Business has been good.  Unfortunately, it has been so busy that the smelly old Slingshot Solutions website stuck around way too long.

When I say smelly, think:

• IE-only (in 2002, IE was 95%+, and Firefox was still a glimmer)
• IE6-only -- IE7 often crashes (why can browsers still be crashed by web code these days?)
• Outdated in various ways (6.5yrs)
• Kinda ugly
• Over-complicated
• Wordy -- can there be too little horn-tooting?
• Did I mention IE-only?

So my goals for a new site were focused on simplicity and compatibility.  I started designing building it when I started back to Slingshot Solutions full-time, and have been alternating between false starts, second-guessing, and neglect ever since. 

It's finally done now, though.  Please meet the slim and trim new "slingfive.com 2.0":

It works on any modern browser, plus IE6 (kicking and screaming).  Some other geeky goodness:

• It's Javascript-heavy, but it's all non-obtrusive and progressively-enhanced, so it still works with Javascript disabled.
• JQuery greatly helped simplify the visuals by hiding less important stuff until it's needed.  Rather than a second page just for a contact form, Contact Us is just a popup.  Similarly, I built a hide/show toggle for less-important content details.
• FONTS!  Every web designer hates the fact that you have to choose fonts based on lowest-common denominators (not everyone has your font on their system).  Alternatively, you can use images or Flash to get around this (carefully!).  I certainly wanted automatic as possible, so I tried SIFR (implementation stinks), then settled on DotIR.  Unfortunately v3 only outputs non-transparent GIFs, but with the wonders of open source, I've improved it to output anti-aliased transparent PNGs (including IE6 compatibility), and made it medium-trust compatible (for web hosts).  Hopefully my changes will reach the next version.

Weaknesses / to-do:

• Still way too wordy, this time with TLAs ("acronymy"?).
• I pulled over my old code section for developers.  I've tested none of it though, and will surely need to fix several server-side settings.
• The layout wrecks at less than 1024x768.  Stats say that covers 90% of the world, but that's hollow comfort.

For now I'm just happy it's out and not killing anyone.  Hurrah!

I won't say it's "finally" coming, because it might be one of Internet Explorer's fastest major upgrades.  But IE8 is coming, and better yet, I think it is "finally" catching up with the competition.

The news is all over the place, and this time I won't dig into the tech like I did with the IE7 beta.  I have installed the developer beta for a little testing, and it looks pretty similar to IE7.  Since the UI isn't changing much, I think it's a comparatively developer-heavy release (yum!). 

Here are some good official links:

• IE8 home page
• IE8 Readiness Toolkit
• IE8 Developer Highlights
• IE8 Release Notes

And the interesting progress & commentary:

• IE8 passes Acid2 test (Acid2 is a CSS Rendering test)
• IE Team says IE8 will have to opt-in to its own new standards-support, and then changes their minds (hooray!)
• Ajaxian on IE 8: Better Ajax, CSS, DOM, and new features
• John Resig (JQuery) applauds IE8's great Javascript (and other) progress

My own/other thoughts:

New Direction: A lot of the most interesting new stuff is neither UI/security improvements nor core web technology improvements, but Web 2.0-type stuff like Activities and WebSlices which seem to be targeting easier mashups and 3rd-party browser extensions.

Bad Chrome: A later IE7 release added back the Classic file menu.  Now they've added the crap links bar back in, sacrificing that much more viewport to the biggest waste of browser chrome.  Those plus the infobar warning I got right away doubles the 3 rows it should be, meaning if it goes live this way, my various inattentive relatives are gonna be scrolling way too much:

Developer's Browser Ecosystem: IE7 usage is still roughly even with IE6, and seems to have leveled off.  It's frustrating that IE6 is still hanging on so much.  Let's get IE8 in and IE6 gone!

 

Microsoft just published an interesting Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report

I especially like this graph:
 

I mentioned a few days ago that Vista seems to have picked up at XP's current level of stability.  From this it looks like it's done the same with security. 

I think what's remarkable is that they've accomplished this while increasing the amount of Windows code (because of new features).  Normally more code creates more ways for it to fail and to get hacked, but the Vista team has done the opposite.  That's impressive.

