You will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand and yielded that which is not yours to give or to withhold.  You may think you are dead, but it will be only a dream;  you may think you have come awake, but it will still be only a dream.  Open your hand, and you will sleep indeed -- then wake indeed.

From Lilith, by George MacDonald
Found in The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis, page 123

It's a book meme.  I did this, you do it too:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

On the meaning of life:

What if Life is just one big, much-too-interesting waiting room?

If so, I think I'm a bit afraid to find out what's next...

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• Outdated in various ways (6.5yrs)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!

Because not proofreading shows your contempt for us both.

Dear Mr. Q: 

I find it disturbing that you could misspell your own name, and not notice/care for this long.

Dean pointed out that Apple's Webkit team is finally adding Internet Explorer's CSS Visual Filters (invented back in 1998 with Internet Explorer 4), and are calling it CSS Masks in Safari.

The sad news is that nobody's giving the IE team due credit.  The good news is that that power is now there. 

So hooray Safari for ignoring web standards!  Yes, I mean that.  I'll take a good de-facto standard over nothing any day (anyone remember when the W3C actually did stuff?)  Step up to the plate, Opera, Mozilla, and Konqueror!

While you're at it, don't forget to grab IE's other great dev features, too!  If we get DHTML Behaviors, Databinding, CSS Expressions, Conditional Comments, and Deferred Scripts, that will cover my 2005 Dev Wishlist for Other Browsers.
    That done, MS-haters could complain less about proprietary/innovation and the the web could keep moving forward.  To be clear, I'm saying the effort to complain about IE's extras would be better spent copying them in other browsers, helping web developers and by extension users.

Hooray for progress!

I saw Matt McSpirit's posting about Microsoft's new PartnerBot IM agent and contest, and gave it a whirl.  The result was a bit disappointing, and then went downhill:

(4:45:55 PM) me: How can I combine SQL instances on SBS 2003?
(4:45:56 PM) MS PartnerBot: Welcome back...
Do you want more on How to buy SQL Server or SQL Server Product information?
(4:46:00 PM) me: no
(4:46:00 PM) MS PartnerBot: I'm sorry I couldn't help - please try again
(4:46:16 PM) me: I'll just ask Google.com instead
(4:46:16 PM) MS PartnerBot: Component Object Model
(4:46:20 PM) me: What?
(4:46:21 PM) MS PartnerBot: Partner Bot is unable to answer your query, please try again.
(4:46:30 PM) me: Like I said, Google will help.
(4:46:31 PM) MS PartnerBot: I'll try to help - please type your question
(4:46:40 PM) me: No thanks.
(4:46:40 PM) MS PartnerBot: You're welcome, please come back soon.
(4:46:55 PM) me: (for nothing)
(4:46:56 PM) MS PartnerBot: I cannot help you yet, could you refine your search?
(4:47:03 PM) me: Who's asking the questions here?
(4:47:03 PM) MS PartnerBot: I'm sorry I can't find that name in my directory - please try the Outlook Address Book
(4:47:17 PM) me: Ok.
(4:47:18 PM) MS PartnerBot: Partner Bot can't understand your question. Please rephrase it.
(4:47:32 PM) me: Who is the Heartland District's partner representative?
(4:47:33 PM) MS PartnerBot: Our partners are our priority - we want to help you develop and grow your business. Please visit the programme membership page at http://partner.microsoft.com/uk/40014052.
(4:47:43 PM) me: Why don't you show me that information here?
(4:47:43 PM) MS PartnerBot: In a competitive environment, having the right business intelligence can be the deciding factor in closing a deal. Gain a competitive edge with the information your customer needs to make a decision in your favour. Learn more at: https://partner.microsoft.com/UK/40018122
(4:47:58 PM) me: You're Eliza, aren't you?
(4:47:59 PM) MS PartnerBot: I am Partner Bot - code with attitude. Please type your question.
(4:48:04 PM) me: ha

"Code with attitude" -- if only it was helpful too.

