wish I did now.
Recently I replaced it with a 500gb drive by the same company – Western Digital – but Windows recognises it as being only 465.76gb in size. Where’s my other 35gb?
I’ve been caught by one of those 500gb = 500,000,000,000 bytes (500×1000x1000×1000). If you do the maths properly, you get 500,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 465.66gb.
In other words, if you are in the market for a new drive, steer clear of Western Digital. I used to like Maxtor drives, but I switched because Maxtor were more expensive than the competition, but now I wish I’d stuck with them. It seems Maxtor were charging more because they were giving you the actual drive size – not an imaginary number.
Update: Even my Maxtor drives are doing it now: I have 2 40gb maxtors in this machine of varying ages and they both report differing amount of available space. One is 39.6gb in size and the other is 38.1gb. Neither quite 40gb but both above the 40,000,000,000 mark:-(
I’ve installed reCaptcha on my site in an effort to slow the tide of spam that my site is receiving. Before I installed reCaptcha Askimet was blocking nearly 80 per day. After reCaptcha was installed this dropped to 2 per week. Recently however it shot up. I got 4 yesterday, and this morning I woke to 22 waiting moderation.
That means that in all likelihood some poor soul sat there and typed in all 22 posts and typed in the Captcha texts. Why? Don’t they realise that it won’t get seen as comments will be screened? The fact there is a Captcha service installed means the owner of the site has some sense of decency and sorry, whoever you are, you’ve just wasted your (and unfortunately my) time.
…but the overwhelming amount of blog-spam I have to wade through on a daily basis makes me almost lose the will to live. I’ve got myself a captcha system for WordPress and will try and get round to installing it sometime soon.
UPDATE: I am now running it – spammers meat your death (ho ho ho).