For bonus points, read through the report's comments (pretty fun on its own) and then read this response on the MS Software Development Lifecycle team blog.

I've been using Vista Business for about a year.  I've had it on a secondary work machine since around May, and as my primary work machine since November. Overall, it's quite nice.

But it's definitely had its quirks, mostly with waking from standby or hibernation. I put a couple hotfixes on, and they definitely helped, but it still did have an occasional strangeness. That said, in almost a year's time, I only remember needing to hard-reset it perhaps 3 times, and needing to reboot it maybe 5.

Now, I think that's great, considering these machines belong to a tweaker like me (read: not a grandma or Mac-type user who doesn't try new things).  I'd say it's comparable reliability to a current stable XP system. This is an important comparison -- XP has been maturing since 2001, but Vista started out at the same level of reliability.

As an aside, I've had several non-technical folks ask me "is Vista as bad as they say?" and I've only been able to respond "as who says?"  The only negative reviews I've seen were some journalists who must have put Vista on old hardware without current drivers.  But IT professionals I've talked to who've used Vista for a while seem to like it.

So anyway, I still didn't want that occasional quirk, so I tracked down hot-off-the-presses Service Pack 1, and applied it last night.  It took about 45 minutes, and went flawlessly.  Hooray for that, and hopefully it sails even smoother now...

I've bugged the Microsoft Scripting Guys to make a feed for their great daily Q&A.  "Coming soon" was the most I ever heard (and over a year ago)...

I don't know what the holdup is, but it doesn't matter to me now.  Thanks to etc., I just found Yoktu.com Feedmaker.  A moment later, I had the feed I want.  Sweet!

One note: Feedmaker has a Word Filter option.  Unfortunately it doesn't do positive filters, so "?" hides all the links I want, instead of the generic ones I don't.  No big deal (I'll choke doen the extras), but hey Yoktu, how about a googlish syntax like "+?" for specifying what to include?

A comment I just posted at http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/attensa/ :

I've been using intraVnews for several years, liking Outlook's sorting power to manage info, but I'm not at one machine long enough lately to keep current. So I went shopping for an online reader, and found your post and the RSS Reader Survey.

Based on those, I tried (or at least looked at) Bloglines, Rojo, NetNewsWire and Great News. I mostly didn't like the UIs (too weak or clunky compared to Outlook), and most just didn't work on my Windows Mobile phone' Pocket IE.

I ended up using Google Reader instead -- sure it's not as powerful as intraVnews/Outlook (no search folders, no deactivating feeds), but I don't think I need that power since the "reading flow" is so smooth (aka "UX", or User Experience in Microsoft's new lingo). I don't Need to filter out the "junk" since it's easy to just ignore it.

Granted, it's only been 2 weeks, but I've been successfully keeping up on 296 feeds pretty easily.

I should mention I was actually looking for an Outlook/online combo.  Apparently Newsgator and Attensa both do this, but Newsgator ain't free (and I'm a tightwad), and I couldn't find Attensa's supposed free service...  I've tried the Outlook addins for both in the past, tho, and they're fine (since it's Outlook).

Hm, should I post my 296 feed OPML?  ..or I guess Google Reader has a sharing feature -- maybe that's something to try out.

Busy?  Oh yeah.

• TRAFFIC WAVE EXPERIMENTS -- I've been wanting to write this article for a very long time.  Someone finally did it for me (tho' at much greater length).
  
• You can improve IE.next - The Web Standards Project -- cool this is being done, uh, again.
  
• And interesting variations on a theme -- also interesting is that you'll never see anything like this on Slashdot or Digg (which is their fanboyism):
  • Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox (from a developer's point of view)
  • Firefox Myths
  • Firefox - A New Religion
    

IE7 was supposed to have supported min-width in CSS.  It doesn't work right. 

Their spec says it applies to "floating block-level elements", but they don't mention that it also requires an explicit width -- "auto" won't work.  While that's fine for "stretchy" layouts, it's useless for what I want: a flexible, tableless form layout (with elements which can expand to their contents' sizes).

