Yesterday, he came in and told me that it had indeed died.  In actual fact, it died in exactly the same way as my one did.  The wireless adapter suddenly disappeared and the laptop doesn’t seem to acknowledge that it even exists.  I gave him the link for the free repair that HP performed for me.  Still waiting to see if the laptop is in fact one of the models listed on the HP site, but I’d place a fair amount of money on it.

So, why call it a virus?  It’s blatantly a case of poorly constructed hardware!  Well unfortunately, I bought the 2 machines based on recommendation.  Similarly, my colleague recommended the laptop to all his friends.  So, there we have it, the curse of failing hardware, spread by the good intentions of happy customers early on in life, only to be become a whole web of disappointment, in say, 14 months…

While most of the world has moved on to CSS based sites, I just can’t be doing with it.  Don’t get me wrong, I have tried to embrace some things in CSS, navigation for instance, and divs for e-commerce sites have made my life a huge amount easier, but I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Today, a colleague was having issues with a 2 column layout.  To get 2 columns to stretch to fit the content, remain the same length, and have a footer that stays underneath them requires at least 4 divs, and 3-4 lines of CSS for each one.  A table requires 6 lines.  It does the job without any hacks, and remains the same in all browsers.

This brings me on to my second issue with CSS.  Almost every CSS site I have ever seen has some degree of hack to make the site look correct in all browsers.  Is this because browser makers are being lazy, or is it that CSS based design has opened the door to slapdash ‘designers’?  Either way, why make life difficult?  If a website needs columns, why not use the method made for it?

I use a combination of the two.  I normally use a container div, with a table inside that to split it into safe, predictable columns.  Then I style my TD’s and sometimes have divs within my tables.  People from the tables camp and people from the CSS camp probably look at my code and cry, but it works.  I don’t get issues that I have to fix with a hack.  Sure, you have to think about Internet Explorer, I mean you can’t even put a body tag on a page without IE8 screwing it up, but I don’t have to deal with items being a couple of pixels out of place.

Did you know, the first computer mouse was invented in 1964?  Sure, it wasn’t anything like what we use today, but the basic concept was there.  For some time now, mice have had 1 or 2 buttons.  Later on came the scroll wheel.  Now, with optical technology, wireless, and the addition of a few more buttons, the mouse is a technical marvel compared to the old ball mice of the 90’s.

Where is this going you might ask?

I used a classic mac in secondary school.  One of the all-in-ones with the square mouse with one button.  This worked fine.  Why then, have Apple felt the need to mess with the design of the mouse since then?  The hockey puck, that rotates in your hand, meaning you get tangled up with the cable, and can’t press the button.  Then there was the mouse where the entire shell pressed down.  More recently came the “Mighty mouse”.  Every single one of these had a stupid wheel, which while nice to use, eventually stopped working.  It also had a one piece shell, but had two clickable regions.  I always had trouble with the right mouse button clicking when I didn’t want it to.  Now, the Magic mouse has arrived.  No wheel on this one, but it has multi touch capabilities.  You have to sit through a tutorial on how to use the most basic peripheral that’s been around since the 80’s…

A colleague recently compared me buying a Logitech mouse for my mac to “putting a K&N filter on a Ferrari”.  I replied with, “a Ferrari wouldn’t need a K&N because the standard filter works perfectly well”.  Said colleague has since purchased a Logitech mouse for his MacBook Pro…

Unfortunately Apple seems to have a style over function attitude in this respect.  A mouse has 2 buttons and a scrolly wheel.  Apple, pay Logitech to make you a nice white mouse, your users will thank you for it!

Microsoft are obviously trying to push the fact that they have listened to their painstaked users and are now responding.  Having not seen 7 in the flesh yet, I can’t really comment on it, however I can see a Microsoft ad in a couple of years, once 7 has flopped just like vista:

Windows 7.  It’s not our fault, it was all your idea…

Microsoft, what the hell are you playing at?

This week, I had not one, but two phone calls from customers announcing to me that their site had stopped working.  In both cases, it was the menu at fault.  One site has a fairly hefty javascript based menu, and the other drop-down submenus.  So, off I go, testing the sites in all browsers available to me, FF, IE6, 7, Safari, Mac FF, Mac Safari, and then came IE8.

