I’m in the middle of designing and building an Intranet site.  Being a web developer has it’s pluses and minuses.  One of the minuses is the variety of web browsers available depending on your environment of choice.  You would think that once you develop a web site, it’s done, and your off on to another project, but unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy.  The browsers keep popping into the picture, and I ran into it again yesterday.

My current development environment is Windows XP Pro running WAMPSERVER 2.0c.  I prefer XP, at the moment, because of the rich number of tools and resources that are available to me that make my job easier, and at the same time, are rock solid and stable.  I do not want bugs and environment problems with my tools when at the same time I’m having problems with my application.  That being said, I admit to seriously flirting with Ubuntu from time to time, and know eventually I will end up there, but for now, and until I get a dedicated computer for Ubuntu, I will persist with XP.

My browser of choice to develop on is Firefox.  Firefox has the best development tools available of any of the browsers out there.  Some of the plug-ins that I use regularly is “Aardvark,” to see what I’m editing in CSS on the page, “Web Development” suite of tools for the variety of information I can see about the current browser window, and “Firebug” to help debug some problems I have on web page.  No other browser comes close to these tools.

So yesterday, I reached a “come up for air” point in this Intranet application I’m hand coding in PHP and MySQL, and decided to see what the application looked like in the other browsers.  Ugh! What a disappointment. Internet Explorer 8,  the just released new Microsoft browser, still is far behind.  It has a tendency to murder forms.  When you have a nice form in Firefox it is either ignored, or made unrecognizable, in IE8. We don’t want to go to IE6 or IE7 which are worse.  Bear in mind, I develop all my applications to pass the current web standards. My XHTML, and CSS is validated with the W3C validators to conform to the latest web standards.  So we’re starting from a common ground here.  Opera 9 worked pretty good.  A couple of minor renderings were a little off, but I call this trivial.  Safari was the closest, and seems to be right on, no problems.

I took this “up for air” opportunity to run the acid tests on the browsers again.  I am here to report that the ACID 2 browser test is no longer relevant. Why?  With Microsoft’s new release, IE8, all the browsers now pass ACID 2 with flying colors. Yes!  My job just got a little bit easier, after all, we still have to make applications work in all browsers.  Because of this need to modify an application to run IE, I have hated the IE browser for years now.

Microsoft did an interesting thing with IE8.  They put a gear shift in the browser window, called a  compatibility button.  They could never admit they tried a “grandstand” play to take over Internet Standards with their own proprietary standards for the web, like what they pulled with the Office suites and tried with Java.  They failed with Java, and now, the browsers. Luckily for us all.   This compatibility button is on the top toolbar, just to the right of the address field, when the browser detects that you are on a page that requires it.  It is suppose to let you render your bank pages properly, that may not be visible, because it was developed just for IE5, 6, or 7.  What it does is try to bring their older versions of proprietary rendering of web pages, up to current standards.  I guess that’s as close as we’ll get to Microsoft admitting defeat.

Since all the browsers pass ACID2, ACID3 now becomes the standard all browsers should strive to reach.   The idea is the browser runs a series of tests that gradually build to a score of 100 with smooth animation.  The higher the score the better the browser conforms to the current standards.

The Report Card Please:
Safari 4.0.530.17  Passed with flying colors  Score: 100
Opera 9.64         Came close.                Score: 85
Firefox 3.0.11       Up there                    Score: 72
Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702  Ugh! Still not there. Not smooth. Score: varied best 20

You can run the ACID 3 test in your current browser by simply going to the ACID 3 site and running the test.

Those of you interested in web development might want to build your own web pages on your home computer before going to a web hosting service to get on the Internet.

Although you can always do a file open in your browser, and load a page on your computer ending with an .html extension, once you start putting a series of pages together and want some additional functionality like a web scripting language, like php, or a database, like MySQL, you will want to have your own web server on your computer.

A web server is a program that takes in URL requests sent by a browser, and responds to those requests, by sending back the requested web page to the browser that requested it.  For example, you type in a URL web address, www.geekgumbo.com, in your browser and press go, you are connected to the geekgumbo web server on the Internet, which returns this page to your browser.  Pretty neat, and what makes the web go round.