In fact, my previous IE6 hacks to force it with CSS expressions now don't work, because while the min-width attribute is valid in IE7, the feature is not actually implemented.  SO, while I previously could pick it up in IE6 with something like this:
SELECT {
min-width:11em;
_width:expression(this.currentStyle.getAttribute('min-width'));
}

IE7 now requires the same trick to be like so:
SELECT {
min-width:11em;
_width:expression(this.currentStyle.getAttribute('minWidth'));
}

Unfortunately, forking logic inside CSS expressions is a bit of a pain.  That, combined with the limitations of this technique (IE6 treats width as min-width only when the contained elements can't be wrapped), prompted me to write a solution script.  Here it is:

/*
author: Rob Eberhardt
desc: fix MinWidth for IE6 & IE7
params: none
returns: nothing
notes: cannot yet fix childless elements like INPUT or SELECT
history:
   2006-11-20 revised for standards-mode compatibility
   2006-11-17 first version
*/
function fixMinWidthForIE(){
   try{
      if(!document.body.currentStyle){return} //IE only
   }catch(e){return}
   var elems=document.getElementsByTagName("*");
   for(e=0; e<elems.length; e++){
      var eCurStyle = elems[e].currentStyle;
      var l_minWidth = (eCurStyle.minWidth) ? eCurStyle.minWidth : eCurStyle.getAttribute("min-width"); //IE7 : IE6
      if(l_minWidth && l_minWidth != 'auto'){
         var shim = document.createElement("DIV");
         shim.style.cssText = 'margin:0 !important; padding:0 !important; border:0 !important; line-height:0 !important; height:0 !important; BACKGROUND:RED;';
         shim.style.width = l_minWidth;
         shim.appendChild(document.createElement("&nbsp;"));
         if(elems[e].canHaveChildren){
            elems[e].appendChild(shim);
         }else{
            //??
         }
      }
   }
}

It uses a shim technique to fix it only for IE (other browsers don't support currentStyle).  The remaining limitation here is that it only works on elements which canHaveChildren, so it does not work on childless elements, like form INPUTs or SELECTs.  Any suggestions for this case are welcome!

To use it, just call fixMinWidthForIE() in the window.onload, or better yet when the DOM has loaded, and you're set.

2006-11-20: I updated the script for better standards-mode compatibility (it was causing extra blank lines).  I had missed the doctype switch in my current project.  The good news is that IE7 in standards mode does do min-width.  (I wish I'd noticed that sooner!)  However, I still have a lot of IE6 miles to go before I can put it to sleep...

 

Windows XP Professional?  Check.

But what about 64-bit?  Apparently it's actually not supported on 64-bit Windows XP Professional.

Guess I'm not the only one who was baffled by the new W3C XMLHTTPRequest spec credits.

From Dare Obasanjo:

Interesting. A W3C specification that documents a proprietary Microsoft API which not only does not include a Microsoft employee as a spec author but doesn't even reference any of the IXMLHttpRequest documentation on MSDN. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. ;)

And then finally from Anne van Kesteren (one of the spec's authors):

Hereby my apologies to everyone who had to waste his time by writing a rant... The current draft reads: "Special thanks also to the Microsoft employees who first implemented the XMLHttpRequest interface, which was first widely deployed by the Windows Internet Explorer browser."

It's great that XMLHttpRequest is finally becoming an official standard.  It's better though, that the "other" browsers didn't wait for this before implementing it.  Real progress has happened as a result, in particular the recent popularity (& naming) of the AJAX technique, and the somewhat-related "Web 2.0" phenomenon.

The news also makes me smile at the anti-Microsoft folks who have thrown stones at Internet Explorer's standards support -- once again the IE team innovated (*overused word through gritted teeth*) a proprietary extension, and it was such a good thing that the competition swiped the idea, thus making it a de-facto standard.

I'd rather have a good de-facto standard now, than an official one too-late. End result: Developers and Users win (and they already are winning).

Footnote: Anyone else think it's strange that the standard's authors list seems to represent every browser except for XMLHttpRequest's inventor?

Thanks to Clagnut, I'm observing CSS Naked Day on April 5^th.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

For the remaining dotText-ers out there who want this to automatically kick-in every April 5^th, I just added this condition to DTP.aspx:

<%
// suspend styles on April 5 to observe CSS Naked Day - http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
DateTime dtNaked = DateTime.Today; 
if(!(dtNaked.Month==4 && dtNaked.Day==5)){
%>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mystyles.css" />
<%
}
%>

Via Dean Edwards' Links, meet HedgerWow's <SELECT>-Free Layer, a CSS-only workaround for Internet Explorer's SELECT bug with z-index.

