I remember when I was in college. We were all using Netscape Navigator. It was around the time Microsoft realised “Whoops, we screwed up, the internet is a big deal after all” and turned around their huge behemoth to focus on Internet Explorer 3/4. There was a great divide in the friendships then: Some loved IE4, some loved Netscape 4. Simon, I’m looking at you…

These were the days when you expected to hack your sites and put separate font tags in every table cell.

The internet has matured. Netscape Navigator died and resurrected as Firefox. Opera eventually realised they can’t charge 1% of the population for a browser and remain relevant, so went free (and ironically still only serve about 1%…).

Eventually the internet matured to such a degree that HTML5 was started, with the excitement and promise of non-Flash video, vector graphics, better input types. Javascript became more than “Oh look, another Javascript error”. The world rejoiced and embraced the new technologies.

Unless the user was running Internet Explorer.

Microsoft themselves have admitted that IE6 has become a big embarressment, a thorn in the side that everyone wants rid of. Frankly, they should have included IE7, and to a lesser degree IE8 in that too. Finally though, Microsoft have released their first ever competent and capable browser! Lets not give too much credit here though, they’ve only done it because they were losing market share rapidly.

Regardless of reasons or history, we’ve just entered an era of co-operability and compliance. Now, more than ever is the time to upgrade.

If you’re using Windows, regardless of which browser you currently use (hopefully Firefox, Chrome or Opera), upgrade your Internet Explorer to v9. If you’re using Windows in your office, push, demand and scream at your IT department until they upgrade.

http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

The Nerd Generation days: Back in 1999 I needed some software to rename thousands of files, and after spending hours scouring the internet for something suitable, I gave up. I already had 7 years experience in Turbo Pascal and Delphi by this time, so I decided to write my own. A fortnight later, I was done. I found the program so useful, I decided to upload it to a few websites and forgot about it for a year. Next time I checked, it had been included in a French free newspaper and had dozens of great reviews, references all over the internet. The software had a few bugs and a lot I wanted to improve upon, but the web was fast becoming the way to go. I abandoned the project, the domain it was hosted on (nerdgeneration.com) and moved on.

Fast forward 11 years: Links and references to the software are still spread around the internet. The domain has been taken and abused by some cyber-squatters.

Partly due to the overhaul of Lamped, and somewhat due to the level of existing links and references to the software, I’ve decided to re-host it.

Please bear in mind, this software is 11 years old. It’s completely unsupported. It may or may not work in Vista or 7; or XP as part of a Windows Domain. In short: This blog entry mainly exists to help old users find it again.

Download it here: http://marcgray.co.uk/files/therenameprogram104.exe

I’ll be monitoring the downloads. If there’s still interest after all this time, I may rewrite it from scratch. Comments to this blog will help me decide.

I never thought I’d type this entry.

My previous website portfolio has included code to apply hacks and fixes for IE6, 7 and 8. While I’m on the topic, this is good advice for all you budding (or some experienced) web developers out there. Why do I only apply fixes to 6, 7, and 8? IE5.5 and lower are basically no longer used, and people using it expect almost every site they use to look bad with it. IE9 isn’t released yet, and you simply don’t know how your fixes will look in it. This is the common philosophy: Develop it properly, then hack it for IE. Since every version of IE has substantially different rendering bugs, you can’t realistically apply the same fixes for IE6-8 in IE9 before you’ve tested it. You should always be as specific as possible with your hacks and fixes, to save them having unwanted effects in other browsers.

As I was saying. I installed the Internet Explorer 9 beta today. I loaded my most complex sites (with only IE6-8 hacks). I closed my eyes. I’d have prayed if I wasn’t atheist.

I spent a moment in the darkness of my mind thinking about the beautiful curved edges. The advanced Javascript applied styles. The HTML5 video. So pretty.

I opened my eyes.

I blinked.

At this stage, I’m pretty convinced my eyes are still closed, or my mind has stuck on the beautiful imaginings of the Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera view of my portfolio. I called my wife over and asked her: “What do you see?”

Internet Explorer 9 actually displayed the site properly. HTML5 video, inline-block li tags with styled block div child elements, curved borders – the lot.

It actually worked. All of it!

It actually worked.

This brings me to the title of this post. Call to Arms:

Now that Microsoft is showing some care towards standards, we all need to upgrade. Lets stop this trend of IE 6 and 7 (plus 8 to a lesser extent) usage NOW. Petition your IT manager, bully your friends and colleagues. No really, bully them.

If a genie appeared before me now and granted me one wish: It would be to instantly upgrade the whole world to IE9.

