jorge's jome

I've been doing a lot more web work lately, including javascript, so I have become a bit more sensitive regarding standards. Standards are good...adhering to them generally gives you predictable behavior and will give you (mostly) consistent appearance across browsers. Unfortunately, as I've been working more towards standards compliance, my contempt for Microsoft has grown. Take javascript, for example. In many cases, Microsoft has either implemented their own proprietary features, such as the case with the events model, or poorly supported the existing standards. There are also some oddities with XHTML support.

Anyway, enough bitching about MS. One of the things I've noticed along the way is that many sites run in "quirks" mode. For a comparison of standards-compliant vs. quirks mode you can go here. The easiest way to determine which mode a site is running in is to go to Tools -> Page Info in Firefox (you *are* using Firefox, right?). From there, you will see an entry called Render Mode that will tell you what mode the page is running under. I couldn't find a way to determine this in IE, and I don't have any other browsers currently installed to see where you can find this information when using them.

Fortunately, for ASP .NET developers, there is a lot of work going into Whidbey to make it easier to build standards-compliant sites. I stumbled across this article from a couple years ago on Scott Guthrie's blog.

Anyway, enough for now, back to work.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink

That's the rumor. I guess we'll find out tomorrow. If it's true, sign me up.

Posted by at 12:53 PM | Permalink

The cable company never ceases to amaze me with their incompetence. I recently decided to switch back to cable TV from DirecTV, so I scheduled an appointment for setting that up. I have been receiving Time Warner Roadrunner internet service for over two years now, so all they needed to do was add cable. The guy came out and set that up but, of course, 30 minutes after he left, my internet connection went dead. So I call their tech support only to be told they have to send someone out again, but can't get anyone out to my place until a week later. I repeatedly told their tech support person what my symptoms were (power light blinking on the cable modem) and told them I was able to talk to their DNS server, but I was getting a bogus IP. He reiterated that they would need to send someone out. I hang up and call back about 5 hours later, again explaining my symptoms. The new tech support guy says the same thing as the last guy.

So, guess what happens when the guy finally comes out the following week? Yup, you guessed it. He takes one look at the modem, calls back to the office, and bingo, everything works again. He then says something to the effect of "yeah, when I see the power light blinking then it just needs to be reset". To which I reply, "yeah, I told the tech support guy that the light was blinking several times over, you guys need to get on the same page, it could have saved you a trip out here and saved me a week without internet access".

Think they'll do something about it? Me neither.

/rant off

Posted by at 6:38 PM | Permalink

After two years, I'm finally cancelling my DirecTV satellite and replacing it with regular cable. There are several reasons why I am doing this, but the primary one is that I've been using a DirecTiVo for recording programs and it has really been pissing me off that DirecTV has been so lame with the upgrades and has no plans to offer a feature like Tivo ToGo. Anyway, why do you care? You don't, but in case you've been using my satellite guide, it'll no longer have DirecTV programming data, it will have San Diego Time Warner programming data. In the meantime, I've created a new project for myself (imagine that!), this weekend I'll be building my own MythTV box. I picked up this dual tuner board and will be setting it up in my living room on my mini-ITX board. And now I'll finally be able to take my shows with me. Not that I watch much TV, but at least now I have that option.

Posted by at 6:58 PM | Permalink