It's not quite clear from the demo, but I think the magic is an absolutely-positioned + transparent + huge IFRAME inside the layer to show.  C'est trés hacky, but it still seems better (in a way) than the usual dynamic hide/show javascript approach.

Here's hoping that Microsoft will quickly windows-update us all with IE7 (which fixes this bug, hoorah), and free us of these sHACKles.

Looks like I'm:

• Participating in Scoble's

  brrreeeport

  experiment.
• Syndicating Digg's Programming news here now (in the sidebar).
• Considering participating in Technet ScriptCenter's Scripting Games event, despite my busy-ness. (Hey, I could be a contender!)
• Baffled why UC would require its own Alumni (aka "prospective donors" to UC's board) to jump through Stone Age hoops to get a transcript (this is 2006, and phone isn't even an option), and they'll still take "5-10 days" to process it.
• Downloading various free VMwares at the moment. Oh, and eating cookie dough.
• Wondering why the machine I've reinstalled at least 12 times in 12 months -- due to strange disk problems, but with different disks -- now appears problem free after switching its filesystem from NTFS to FAT32 (which is supposedly more fragile).
• Also wondering why the Virtual NT4 Server I spent the last week fighting with just refuses to run IIS4.
• Avidly tracking shipment of my new little Athlon 64-based machine, due here Tuesday.
• Chuckling at the recent surplus of general serendipity.
• Remembering that Tuesday is Valentine's day....

and so I was sad to see it go away again today:

Y'know, I remember seeing the early web on Lynx, and thinking "oh, like gopher, except harder to use -- what's the point?" Then I saw it on Netscape 1 and everything changed.

(Yes, I actually have a need for NT 4 Server right now. I never thought I'd be installing Option Pack this many years later. At least I've got Virtual PC & Server these days).

I'm really not in love with IE or anything, but I do fight with it a lot...

I need to cover what I am in love with: my family, music, ice cream... -- the good stuff.

Observations as a user:

• Address bar: I'm not sure I like it being locked to the title bar.  Any other toolbars go below -- that's weird.  Interestingly, I can drag the whole window from the chrome near it, so I think it may actually be part of the titlebar under the hood.
• "Star"/start menu: Opens the sidebar containing Faves, History, and Feeds. I think I like this, an idea borrowed from live.com.  It'll still take some getting used to, tho.
• bug?: Backspacing/deleting characters in this MSHTML-enabled (contenteditable) area of .Text doesn't work right.  Possibly machine-specific, but I haven't noticed it before.
• Tabs: I reeeally want to move the tabs to the bottom of the screen, as I do with Firefox (and like Excel worksheets).  I also want to be able to double-click to close tabs, but I'm happy that middle-clicks are “Open in a New Tab”.
• New tab thing: The small “blank tab” for creating new tabs is Mystery Meat, and especially confusing since there's a “plus” icon nearby.  I know MS is going for “uncluttered UI”, but this breaks usability in favor of pretty.  Just show a #8220;new document” icon the whole time, and it'll be much clearer. 
• Stop loading icon: The “X” icon also very confusing.  “X” means Delete, a “Stop Sign” icon means stop. 
• Reload icon: OTOH, I like the color reversal here, the green in the background makes it stand out more.
• Faster: address bar responsiveness.
• Slow, like rendering of the new Quick Tabs, Classic toolbar and Google's toolbar.

Observations as a developer:

• CSS Visual Transitions: are these gone?!?  Strange, b/c CSS Visual Filters still work.
• Modal/Modeless dialogs: IE6sp2 forced the status bar onto these.  IE7 now forces an address bar too, creating problems for web apps with sized dialogs.  Slowly but surely those dialogs are becoming just windows, EXCEPT that...
• Modal/Modeless dialogs are still very buggy in IE7b2!
• SELECT elements: As expected, much better now!