Thank you Microsoft. It’s been 18 years coming, but thank you.

I’ve spent a lot of time using Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Windows XP and 7, and Ubuntu over the last year. It’s remarkable and amusing how similar and dissimilar they are in surprising ways. I think the main issue people overlook is what the core of the operating system is built on, or derived from.

Mac OS X is Unix based/clone

Linux is Unix based/clone

Solaris is Unix based/clone

Windows XP and 7 is WinNT based

Well, isn’t that lovely, but what does it mean or matter?

Operating systems based on similar systems tend to work in a similar way. To oversimplify this, I often use a tool “rsync” to update content from my desktop to my web server. I’m familiar with this tool. I booted up my Macbook and wanted to copy a large folder to it, but didn’t have Samba installed on my Ubuntu desktop… I used “rsync”! The desktop options are also similar (or identical) between Gnome/Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.

Windows is a highly proprietary ”beacon” of sorts on the landscape now. Ubuntu is doing wonders for the Linux world in general. Mac OS X is pushing ever forward courtesy of Mr Jobs and his zealous band of fanatics. Solaris will probably remain a niche product and go the way of OS/2 eventually (die a slow and painful death).

This operating system selection is now giving me a headache.

I use Adobe Photoshop. I play World of Warcraft (yes, I said it. I actually admitted it). To get anything above Photoshop CS2 working AT ALL in Linux (courtesy of Wine), you need to pray the Wine developers find the time to develop their software further, or Adobe suddenly decides to release a Linux version. To get World of Warcraft working in Linux, you need a supported graphics card (most Nvidia cards, or modern ATI cards) with proprietary drivers. On this note, might I add I use an ATI X1250; Screw you ATI. Screw you. Apparently this chip isn’t modern enough to let me run the official ATI drivers.

If it wasn’t for my crap graphics card, ATI being bastards and needing more memory to properly virtualise Photoshop, I think I’d actually uninstall Windows now. The utility and synergy between my Linux desktop and Mac laptop are far more useful to me than kludging around with Windows integration with either, and aside from the two examples, the software available in Linux and Mac OS X suits my needs perfectly.

I find myself wondering, if hardware manufacturers spent more time supporting alternative operating systems such as Linux, would a lot more people switch? I know I’d have my grandfather on Linux if his random choice of multi-function printer was supported fully.

P.S. Take note ATI, if you’re too lazy to support slightly older graphics cards in your official Linux drivers, I’m too lazy to continue my 15 year support of you. Next purchase: Definitely Nvidia.

Every day I take the time to read my iGoogle. It has my weather, news, email and RSS feeds. There is no better place to get my daily dose of informationm and kudos to Google for managing to provide such an excellent facility. I’m aware other sites can provide similar, but they tend to be filled with a lot of extra crap I really don’t want – popups and the like.

Today I bumped into http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7545722/A-third-of-people-think-it-is-acceptable-to-pirate-software.html – an article based on Microsoft research. Apparently most people use pirated software. My last employer used pirated Windows Server, pirated Windows XP on every workstation, pirated Adobe CS3 suite, pirated Microsoft Office.

For the record, I use a legal Windows XP for gaming and entertainment, and Ubuntu for everything else. I even get my music through Spotify – I expect my sainthood any moment! If anyone has any tips for Spotify randomly crashing in Wine, that’d be lovely.

If Microsoft’s poll wasn’t so blatantly a political move in light of the Digital Britain legislation, one might suggest they change the focus and find that actually, 99% of people use pirated software, without issues. They quote figures relating to viruses and crashes, presumably in the hope it’ll scare people off. I often wonder if the Microsoft execs don’t live in a different world. Infact, I’m sure they do. While I’m on the subject, I have an old friend who works for Microsoft, I’m going to point him here and seek his anonymous feedback.

On a slight tangent: How do people start up using industry standard software, when such software is quite so expensive? I want to type a piece here about Photoshop and Gimp (yes, there’s Paint Shop Pro etc, etc. Photoshop and Gimp are the big boys of proprietary and free in my world). There’s lots to be said for cost of ownership – free support in Windows and paid-for support in Linux, and it’d be a never ending debate. In the grand scheme of things, Photoshop is known by many and despite the initial cost, you may employ trained people quickly. Gimp is less known and has training costs, and potentially harder to recruit for.

Anyway, I’ve rambled through this entire post. I don’t know what the answer is. I DO know, I won’t pay for Windows 7 or Photoshop while Ubuntu / Windows XP and Gimp will suffice. I really hope http://www.reactos.org/ gets somewhere, though I imagine it’ll suffer similar fates to DR DOS and the AARD debacle (look it up).