DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

Took Apple 3 days to make it and ship it from China to the Czech Republic. It then took TNT 7 days to ship it to the UK. But it’s here now.

I haven’t used it much, and this is the first time I’ve used a Mac, so these are only 1st impressions.

Good
——-
1) It’s tiny. Really tiny. I hadn’t quite grasped how small 16.5×16.5×5cm was.
2) Lot’s of visual flourishes in the OS - things like the icons in the Dock shrinking as more needs to fit.
3) WebCore appears to do an excellent job.
4) Camino, iCab and Omniweb all seem to be well-designed web browsers.

Bad
—–
1) It asked if I wanted a US or UK keyboard layout, but seems to be using the US version anyway - shift+2 gives me @, not ” and vice-versa.
2) The Home/End keys don’t seem to do anything - how do I skip to the beginning/end of a line?
3) Closing the last window of a program, doesn’t appear to actually quit the program.
4) Hate Safari
5) Weird sound when I turn it on. Very tinny speakers.
6) What the hell is the green button in the top-left of windows supposed to do? It certainly doesn’t maximise - it just seems to make the window slightly bigger (but how much bigger depends on the individual application.
7) 250Mb of software updates needed on a machine that only came out of the factory 10 days ago.

(posted from my Mac)

Just watch this French bloke perform his act. Amazing stuff!

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter.

I’ve just ordered myself a Mac Mini. Not sure what to expect exactly - the closest I’ve ever been to a Mac is a screenshot, but I thought I’d see what makes people rave about Macs so much. As a bonus, it means I’ll be able to test my web pages in Safari. Would be nice if Apple made a Windows version…

Today we had a bomb scare at work. Although it was obviously a kid’s schoolbag that they’d left behind, some bonehead in the BP garage we share the building with phoned the police, who told us to evacute the building. 10 minutes later (remember this could have been a bomb), 2 policewomen drove up, and could be seen laughing through the car window. After a brief chat about the situation, and 10 mins on the radios back to HQ, they went into the building to look at CCTV (weren’t allowed to touch the bag). When they emerged, they told us that yes it was left behind by a kid, and it was safe to move.

All in all, we were shut for an hour

Building on the security features released at beta 1, upcoming new features will include ActiveX Opt-in: To reduce the attack surface and give users more control over the security of their PC, most ActiveX controls (even those already installed on the machine) will be disabled by default for users browsing the Internet.

…

IE 7 implements a native XMLHTTPRequest object for Javascript applications, instead of requiring an ActiveXObject to be created. This also means XMLHTTPRequest will function on machines that have ActiveX disabled.

…

Finally, in recognition of the need for great web developer tools, we are just about to beta a Web Developer Toolbar that provides web developers with rich object model and visual tools which will help them design standards-based HTML and CSS web pages. This feature will be delivered as an add-on for IE6+.

Chris Wilson (on the IEBlog)

Microsoft are worried

Not only does the official IVS Knowledge Base suck for ‘knowledge’, the incredibly bad forum search makes looking elsewhere extremely difficult.

So I’ve added one to the resource centre. At the moment, it sucks too - default mediawiki theme, and only a single article. Hopefully, it’ll take off.

The other day I blogged about getting visits from ‘Opera/9′, one of which originated from the headquarters of Opera Software, leading me to speculate that the next version was going to get a major bump to it’s version number. I’m now received a visit from ‘Opera/8.50′ - again from Opera’s headquarters in Norway.

So what is the next version? 8.50 or 9? Does anyone know?

Predictable and mind-numbing, but a fairly enjoyable 90 mins nonetheless. And so much better than Jingle All The Way

Recognise this girl? She starred in Clueless along with Alicia Silverstone.

Recognise her now? She’s now ranks highly in 100-sexiest polls.

Without my upgrade to AWStats, I’d never have noticed these 2 gems revealed here!

1. There are still people using IE 5 and 6 betas. People using 5.0 and 5.5, I can put down to user apathy / company policies. But leaving a beta version installed, when the full product has been out 4 or more years, seems odd to me. Oh well - it’s sub-0.1% of visitors.

2. The next version of Opera appears to be version 9. The current version is 8.02, so that’s quite a version leap, given the small version bumps of recent history. Normally when I see a version number that isn’t ‘right’ (e.g. ‘Firefox/reset’), I’ll go into the raw logs, and do a manual examination. If it looks suspicious (e.g. a spammer), I then exclude the visitor from the summaries, in the same way I exclude myself. 2 things stand out about this one though that make me think it’s genuine. The logs reveal 2 visits from Opera/9…

   1. The first occurence was a visit directed at a testcase I created for one of their QA staff, regarding a bug in Opera.

      This visit is listed in my logs as

      84.48.74.200 - - [22/Aug/2005:18:45:03 -0400] “GET /wp/?page_id=121 HTTP/1.1″ 200 3761 “-” “Opera/9.00 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)”

      84.48.74.200 is an IP address registered to an ISP in Oslo, Norway where Opera Software is located. An Opera employee would certainly have access to pre-release versions…Suspicions reduced, I moved on to the 2nd visit.

   2. Visit 2 also confined itself to the aforementioned testcase, and is listed in my logs as

      213.236.208.22 - - [26/Aug/2005:06:14:01 -0400] “GET /wp/?page_id=121 HTTP/1.1″ 200 3765 “-” “Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)”

      213.236.208.22 is an IP address registered to Opera Software ASA. Good enough for me!

I’ve completed my modifications to the way the stats are generated, and the stats are slowly coming back up. The only thing holding them back now is time - I have to reprocess each configuration/month combo individually. 16 Resource Centre configurations (1/resource) x 7 months since February = a while.

Thanks to Microsoft (and Netscape, but mostly Microsoft), 90% of browsers identify themselves as something else. This makes life hard.

In the early days of the web, everything was fine. Browsers identified themselves in a sane manner. The most well known browser was Mosaic.

Along come Netscape with their ‘Mosaic-Killer’ browser. To web servers it identified itself as Mozilla (mosaic-killer->mozilla, geddit?). At this time, Netscape was inventing extensions to HTML, that no other browser understood, so often authors wrote 2 different versions of pages. Standard and ‘Netscape Enhanced’.

Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer, but people obviously wouldn’t switch if it couldn’t display all their favourite Netscape-enhanced pages properly. Because of this Internet Explorer identified itself (and still does) in the form Mozilla (compatible; MSIE), so that it received the same pages as Netscape.

To get over the same problem Opera identifies itself by default in the form Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE;Opera). So to get accurate statistics, you’ve got to look for Opera before IE, and IE before Netscape.

The modern Mozilla browser can’t identify itself as Mozilla/version, because then it receives pages saying ‘You’ve got a very old Netscape, we won’t let you in until you upgrade. Mozilla therefore does something like this - Mozilla/5.0 (rv:1.7) . Netscape 6 and above, are based on this competely different Mozilla, and do something similar to Mozilla/5.0 (rv:1.7) Netscape/6. Other Mozilla-based browsers do the same e.g. Mozilla/5.0 (rv:1.7) Firefox/1.0.

So…

The number after Mozilla/ is the version of Netscape in versions 1-4. But you’ve got to check for Internet Explorer & Opera first. For Netscapes 6 and up, you need to look for Netscape/. This needs to be done before checking for plain Mozilla, as does checking for Firefox etc…as you amass a list of browsers, the amount of ‘check this before that’ requirements for accurate identification of the browser is staggering.

I’ve rewritten parts of this multiple times to make more sense, apologies if it still doesn’t.