A friend gave me a work update today, which made my day:

"They wanted a craptastic site that just shows what they offer and how to get a hold of them, so I pooped something out of Frontpage and gave it to them."

I'd normally give credit, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't want it for this.

I've fought with this before, and am getting it again on a fresh SBS R2 install in monitoring reports (and the Event Viewer/System log):

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {E579AB5F-1CC4-44B4-BED9-DE0991FF0623} to the user NT AUTHORITY/NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

It took a long time to track down/fix the first time.  It was faster this time, but I'm documenting it now for future reference.  I underlined the important bits above.

First connect the dots:

1. Looked up that CLSID with regedit in HKCR\CLSDID\{E579AB5F-1CC4-44B4-BED9-DE0991FF0623}
2. Looked up its AppID there: {56BE716B-2F76-4dfa-8702-67AE10044F0B}
3. Open Component Services: Start > Run > dcomcnfg
4. (Guess that it's VSS related since SBS often has VSS errors, and) open My Computer > DCOM Config > Volume Shadow Copy Service > properties dialog.
5. Confirm Volume Shadow Copy Service has that Application ID: {56BE716B-2F76-4dfa-8702-67AE10044F0B}

Then actually make the fix:

1. Open Security tab > Launch and Activation Permissions > [Edit] button
2. [Add] Network Service,  [OK]
3. Allow Local Activation permissions to Network Service,  [OK], [OK]

My opinion: connecting the dots shouldn't be so nearly much more involved than making the fix.

(Credit to this article for documenting the basic troubleshooting process.)

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...

Wow, I've been out of it for a while...

I've failed to mention my new job at TQL as Web Team Supervisor (best described as "all things web").  Well, 2yrs ago isn't "new" anymore, though.  The job was both a break for me and also an experiment to try A) being not a consultant, B) working for a non-IT organization, and C) working with bigger stuff.  The break/experiments are over now -- my questions are answered and I'm back to working on Slingshot Solutions full-time (never actually stopped, but it was only for a few clients). 

Enough background.  Going into this, I wanted to start a "consultant-vs-corporate drone" comparison .  Coming back out, I do again.  So here it is.  I'll just sketch it here and fill it in as I think of it.  Consider this in progress:

Hours

Working For The Man: Regular and Separate.
But too many, and for no extra reward but sacrifice to my own quest for perfection.

Working For The Me: Free and Easy.
"Working for the man" can mean "I'm the man!"  But sometimes it's too free.  I often found/find myself working at odd hours I shouldn't.  And often my boss was a jerk -- time off doesn't pay the bills, so no vacation and no sick time.  Chalk this up to I'm just a nincompoop.

Sense of Ownership

The Man: Good-ish.
Unfortunately, a strong sense of ownership without enough discretion = lousy follow-through and perpetual frustration.  Not my bag baby.

The Me: Great.
The only limit is my own capacity.  Time tends to be the biggest limit for me (I often suspect this is more a bachelor's game).

Stress

The Man: High.
An uptight organization's expections often venture outside of performance.  Uptight sucks.

The Me: High.
Remember that bit about Ownership?  It's not all healthy.  While it's great to own your own business, it really sucks when it owns you.  (works of my own hands ... otherwise known as idolatry, I'd say).
OTOH, I noticed I smile, sing and play music, and play with my kids a lot more lately (at least when I'm not swamped).

Teamwork

The Man: Great.
It's wonderful to let HR, Accounting, DBAs and Network Admins just do their thing, so I don't have to.

The Me: Sucks.
Yes, I use good subcontractors, but everything is still ultimately my problem.

Motivation

The Man: Consistent.
There's always someone else watching (or at least the sense that there is), which keeps me on my game.

The Me: Variable.
As a lone consultant, motivation is more easily affected by other influences like mood or weather (these snow days are killing me!)