Installing a web server on your computer means you can make URL browser requests to your own web server, usually called “localhost”.  To do this, you type in the “localhost” URL in your browser address field along with the name of the pages you are building on your computer, for example, “http://localhost/yourwebpage”  The browser sends the URL request to your web server, “localhost”, and “localhost” returns the requested web page to your browser window just like a web server on the Internet.  Using your own web server means the web pages you build will execute just as if you are actually on the Internet.  This is the way most web developers build web sites before publishing them on the Internet.

There are several web server applications running the Internet.  The two biggest are Apache, and Microsoft IIS.  Apache is the web server for over 100 Million web sites at present, and, by far, is the leading web server with 66% of the business sites.  We will focus on Apache, mostly because its what we know, and secondly, because all the open source, free, technologies work well with it.

Apache usually comes with PHP and MySQL in what is normally called a LAMP stack.  LAMP standing for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  Don’t let the Linux scare you away it runs on Windows as well.

There are currently two LAMP stacks available for free, XAMPP and WAMP.
XAMMP runs on the Windows, MacOS, Solaris, and Linux operating system.  WAMP only runs on Windows.  WAMP stands for, you guessed it, Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

Right now, XAMMP is the leading home pc server, but if your running Windows, either XP or Vista, we prefer WAMP.  Having installed and used both servers at one time or another, we feel the WAMP interface is much easier to use, and configure then XAMPP.  XAMMP requires some configuring after you install it that you don’t have to worry about with WAMP.

Download either, and give it a try. They both come with initial screens that let you know their installed properly.  Put the web pages your building in the htdocs directory under XAMPP, or in the WWW directory under the WAMP directory and walla… your off and running as a future web developer.

Has anyone running Microsoft Vista experienced starting an application on your computer, that normally starts quickly, and having to wait a minute or more for the application to start.  Sometimes you’ll get the spinning circle wait icon and sometimes you won’t.   Or all of a sudden your computer suddenly slows down when you haven’t done anything that you normally wouldn’t do.  Or your internet connection suddenly get real slow when it was running fast a second ago.

The immediate thought is I have spyware, a virus, or trojan running on my computer, and wonder how I got it.

Well, I have a surprise for you.  It may be Microsoft’s error reporting causing the problem.  The theory of error reporting is  if enough people have a problem, and you report it to Microsoft, then Microsoft may come up with a solution, and fix your problem.

Microsoft has been doing error reporting for a long time.  I’m not sure when they started having user’s computers, attached to the Internet, automatically send messages back to Microsoft.   It’s been a long time.  When Vista first came out, it was so bad, I figured, yea, let’s help get this operating system as good as XP.  But enough all ready, Microsoft has given up, and is rushing out Windows 7.  And I have to say, I have never had a message back from Microsoft fixing my problem, or even a message about a current problem.  That’s never in all these years.  So what gives.  I do wonder if they are not just tracking the software on your computer.

If you would like to see what get’’s reported to Microsoft in Vista, get ready for a surprise.   Go to Start>Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Problem Reports and Solutions>View Problem History.  It looks to me like every application you run gets reported at one time or another.  Each one of those reports may cause one of  the slow down problems we described at the start of this post.

My advice is to turn it off, forget about it, and stop those annoying slow downs.  To turn it off go to  Start>Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Problem Reports and Solutions>Change Settings> click “Ask me to check if a problem occurs.  Your not done yet. Click in the same window right below that “Advanced Settings>For my Programs, problem report is “OFF” .”   Then click “Change Settings.”  Windows will protest, and  remind you to turn it back on occassionally, but you don’t need it, and you  can safely ignore their prompts.  Your computer will run a lot better and a lot quicker.

We were talking the other day amongst ourselves about one of our favorite topics.  What’s your favorite editor for web development?  When all of a sudden a common pet peeve reared its ugly head, we had to write about it, mainly, in hopes that one of those unknown editor developers might someday in the near future rectify the situation.

I’ve looked at, and tested, a lot of editors,  my specific needs mostly being web development.  Let me name a few,  in no particular order, that I have actually downloaded and spent time looking over:  NetBeans, Dreamweaver, Komodo, Zend, Eclipse, Aptana, HTML-Kit, PS-Pad, Notepad++, Kompozer,  Textpad, TopStyle, and  InType.   I am currently using Aptana, and HTML-Kit for most of my work.  These are both free for the download.

