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Some evidence my site gets VERY little traffic, my window.open() solution has been making windows open without an address bar. VERY VERY annoying. Had I noticed it was doing this I'd have corrected it long ago but my browser, Maxthon does not behave the same way so I hadn't seen this before. My new solution is window.open(url, '_blank') as opposed to window.open(url, '', 'fullscreen=yes'). The new window does not open maximized but it's better to have the menu and address bars and not be maximized than to be maximized and have neither. It would be nice if the DOM model supported maximized=yes but for now I guess we'll all just have to live with the limitations imposed upon us.

So far, other than some issues regarding the Epson scanner and my Iomega Zip Plus drive, I have been reasonably satisfied with XP Pro x64. The issue with the BIOS is still not resolved as far as the functionality of the software. I informed Gigabyte and they told me they had not experienced the problem themselves so it must not exist. I work in the software industry, just because you can't reproduce a problem yourself does not mean that it doesn't exist. Their response was 'less than adequate' to my thinking. The way I see it I was reporting a bug IN BETA SOFTWARE and they were dismissing it out of hand. Sounds like they don't even understand the meaning of BETA. The problems I was having related to the software's use have been resolved by making a boot disc/cd and loading the BIOS from the command line. Haven't had any BIOS problems since.

In an unrelated topic to my BIOS adventures I have come to an unfortunate revelation that the 'big boys' of software development have very little concern for those using their product(s). I recently have been working on an, as yet unnamed and unreleased, opensource project. I found a way to use an existing class in Sun's JDK that accomplished what I needed it to do by adding 3 very short lines of code to it. The code was marked at the top as PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL so I figured I would need to ask for permission from Sun to make the modification and redistribute it, outside the JDK, but here is where my disappointment began to set in. For this type of issue there is no e-mail address on Sun's site to write to, keep in mind this is an OPENSOURCE project. I was told I should call their legal department, but their legal department shuffled me to 4 technical people none of which were able to direct me to the right person. Let me make clear there is always just one person with which the ultimate decision lies and NO ONE there had any clue who that one person might be. One of them said I needed to open a support request either with a Sun contract number, an indication that we had already given them money, or pay $150/hr with a 2 hour minimum so $300 minimum in support to answer a simple legal question regarding one class in the JDK library. How Apache does it I have no idea. I would stress that code re-use is a HEAVILY preached concept in today's world. So instead of making that simple 3 line change I ended up writing my own class with less capability than Sun's but more flexible in terms of meeting our requirement. The most disappointing aspect of this is that I was trying to do the right thing in asking their permission yet they make it ridiculously difficult to do things the "right way". No wonder so many people and organizations get in trouble for doing things the "wrong/illegal way". Steven Segal said in Fire Down Below, and I am paraphrasing here, "companies will always do things the cheapest way, even if the cheapest way is the wrong way". To that all I can say is "Amen, brother".

Well, my IE7 experimentation came to an abrupt end when my video driver decided to stop working. I suppose it's ok since it gave me the "excuse" to upgrade my OS to Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. It is not significantly different but you have to be willing to do without some of the peripherals you may be accustomed to. My Epson Perfection 2450 Scanner no longer works, I guess it might be appropriate to lump Epson's support in with UMAX and just give up on anything but HP or Xerox equipment. It's sad that they have such sorry support now. The image quality was outstanding but their lack of support is a HUGE disappointment. Not even beta drivers!! I was almost ready to spring for a new 32 bit license for the machine until Microsoft released the Post Script, PS, driver for my Samsung ML-2151N printer. I can reassign the scanner to another machine but the printer is a necessity. That said, I still want to see the PCL6 driver released in 64 bit, but I can live with the less capable PS driver for now (less capable than the 32 bit version of the driver).

The motherboard manufacturer, it's a Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI board, is a bit of a disappointment as well. The hardware supports 64 bits but the 64 bit software support is quite poor. The @BIOS 64 bit app they are putting out "appears" to work until you reboot and the machine simply won't boot. Shutting it off and powering it back up will get it back to bootable but apparently it defaults to the originally installed BIOS (F6 in my case, I was attempting to install F9!!!). The other problem is using the Silicon Image SATAII chipset causes the machine to restart without even getting to the boot screen for Windows. It worked pretty well in the 32 bit XP Pro.

This leads me to the real reason for this long overdue post. I would like to know why it is we have to pay for anti-virus software at all. If the OS were properly supported there would be no need for it to begin with. And before you linux lovers jump on the bash Windows bandwagon I want to be sure to point out that Linux and the Unix variants (including BSD/Apple/OSX etc) have had well documented vulnerabilities as well. The user base simply isn't large enough to warrant a huge outcry about them or to attract serious hacker/virus author attention. Not to mention if you are getting your OS for free you kind of expect it to have problems anyway. No, my point is that these viruses and spyware things should simply be part of the support package supplied with Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux, Suse/Novell Linux, Sun Solaris, HPUX, IBM zOS, Apple OSx even if it means they have to support their own version(s) of antivirus and anti-spyware products. I see them as a sort of immune system for operating systems that should be an integral part of the software to begin with. As for those e-mail born viruses and spam, the e-mail server and client vendors could certainly do more to prevent the spread of these hassles/annoyances as well by building the heuristics(immune systems) into them as well. In case you are wondering, this was brought on by the fact that most antivirus vendors did not have 64 bit antiviruses available for the launch of Windows x64. I am actually using the free version of Avast Anivirus 4.6 (64 bit).

