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The invite to the Xmas party has an asterisk leading to fine print at the bottom...
06 Nov 2008 15:55 [category: /weird] #
Last week I wrote a letter to my local member, Anthony Albanese, detailing my concerns about the proposed internet censorship regime. I received a response last night. I won't bother wasting electrons copying it in here, because I can just link to the letter Stilgerrian got because it's exactly the fucking same.
So apparently Lindsay Tanner reckons the government is keen to use web 2.0 buzzword compliant tools. The first lesson they need to learn is that we talk to each other, compare notes and compare responses we receive. Second thing about all this web 2.0 crap is that it's social, and the one thing that stands out more than anything else is robotically-created canned replies.
I sent Albo the following response:
Dear Anthony,
Thank you for your recent form letter. It's refreshing to see that my comments and queries are completely ignored, and instead of either considering or responding to them, you've sent all people contacting you the exact same message. I'll be sure to return the favour at the next election when someone tries to hand me an ALP how-to-vote.
In case you'd like to actually read, and respond to, my email, I'm including it again.
I'm not holding out much hope of a rational response.
06 Nov 2008 11:50 [category: /geek] #
Yet again, Fastway couriers fraudulently forge a signature to "prove" delivery. At least this time they didn't forge my own name. In this case, the courier didn't bother to knock. We were in bed at the time and heard the delivery.
If you run a business selling things by mail order, do not use Fastway couriers. There's a reason they're the cheapest! You pay less and gain extra disgruntled customers.
In other news, my fruit trees have arrived! Can't wait to plant them out.
06 Aug 2008 11:52 [category: /grumble] #
So the latest Internet Explorer is out and, like any good web developer, I've downloaded it and thrown the sites I manage at it. The results aren't good, and I'm very pleased by that.
IE8 was originally planned to emulate the broken IE7 rendering engine by default, with standards-compliant sites required to use a dodgy, non-standard hack to actually render using the new, standards-based engine. This met with howls of protest from the community of developers trying to get standards to actually work. Fortunately, the IE team listened to the feedback and reversed the decision. So now, out of the box, IE8 will render in standards mode, and sites with broken markup will have to use the dodgy hack to force IE7 rendering. Brilliant!
This decision will break the web, which is excellent. All those shonky hacks used to make IE work will stop working, and the enormous market power as the vast majority of browsers are upgraded to IE8 will force web developers to actually do something, and acknowledge that they haven't been doing things right. If you're lucky and using some kind of templating, the fix will be very easy. If you're not using templating, it could be quite painful. But it means the next redesign will do things right!
For sites I've built from scratch, the results are exactly as expected. My home page renders perfectly, as it did in IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, lynx, links and probably any other browser.
For sites I've inherited, the results aren't so good. The site I support for my main job breaks very badly. The shonky sIFR Flash+JavaScript font rendering breaks completely, the top navigation looks funny and doesn't work, some of the style cascading is strange. It'll be easy to fix, just tweaking the base template to have the IE7 mode forced.
We're planning a redesign, as is pretty usual with these types of projects, and I plan to consolidate the ridiculous proliferation of styles. The new design will follow the standards and use the bare minimum of hacks to get it mostly working in IE7. It should work just fine in IE8. Yay!
Hopefully Microsoft will automatically upgrade most users once IE8 is released, as has happened with IE6. That enormous market power will finally be put to some good use. There will be pain, but it will be pain that makes the world a better place. How novel to be praising Microsoft!