Now to the Pet Peeve, I’ve talked to a lot of developers and everyone I have talked to, tells me that they like to work with their editor having a dark background with consistent color syntax highlighting across various code languages in lighter colors.  Everyone that wants to do that, have a dark background and light syntax highlights,  has to configure each and every one of these editors by hand, for each language, and for each selector or tag.  What a pain!   Some of these color changes can take hours.   The absolute most frustrating editor to change colors, bar none, is Eclipse, it’s awful.   I’ve tried to get Eclipse the way I wanted it several times, and each time, I have gotten so frustrated, I’ve switched editors.

Every version of these editors that is released has a white background and usually a nicely set up color syntax highlighting adjusted properly for a white background.  Why give you any color choices if it such a pain to go away from a white background?  In fact, what I’m asking for, is a properly configured dark background choice, like one option reverses everything to a dark background with properly set up color highlighting for the dark background.  That doesn’t seem to much to ask, but apparently the editor developers find it just as hard a task as us everyday developers.

The only editor that came with that option was a very good, but incomplete and still in, what seems like forever, development, InType.   If this editor ever gets done, this could be the TextMate of the Windows world.

So what about it.  Can we get a proper dark background layout, or are we just going to be iritated for the next 10 years, until someone gets it right.

Microsoft is scrambling to get out its replacement operating system for Vista to bring up its revenues.  The replacement, Windows 7,  will try to get corporate America and the government weaned away from XP.  Vista has largely failed to meet expectations.  It is slower than XP with many annoying features, like UAC, User Account Control.  That’s not to say Windows 7  will be much better.  It will have UAC only with four choices instead of two.

In an effort to get Windows 7 out by Q3 2009, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced that a new version of Office will NOT be released with Windows 7.  This is a switch from previous releases where both were released at the same time to enhance both revenue streams, and signals a separation of operating sytem and Office development.

This separation is real, and led to several interesting developments.   You will not have to have Windows 7  to run Office 14.  It will still be supported on XP.   Office 14 will have a new format that will support XML-based file format Open Office XML (ODF). Microsoft has been fighting against this to try to keep to its own Open Document Format (OOXML).  It looks like it will give in on this one.

And in a big twist, Stephen Elop, Microsoft Business Division Chief  announced that Office 14 may offer a FREE ad supported version.  In other words, you can get it for free, if your willing to look at ads while you work. Elop said it was to fight piracy, but we think that the complete $400 plus package of Office from Microsoft is under a lot of pressure from OpenOffice.org.  Sales must be hurting given OpenOffice.org is free.   Elops sees it has a chance to get upgrade revenues later on.   I guess, if the ads are annoying enough, people will spring for the $200-$500 to upgrade, but we don’t think so.  Hopefully, the ads will replace the ribbon.

Office 14, the new release, now will not be released until 2010.   In the meantime, we thought we’d tease you with some advanced shots of the new Office 14.   These are compliments of the Office 14 Alpha release and was leaked by the Russian web site, Wzor.  We know, we know, the images are small, if you like an even closer look try here.

For those who use MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database for web development, there is a neat MySQL Administrator toolkit that the MySQL folks have come out with that helps you with all aspects of your database.  It includes  a very nice MySQL Query Browser, a Migration tool,  allows you to do backups, restores, and view your database tables, and data.  It is worth the download.

We have downloaded it on both a Unix and Windows system.   Once you get it up and running you’ll feel very much in control of your databases whether at your localhost or to a remote server.

There is one problem you will run into when you initially launch the tool on both Unix and Windows.  This problem appears to be independent of the operating system or server, i.e Wamp or Xampp on your local machine.  There is an initial login error which pops up a message:  “Either the server service or the configuration file could not be found. Startup variables and service section are therefore disabled.”  This is documented in the MySQL forums.

You can still click ok and the tool will launch, you’ll see your databases under “catalogs,” but your service controls will be grayed out, and you will not be logged in as a user.  The problem is the Administrator tool can not find your MySQL “my.ini” file.  And since your not logged in, you can not change your path in “Service Control->Configure Service,” it seems like a catch-22, and has left us, and judging from the forum, many others frustrated.  We spent about an hour on it.