Motive

The Man: Convoluted.
When politics/red tape get in the way, it's sometimes hard to tell if I'm fighting for project's success or just my own ego.

The Me: Clear.
Simple: My customers' success is my success.

"People should be ashamed when they are passed on the right"

I'm not a bumper-sticker person.  I really have never had one, and probably never will.  I guess my soapbox-ish feelings have never overcome my greater aversion to more visual pollution.  ...Except when it comes to driving considerately.  If I saw one, I'm sure I would buy and apply a bumper sticker along these lines:

Driving considerately depends on awareness.  If you're oblivious to what's going on around you, yes "mental auto-pilot" might keep you personally safe (somewhat), but it interferes with the effective flow of traffic. 

This "driving oblivion" is essentially a form of laziness.  People should be ashamed when they are passed on the right, and should feel the need to apologize somehow, perhaps by flashing their lights in acknowledgement of the inconvenience they may have just caused the passer.  But of course they'd have to notice that too... 

A similar symptom of driving oblivion is failure to indicate: just drift on over to wherever you feel like being, with no consideration for other drivers.

I guess flow and being considerate are big with me these days.

A not particularly-related frustration, but one which also breaks flow, is traffic waves.  I think I mentioned once that I'd meant to write about it as a form of compression wave, but fortunately someone beat me to it.  Traffic waves are actually not a symptom of laziness, but rather one of greediness -- never allowing enough space in front of you that someone else might be able to cut in line.  In the process, your foot ends up back-and-forth between pedals, magnifying the compression waves and actually slowing the flow.  (Imagine a sink drain that burps, back with the air, forth with the water).

(Normally I'd apologize for venting, soapboxing, etc.  But lookee there at my name up top!  Speaking freely is a blog's "why".)

• Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)
• Kool and the Gang - 16 Spirit Of The Boogie
• King's X - Pretend
• The Commodores - Still
• Spock's Beard - 4 O' Clock
• Lit - Miserable
• Journey - Any Way You Want It
• Van Halen II - D.O.A.
• They Might Be Giants - Clap Your Hands
• Mike Helm - Meet My New Friend
  

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 theirfanboyism):
  • Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox (from a developer's point of view)
  • Firefox Myths
  • Firefox - A New Religion
    

For those in a similar tight place...

Alright, I shouldn't have experimented with the BIOS settings so flippantly, but all my other current hardware either has an internal "reset" jumper, or it automatically detects problems and resets itself, so I assumedI was safe...

Well imagine my surprise that powering on gave me an utterly blank screen, and no combination of keys would fix it.  Opening the case showed no reset mechanism either.  And Sager's website showed no support options except an RMA form...

Fortunately I found (elsewhere) an email address for support: websupport@sagernotebook.com.  I emailed and got a response within 24 hours asking for a serial number.  Knowing it was out of warranty (and expecting a "sorry about your luck" response), I gritted my teeth & answered.

Glory be, 12 hours later I received these instructions from Daniel on how to reset the BIOS to factory settings:

Bob,

If you feel comfortable, Try this, 1st unplug all the power remove the AC Adapter and the Battery. And open the bottom cover(see attachment picture) and unplug the Cmos-Battery’s wire(red&black crop by Green Color) for like 15sec. Then reconnect it back the wire then everything ACA and the Big Battery. See that will help.

*** We don't hold any responsibility ***

Daniel
Sager computer
18005 Cortney Ct
City of Industry, CA 91748
Tel# 1-800-741-2219 626 964 4849
Fax# 626-964-2381

Despite Bob-ifying me, it made enough sense that I was booting normally in 5 minutes (and mostly time for the tiny screws).

It's good info, Sager just needs to share it more easily.  I wrote back to thank Daniel, and suggested they put this kind of info in a public knowledgebase.

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-widthonly when the contained elements can't be wrapped), prompted me to write a solution script.  Here it is:

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