DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

As of 4pm today, DougWeb is hosted by Site5 rather than Lunarpages. Not only are they cheaper ($6.95/month) – I get more hosting for my money, as well as a zippier site. And Site5 are willing to pay off old hosting contracts (within limits!), so I haven’t lost out by switching.

It’s not that I was upset with Lunarpages – they’ve been fantastic. But Site5 are offering a fantastic deal that anyone would be hard-pressed to beat. Thanks to Doron Rosenberg for the recommendation.

Everything should be fully transferred over, but please do let me know if you spot anything is missing!

The overwhelming negative response to beta 1 has forced Microsoft to reveal exact details of some of the CSS improvements that will be in beta 2.

The IEBlog has the details – the listed bugfixes/enhancements are a very encouraging sign, although MS have confirmed that Acid2 will have to wait for a further release. In the words of the lead IE developer.

We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support.

Chris Wilson (on the IEBlog)

Remember that the first stage to overcoming a problem is to admit the problem exists. And it looks like MS have the next few stages well in hand.

Since Microsoft have decided to release this only to a small group of testers, there isn’t a great deal I can say about it – from comments/other websites I have deduced the following.

1) The main rendering engine is the same one found in IE6, with 3 high-profile bugs fixed (peekaboo, guillotine, PNG alpha transparency). Web developers (including me) are suitably outraged that this is 4 years of work. Improved standards support is apparently coming – along with a promise that cross-version development will be made easier. Sounds like a button to switch between quirks mode, IE6 standards mode and IE7 standards mode (quirks mode is unchanged according to MS). Sounds like a MS peace offering to make up for beta 1 being absolutely shite.

2) The GUI sucks big time. The menu is below the tabs(!), refresh is oddly placed etc.

3) Beta 2 will be widely available.

4) The IE icon has been revamped to fit in better with Windows Vista theming (the same happened with XP). The ‘ring’ around the E is now a full circle, and doesn’t stop around the back .

Acid 2 screenshot found on bugzilla (I’ve also updated the main acid2 screenshot collection)

1) The company I work for has several measures to keep track of store performance. My store is currently residing at #1 in several of these performance measures. Some are measured in relation to ‘the group’ of local stores (about 30), and others (including some of the #1 positioning) rank the 1200+ stores across the country. And we don’t even try that hard…

2) We still have broken air-con. The heatwave doesn’t help either!

3) It appears that the official method for ICT support to bypass user account access restrictions (which apply to even the restaurant manager), is to type the path to command.com in MS Word, and click on the automatically-generated hyperlink. I’m sure Microsoft would be thrilled to learn that ‘a-well-known-japanese-tech-company’ and ‘a-well-known-fast-food-giant’ consider this acceptable practice.

4) It also appears that ICT support are inept. Putting the system clock back a day, and then jumping 2 does not solve connection errors. It also causes havoc for many system functions. Note to ‘Adam’ from support – Windows is case-insensitive, changing C:\TEMP to c:\temp is a little pointless, and still won’t solve network communication errors…

5) Did I mention the aircon is still broke…

to the good-looking girl who while waiting for food earlier this afternon, decided to change her top in full public view – while not wearing anything underneath…