random neuron misfires

Coding for HTML standards

Four words: I hate Internet Explorer

I spent more time that I should have trying to code around the deficiencies in IE today, just to stop the IE users from doing direct linking to one of my site pages. $ENV{‘HTTP_REFERER’} isn’t sent or supported in IE, so that stopped that,
which also stopped me from using SetEnvIf and friends.

I found this article on Microsoft’s site which states:

“…When linking from one document to another in Internet Explorer 4.0, the HTTP Referer header will not be sent when the referer is a non-HTTP(S) page. The Referer header will also not be sent when linking from an HTTPS page to a non-HTTPS page…”

So I had to use… wait for it… cookies! Bleah!

So now I’ve put it on my long-term plate to write a whitepaper detailing how Internet Explorer is simply a file manager which can (poorly) render HTML content. (I have another one called “Bill Gates Has a God Complex”, but I’ll save the synopsis on that for later) IT IS NOT A BROWSER. It doesn’t support MIME types, doesn’t send proper (or complete) headers, and about 23 other deficiencies. It even fails getting to a site like: http://www.domain.com/foo where ‘foo’ is a directory. You actually have to append the trailing backslash onto it, for it to work because it thinks ‘foo’ is a file that it wants to load in some local application binding (probably MSWord or some other locally installed application), and not send you that dreaded internal “Page could not be loaded” error.

When you lock up the browser itself (which is quite often), you can kill it from the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del), but then your entire desktop reloads, oh, but minus everything that’s a global in the SysTray. How thoughtful of them.

Such an utter piece of trash.

Nailed down a few more bugs, and learned more than I should have about cookies, and how to get them working in both IE and normal browsers (which of course, aren’t the same)

if ($ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /MSIE/) {
        do something completely non-standard;
        check that it actually did what you expected;
        check it again, just to make sure it didn't change;
        print "Please use a web browser, not a file
manager";  
} elsif ($ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /any other browser in
the world/ {
        follow the normal procedures;
        return;
}

Advogato Deficiency?

Why can’t I change my password here on Advogato? There’s no option under /acct to change it. It was that time of the month again, to change my passwords, and I found I couldn’t change it here. Hrmph!

Scope Creep

When deadlines aren’t allowed to slip, why are requirements allowed to be constantly changing, and new things allowed to be added? I’m not going to sit here and work 20+ hours a day (12 of which are unpaid, of course), and then have to begin scheduling my own mealtimes and bathroom breaks, just so I can meet this impossible deadline.

I’m not.

I’m tired.

No time for anything anymore. Why did I move here again?

Wireless Fun

In other news, I managed to get my wireless gateway to do dial-on-demand to my ISP, and handle DHCP and NAT for my internal wired and wireless machines. Pretty slick and fast. No more cables. Locked down tighter than a drum (not that anyone within a 2-mile radius would even know how to hijack an IP, let alone speak my native language here).

Now if I could only get my hands on some telemetric power units…

LWN Errors

http://lwn.net/2001/0607/desktop.php3

“…The bad news overall is that pilot-link may or may not be supported any further. While gnome-pilot seems to use an upgraded version, there doesn’t seem to be a web site anywhere with updated information on the status of the package and the pilot-unix mailing list is apparently dead.

The last word from David Desrosiers, the most recent Pilot Link maintainer, was that Pilot Link was being rewritten to clean up lots of old cruft in the source and provide a cleaner distribution. Note that the SourceForge site for pilot-link is ancient – the project was moved away from there some time back and the new web site is simply a CVS dump of file activity…”

Michael, please make the necessary corrections I’ve emailed you, before too many people see that and get discouraged from a very active open source project.

Wed Jun 6 01:30:10 PDT 2001

oops!, that could have been ugly right before a release. Thanks n9mtb for spotting it so quickly and to my 120+ wpm fingers for being able to patch the roughly 113 files required to fix it within the hour.

irc is such a great collaborative tool, I wish more people would embrace it.

Tue Jun 5 00:04:57 PDT 2001

perl -MTELEGRAM::Start -e `advogato`

Plate still overfull. stop

Learning XML, protocol stacking, IrOBEX. stop

Reverse-engineering != fun. stop

Authoring the Embedded Linux Course. stop

No time left for other things. stop