 

 

Yeehaw it's out!  I'm downloading now and am actually excited to testdrive it.  Already noteworthy to me is the functionality changes section in the release notes:

Scriptlets—Internet Explorer 7 disables Dynamic HTML (DHTML) scriptlets, by default. (Scriptlets were deprecated in Internet Explorer 5). They can be reenabled by system administrators, changing URLActions with the Internet Control Panel (INetCPl.) The INetCPL text should read "Allow Scriptlets." If your programs rely on scriptlets, we recommend that you use DHTML behaviors which are more efficient. Disabling scriptlets is part of our continued work to ensure that unsupported technology is deemphasized in Internet Explorer.

I'm very happy about this.  It sounds like Microsoft listened (!) to my request to not remove Scriptlets after all, but to instead just disable them by default (which is certainly a good thing for security).  I have several good old IE components written as DHTML Scriptlets, and I need some option to keep using them in existing web apps.

• ActiveX controls--ActiveX controls are disabled by default in Internet Explorer Version 7. The ActiveX Input TYPE=FILE control no longer submits a fully-qualified path; it now submits only a filename. The ActiveX control for XEnroll certificate enrollment was removed from Windows Vista and replaced with a new control.

This is a big big deal, and again a good one.  But does this include disabling the built-in ActiveX Controls too, like DSOs and XMLHTTPRequest??  (if so, then ouch!)  Good idea on the file input, but it sounds like it'll cause some rewrites.

• Channel Definition Format (CDF)--All CDF support was removed from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview.

This surprises me.  It may be old tech, but it was big (remember all the "push" hulabaloo? man, those were the [something-] old days), and I do still see sites using it.  Not sure from that statement whether it'll come back in a later beta or RC, tho...

• DirectAnimation--All DLLs to support the Internet Explorer DirectAnimation component were removed in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Update.

Another big change.  So what's the replacement it, native SVG finally??

• XBM--Support for XBM, an imaging format designed for X-based systems, was deleted.
• SSL--Support for weak SSL ciphers was removed from Windows Vista and support for SSLv2 was disabled for all Internet Explorer 7 platforms

Good and better.

• Windowed Select--The Windowed Select Element was removed from Internet Explorer 7 because IE7 is not using the Windows API. This results in some cosmetic changes in padding. The animation associated with the popup is gone as well, and the popup simply pops up.

Simply marvelous!

• BASE Element--Internet Explorer 7 strictly enforces the BASE element rule, as documented in the HTML 4.01 standard. We no longer allow BASE tags outside of the HEAD of the document. The standard specifies that the base element must appear within the head of the document, before any elements that refer to an external source.
• window.opener and window.close--Internet Explorer 7 no longer allows the window.opener trick to bypass the window.close prompt. Browser windows can't close themselves unless the windows were created in script. This security enhancement no longer allows browsing to a random site when the main browser window closes unexpectedly.

Ah, lovely bug fixes.  More please!
(actually, I wish I had known about that window.opener trick a long time ago.  Darn!)

• WWW-Auth--Internet Explorer 7 changes the precedence rules for WWW-Auth. Previous releases of Internet Explorer used the first header encountered. Internet Explorer 7 uses the first header except when the header is Basic. We use Basic auth if no other authentication mechanism is present.
• HTTPOnly Cookies--HTTPOnly cookies can no longer be overwritten from scripts.
• _SEARCH--The _SEARCH sidebar is no longer supported in Internet Explorer 7. It can be reenabled using a URLAction.

All sounds good to me.  I'll be a little sad about _search, tho, but only a little.

• View Source--The view-source protocol no longer works in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Update.

It actually stopped working back in IE6sp2, which was a pain for me.  It was a Netscape standard, albeit de facto, but it was still quite handy for sharing code (and non-abusable, that I know).

• Gopher Protocol--Support for the Gopher protocol was removed at the WinINET level. (Gopher support was turned off by default in Internet Explorer 6.)
• windowexternalImportExportFavorites--windowexternalImportExportFavorites has been removed in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview.
• Telnet--The telnet protocol handler is no longer supported in Internet Explorer.

Gopher, sure -- I haven't touched that in 10yrs. 
The Favorites method -- eh, not a big fan, but I've seen some very cool specific uses (uploading to bookmark sites, in particular). 
But why no telnet://?  All that ever did was open the default telnet client.  This'll definitely be a pain for some sites. 