Here’s the solution.  On Windows,  start up MySQL Administrator, push down your “control” key, and click “cancel” in the login window.  This will bring up your “Service Control” window.  Go to “Configure Service->Configuration Filename:”  and put in the path to your MySQL my.ini file, including the my.ini at the end of the path.  Click Apply Changes, and click the “Start/Stop service tab, and then stop and restart your service.  Close the window, and relaunch the administrator tool.  Your error message should be gone, and everything should start properly.

My setup on Linux is a lampp install on Fedora 10.  The MySQL tools are completely separate from the lampp application suite,  so you need to tell the MySQL Administration tool where to find the database.  The Administrator tool looks for “/etc/my.cnf ” ,  which must be some kind of default location.  I could not find a way to change this.  The work around is to remove the stock “/etc/my.cnf ” file, and to replace it with a soft link to the lampp configuration file.

ln -s /opt/lampp/etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf

Now, the MySQL Administration tool will read the lampp configuration file, and everything should work properly.

Ubuntu 9.04, known as “Jaunty Jackalope” was just released on April 23.   It is the latest version of the popular Linux distro.  This version has significant  feature enhancements over the previous version.  For one thing, they rewrote the boot and install programs, so the operating system should load easier,  and more important, boot quicker at start-up, something Windows has had a problem with for ages.  Boot times may be as short as 25 seconds in some configurations.   With this release, Ubuntu is claiming to be on a par with both Windows and Mac’s OS, Leopard.   They may be right.

With Ubuntu comes OpenOffice.org and a full desktop application suite that is starting to rival Microsoft Office in functionality, and at the same time be completely compatible with Microsoft formats and Mac formats.   They put a lot of your favorite applications in a library so you don’t have to go all over the web to find the correct Ubuntu version of your favorite application.  It’s all available right from the desktop, as are easy updates for all your software.   Another plus that has been bugging Linux Distros has been support for advanced video drivers.  This version of Ubuntu supports the NVIDIA advanced video drivers, so you should not have any video problems.   We are going to take a slightly closer look and be back with you in a bit on our overall impression.

Jaunty Jackalope is available from the Ubuntu web site.

Microsoft released its official version of their latest browser, IE 8, on March 19th.  Web developers around the world know from experience that this may or may not be a good thing.  It’s tough to design web pages and applications that are suppose to render the same, no matter what browser you use, when one of those browsers for multiple reasons wants to do their own thing.  Web developers have been fighting browser incompatibilities for as long as we can remember.

One of the worse browsers for non-compliance has been…you guessed it Internet Explorer.  Almost every web page out there has to have it’s work around for those viewers that use Internet Explorer.  The browser compatibility issue became such a pain, and not just Microsoft as the culprit, that an independent advocacy group was formed, the Web Standards Project, to try to point out the differences that existed between browsers in hopes of getting some conformity in everyone’s web experience.

The Web Standards Project developed a test suite, called Acid,  to see if a browser was compliant with what they considered to be the major standards from various sources for web development.  For a web developer and web user, this is important for an enjoyable web experience.  The current default test that every browser should be able to run is Acid2.  You can check your browser out, and take the Acid 2 test yourself.  If your browser runs correctly, you should get the below image displayed correctly.   Seems like a simple test, but every previous version of Internet Explorer has failed this test miserably, until now that is.   Internet Explorer 8 has decided to join the rest of the world’s browser experience and now passes Acid 2.   Now all we have to do is wait until all previous versions of Internet Explorer die of old age, and we can forget about all those special IE workarounds in our web pages.

By the way, there is a much more strenuous Acid 3 test.  This one counts to 100 and depending on how far you get in the count determines how standard compliant your browser is.   So far Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browser are the only ones to reach 100.

In the meantime, we applaud Microsoft on its latest effort, and bid all you Internet Explorer browser users to hurry up and upgrade.

,

Acid2

I feel compelled to write about all-in-one printers.  I have been using these multifunctions printers for some 20 years now, and always an HP.  After all, HP invented the market.  The multifunction printer does it all, fax, scan, copy, and of course, print your computer documents.  If you get a network ready model, you can print through your wireless network, and run one all-in-one printer for all the computers in your home or small business.

These printers last four or five years before they go out of alignment, a belt slips, or the paper feed messes up.  When your printer died, it use to be a no-brainer.  You go out and buy the latest HP.