I am testing IE 7 beta 1 and have found a few "interesting" quirks you might want to know about. It seems the new rendering engine has somehow broken the title attribute for html links and, perhaps more frustrating for some, it wreaks havok with the MSMessenger plugin for Trillian. The users, at least one who frequents the Trillian forums, came up with a solution that places one of the IE 6 dll's in the Trillian installation folder so that Trillian does not depend on the system dll not changing. It is a good solution I think, but I find it disturbing that the Trillian developers were unwilling to do so themselves. It seems to me the less dependency Trillian has on system dll's the more isolated from deleterious system user actions the application becomes, thus it becomes more stable in the long term. One would think that would be the goal of every software developer, but apparently the "developers" at Trillian feel differently.

Well, the site was down for a few days due an upgrade of the host system from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4. Sorry, if this caused any inconvenience. I didn't intend for it to take this long but if the discs are burned at too high a speed on my speedy machine my little web server can't read them. Since that's the way I burned them originally... well you see the result. No harm done. Surf on my friends.

I've been reading more about web site design, specifically, the "user interface" in the form of the books "Don't Make Me Think : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" by Steve Krug and "The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design For the Web" by Jesse James Garret. That, in conjunction with the success I've had with SSI and rendering my first frame free page, will lead to a new framework for the site. It is not likely to change in appearance any time soon, as I have some design elements to work out yet but I do expect it to change, as time permits, behind the scenes. To this point the site has been quite ad-hoc in nature which leads to a somewhat less than ideal user experience. It is my hope that as I go through the many phases of the design process I can achieve a more cohesive message and document it in order to help my fellow web novices in their quests to develop their own websites.

On a slightly different topic, I despise seeing mispellings and typos in print anywhere. I feel it demonstrates a distinct lack of professionalism and attention to detail or worse a serious case of ignorance. Our own local paper suffers from this malady on the FRONT page from time to time and I find that EXCEPTIONALLY embarassing since most of the visitors to our city see the front page of the local paper. It kind of gives all the residents of this fair city a black eye, figuratively speaking. If anyone should EVER find a mispelling, typo, or grammatical error anywhere on my site, please let me know immediately, via the usual means. I am the only author and proof reader on this site and it is possible that I may overlook an error that stands out to someone else.

I know, two entries so close together, how unusual. Anyway, I have been playing with Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, some more and Server Side Includes, SSI, to try to do away with the frames without making the site any less useful in newer browsers. There are a few issues with really small window sizes (less than 800 by 600) but I think it renders pretty much the way I want it to now. The reason I am leaning toward SSI is that it doesn't require me to install an application server and there is VERY little I need to rewrite on my pages. That said it may still be more work than it is worth with the competing CSS layouts. I will keep playing with it and let you know if I change anything.

I have ended up undoing the "fix" I put in for the horizontal scroll bar. It doesn't validate XHTML 1.1 so I will find another solution at some point in the future.

Well I think my e-mail woes are finally behind me. At least for now.

I also discovered an unpleasant side effect/flaw in IE while I was perusing the site today. Apparently, using a fully qualified dtd breaks the auto scrolling feature in IE6 so that when a vertical scroll bar is required a horizontal scrollbar also appears. This does not appear to effect Firefox at all. Though I find it distasteful, I am using a workaround in my CSS to prevent the problem from occurring on all but the smallest screens. It doesn't really fix the problem which appears to be IE's screen size calculation based on with/without vertical scrollbar in a strict rendering mode. If you look at the Ideas->WTLB page and compare it to the Ideas->Musing page you'll see that the right margin that exists in the Musing page is covered by the vertical scrollbar in the WTLB page instead of being adjusted to fit the area minus the vertical scrollbar. If the dtd is removed from the page declaration then the page is "loose" rendered and everything works correctly but my solution, until my friends at MS fix the problem, is simply to turn off the horizontal scroll bar altogether on the pages I know are going to have the problem, namely, the Home page and the WTLB page

Still having a few issues with the site but most of it is restored. I just thought I'd point out again why the site exists at all. Yes, I know there are problems with search engines and framed sites, but the site exists to help people resolve site and windows problems that I have encountered myself and to point you in the direction of a few useful tools. As a side benefit I host and link to a few sites run by friends and acquaintances. The frame issue aside It does accomplish at least a few of these goals. It will take quite some time but eventually I do intend to eliminate the frames and make the navigation just as seemless as it is now.

Just FYI I have added a few more useful Links to the Links - Software page

Some of you may have noticed some problems related to the site. I have been having hardware issues that have seriously affected the site. I have moved most of the site to a linux machine and most of it is again functional, but my email server is still AWOL. I am slowly working at getting that restored as well. Please bear with me as I attempt the recovery.

Well, it's nearing that time of year again and I just thought I'd share a little link for tax season this year. Here is the FreeFile page on the IRS web site where you can pick the software that is best for you. I used Intuit's TurboTax (go to TaxFreedom to get to their free filing site) again this year since it's free for those of us that aren't making diddly and don't have much, if anything, to itemize. The IRS site lists several others but the TaxFreedom site seems to work best for me. Choose whatever you feel will work best for you.

I hope everyone had a great


yesterday. Not much going on on the site recently but I am learning a thing or two here and there that may be added to the site in the future. I would point out that I have added a few things to the Links pages. Specifically, a few new links on the Shopping tab. There may have been a few more additions and improvements on those pages as well but I can't recall with any certainty.

Interestingly, I discovered a little while ago that it is more browser safe and correct in XHTML to use for links that open in new windows rather than Just an FYI.