• SysImage URL Scheme--The SysImage URL Scheme has been removed from Internet Explorer.

I actually have no idea what this is, which is unusual with IE.  Anyone wanna enlighten my ignorance?

• Status Bar Scripting--Script will no longer be able to set the status bar text through the window.status and window.defaultStatus methods by default in the Internet and Restricted Zones. This small step helps prevent attackers from leveraging those methods to spoof the status bar. To revert to previous behavior (allowing script to set the status bar through window.status and window.defaultStatus) select the “Security” tab from “Internet Options” in the Control Panel. Select “Custom level…” for the Internet (or Restricted sites) zone. Find “Allow status bar updates via script” and change the setting to “Enable”.

I wont miss this one much.  When I've used it, it's been more a toy or bandaid for ugly URLs.  Much more often I've seen it abused, so all good here.

I'll post more if I find my test-drive interesting.

There's more good discussion about it over on the IEBlog.

 

Or SELECTed wisely... (ok, so the quote doesn't quite work).

Considering my frustrations with IE's buggy SELECT element (dropdown list), or my workarounds for those problems, it should be no surprise that I'm quite excited about IEblog's news about SELECT element fixes in IE7: For the SELECT few....

z-index fixed, styles fixed, title fixed. Finally! (But no mention of scripting bugs... hopefully they get those too!)

Hard to explain (I'm a geek, nuff said), but I just noticed my One-Billionth birthsecond is coming up soon.  Furthermore, my (almost 3yr old) son's One-Hundred-Millionth birthsecond will be about a month earlier!

Want to know when you/a loved one reached/will celebrate a major birthsecond?  In that case, I proudly (?) introduce my Birthsecond Calculator™ (;>) :

1. Date/Time of birth:
2. + a birthsecond:        100,000 - One-Hundred-Thousandth      1,000,000 - One-Millionth     10,000,000 - Ten-Millionth    100,000,000 - One-Hundred-Millionth  1,000,000,000 - One-BILLIONTH (RIP Carl Sagan) 10,000,000,000 - TEN-Billionth
3. = ?
    

Note: This surely won't work in a feed reader, so come visit for the fun.

(web geek colophon: This works thanks to jsDate, my port of VBScript Date functions to Javascript.)

Update 2007-04-15: My 7yo son wants to know when his 250 millionth birthsecond is, so here's a customizable version.

This is just awesome:

...Okay, so it's a slightly ugly picture, why is it awesome? Read about it here: http://me.eae.net/archive/2005/12/29/canvas-in-ie/.  Basically, Emil Eklund of WebFX extended IE to support Canvas elements, the currently most-buzzed new technology in web browsers.

Awesome-er (to me) is that he accomplished in a couple days with IE's DHTML Behaviors, just like my xDOM Suite, or Dean Edwards' Star-Light do.  Just like them, it uses DHTML Behaviors to basically improve (fix, enhance, or extend) IE's rendering engine.  Developers can apply this extension by copying two files and adding a single line of code to pages which use Canvas.

Easy development, 3rd-party browser extensions, easy deployment ....All good examples of why DHTML Behaviors are totally awesome, and great reasons why other browsers should adopt them... 

(via Ajaxian, screenshot borrowed from same.)

I recently deployed the ASP.net 2.0 Framework to my server, and since have been fighting with problems it's caused. For instance, when I switched one app to use it, it broke all the other v1.1 web apps I was running (including this blog). Fortunately for me, someone else has been having the same problem and found a solution: move the 2.0 apps into their own application pool. Hooray I don't have to uninstall (which I was close to doing).

Hey Microsoft, how about mentioning this anywhere? ...say during the install, on the IIS site's ASP.net tab, or in the error?

I have another related woe, though: If I set a 1.1 app to run under the 2.0 Framework (which should work, and imparts better performance and security), I get the ASP.net Yellow Screen of Death:

Apparently "global" now a reserved keyword under 2.0 (despite its 1.1 compatibility). Fortunately, I found my own easy fix: just rename the class. So line 11 in my global.asax.vb is now Public Class Global2. Of course I made the same change in its global.asax too: <%@ Application src="Global.asax.vb" Inherits="Global2" %>

Happy to find a solution, and I hope mine helps someone.