But after my six year old HP died, I wanted to rethink that logic.  Since I end up doing the maintenance on the printer, I knew the HP printer well.  I only ever owned an HP, so I was use to their quirks, but I was dissatisfied.  What didn’t I like about the HP.  The HP seems to be built with ill fitted plastic parts.  It feels and looks like plastic, and what I wanted was something that looked like a high-quality printer, think Lexus versus Chevy.  The HP ink cartridges are the highest priced on the market.  Everyone knows HP makes money on the ink cartridges, not the printer.  I never liked having to pay for cartridges that seem to run out of ink just when you had an important job to print.

And finally, the final straw was the software.  HP software ranks low in my eyes, right alongside Symantec software.  (Don’t get me started.)  It’s not the drivers themselves, it’s the way the software application works: how it installs, how the network installs, how sometimes the driver just disappears and needs to be reinstalled, the scanner never worked properly, and still doesn’t to this day.  These quirks were exasperated with the change to Vista.  Generally, HP software is a pain to install and use.  It makes you work to get your printer up and running, and in the end, I got tired of it.  It has trouble installing on a wireless network.  My thought was maybe there is a better printer than HP on the market.

I looked, and started reading the reviews.  I almost bought a Kodak.  The plus was the low price of its ink cartridges.  Yep, $12 versus the HP’s $35.  The reviews said you needed special photo paper to print high-quality color, a minus, which brought me to Canon.
The Canon MX850 had the highest Amazon ranking of all network all-in-one printers on the market, 4.5 stars from 145 reviews, wow.  The HPJ4580 only made 4 stars with 14 reviews.  I took a chance, gave up my HP problems, blew all my HP software off my computers, and went with the Canon, and I’m glad I did.

I finished installing and setting up the Canon MX850, and I am gushing over the Canon.  It’s print quality is superb, it’s color quality is superb, it handles 17-28 lb paper.  The HP sometimes struggled with lighter copy paper.  It’s parts go together precisely, like Lexus, not loosely like the HP.  It looks and feels well engineered.  I get smooth noise on print, not clunky noise with the HP.  The ink cartridges go in smoothly with a click and a light to signify proper install, not a plastic catch that forces the cartridge, like the HP.  The ink cartridges cost about $20, not bad, compared to $35.  The printer is easy to use.  The menus make sense and are logical laid out.  And finally, which prompted this article, the software is a joy.  It installs easily.  it takes care of a lot of things behind the scenes.  it installs quickly.  The HP seemed like it took forever to find the printer on the network.  The Canon found the printer quickly and just said finished with the install.

Right now, I’m a happy camper.  I wish I had gone with Canon six years ago.  Of course, I don’t think they were available back then.  It looks to me like Canon built a better mousetrap in the interim.

Micorsoft Security Updates?   Lets take a completely different perspective.

What if Microsoft didn’t make my operating system like a *&%$* vault, and some baddies somehow laid some malware into my machine.  That’s right, somehow penetrated all my non-Microsoft firewall, anitvirus software, spyware program, registry cleaner, and file change detection programs.  Yep, just suppose this malware got through all of those third-party apps, and really messed up my system.  It messed it up so bad, I couldn’t recover, and I had to buy a new computer.

Wouldn’t Microsoft make more money from the sale of a new operating system and office tools on that new computer I’d be forced to buy.  Get a clue Microsoft, stop these idiotic security updates, and ultra pain in the butt security measures that clog our systems, slow them down, and let us pay you more money.

Along those lines, since we never know what is inside, the now infamous, Microsoft security updates,  I have a sneaky suspicion, that has nagged at me many a time, as my system reboots from yet another securtiy update.   What if Microsoft security updates for XP, and its other older operating systems have a little extra functionality built-in.  Maybe, they have a couple extra loops in the code of each new update.  This would gradually slow your older operating system down.  We, of course, would call these updates, “security updates.”  Of course, the extra loops wouldn’t be in the updates for their latest operating system.

Why? Well, to sell new computers, and with each computer, new Microsoft software.  Can you say money?  Get rid of that super slow clunker you’ve had for a couple of years, and buy a new “speedy” computer with Vista on it.  See how quick your new computer runs.  “Wow, Vista looks really good!”   Nah, Microsoft wouldn’t do that, would they?