Now we’re not talking a slight rendering issue here, or an IE-hackable few pixels out of place, IE8 had invented a Javascript error.  Every other browser in the world was fine, but IE8 had a problem with it.  So this is bad enough, but in IE8 there is a button called Compatibility mode.

From the MS site: Internet Explorer 8 is a new release and some websites may not yet be ready for the new browser. Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the website as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes.

Sure enough, this actually fixes the problem.  What the hell?  Microsoft have released a browser that in default form, doesn’t work very well, but if you want it  to work properly, you can just click a button.  I’m sat here now fuming about this.  If I put out a website where nothing worked, unless you click a small button first, without any prompting, I’d be fired for shoddy workmanship.  Yet the biggest software house in the world seems to think it’s ok?

Now I need to spend considerable amounts of time fixing websites to work in a minority browser, when this goes against all the normal rules just because of who it is.  Well F*** you Microsoft, I’m never going back to a PC if you keep this attitude up.  Leave your browser to die, and let the experts who work for free sort out the world’s internet browsing.

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Now I am using this technology for perfectly genuine reasons, but it strikes me that it would be very easy to abuse.  Also, for your inexperienced programmer, could easily get out of control.  What also strikes me, is that these two scenarios almost overlap if you aren’t careful.

Say for instance, you write a basic spider to read a site, pick up any links, read them too, and record all the information in a text file.  Say also, you forget to put in a checker for duplicate links.  Already you have a spider that will never stop.  In other words, you’ve put it into an infinite loop.  ”Oops” you might say, but consider the website you just spidered.  What you have essentially just done is a DoS attack.  Sure, it may not have done any damage, but it has the potential.

However, chuck in a few random commands, and your basic terrible script can suddenly emulate a real web user, give it a user-agent, and voila, spider away, steal what you want, the possibilities are endless and frankly, scary…

First impressions are, it is faster, but it’s not the huge gap I was expecting.  Apple have re-written the entire operating system to run natively in 64 bit.  Good news since Apple have been pushing 64bit Core 2 Duo processors out for a few years now.

I was teetering on the edge of swapping back to a dedicated Windows machine.  Those who read my last post would have seen me surprised to see how well Vista runs through Bootcamp.  Well, I decided to run a little test.

Photoshop CS3, 141 JPG images and an automated action with the following commands:

1. Auto levels
2. Auto colour
3. Resize to 50%
4. Save for Web
5. Close

So, Snow Leopard was first, and completed the test in 6:55.  Windows was booted up, and I opened the images.  I wish I had timed the opening of the 141 images, as Windows was considerably slower.  Once it finally opened, the action was run.  Windows completed in 7:45.

Both tests were run from a folder on the desktop, both from the same hard drive.

I think if the RAM was upgraded, the Mac would have steamed ahead thanks to it’s 64bit-ness.

So, for now, I’m back on the Mac side of the fence…

Previous readers will have read my opinion of Vista and Microsoft in general since I became a Mac user.

So, what happened?  Well, a friend sent me a link detailing the upcoming release of a new series of Monkey Island games.  To your average nerd, this is the best news since, well, the last Monkey Island game!  This presents a problem to the Mac user.  A productive, stable machine it is, but a games platform it isn’t.

So, Bootcamp was installed, and then Vista was dusted down and installed.  I am slightly concerned to say, that Vista appears to run quicker and more efficiently that Leopard.  I know that I need to install Anti-Virus etc, but I was expecting to install a great big turd of an operating system, as I remember it on my laptop, but it just doesn’t seem to be.  Maybe the service packs and general updates have improved it, but I am actually enjoying using it again.  Plus, I much prefer Photoshop and Dreamweaver on the PC.  They just seem to work nicer, however I’ve been using video capture recently, and also iDVD, and these run nicer on the mac than the PC…

Currently, the house is rocking to the tune of classics like, “a slowed down version of the intro of Smoke on the Water”, and “the first 5 notes of Enter Sandman”.

Still, when it comes to learning new things, I am a patient person, and if all else fails, at least it looks quite cool.