afongen

One: Rob Flickenger’s comments about installing IE 5.2 for Mac OS X have convinced me not to bother with the upgrade. I’ll stick with Mozilla, Chimera, and maybe give OmniWeb another shot. In the occasional instance where I need to use a site that refuses access to Mozilla, I’ll use IE 5.1. Then fire off an email to the webmaster of the offending site.

Two: Digest authentication in Mozilla has been giving me a headache. It seems to work just fine for GET requests, but Mozilla asks me to re-enter my credentials for every POST. That gets to be damn annoying. Maybe I’m missing something in the preferences somewhere, but as a user I expect the browser to act like it does with Basic Authentication: remember my username and password throughout the session. Not sure what’s going on here, have to do some digging through Bugzilla and maybe set up some tests so I can observe the transaction. Perhaps it’s a server setup thing.

Exams are over and Mr. Paul Sowden has reared his head again, although I suppose he was never too far gone. Then again, one can become lost in exams. Anyway. I look forward to seeing what he will do with his site this time ’round. He’s already doing something rather interesting, serving up both HTML and XHTML versions. Take a peek under the hood.

And yes! he has started using GPG. Another convert to the wonders of strong encryption.

The OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and Web Services has been released. Version 1.0 is downloadable from the OWASP home page. At this point it is a rather large PDF.

A coworker sent me a link to John Dvorak’s recent Apple-bashing. No, scratch that, this has gone beyond Apple-bashing to attacking the people in Apple’s “switch” campaign. For their appearance. Give me a frelling break. Thing is, the coworker who sent this did so because he agrees with Dvorak’s sentiment.

This is the same guy who regularly quips, “Simple computers for simple minds,” as if making a computer easy to use is a bad thing.

Sigh.

Whatever. I’ve been wondering how to respond appropriately, because I don’t really want to rise to the bait, but this “article” is such a worthless piece of tripe that I can’t let it pass. Fortunately, Crazy Apple Rumors has the perfect response: Dvorak Implodes From Unintentional Irony.

Anyway, here’s the thing. I am sick to death of mindless bashing of fill-in-the-blank. Not criticism, but attacks without substance. In the circles I run in, usually Microsoft is the one being attacked. I’ll gladly be among the first to criticize them for the failings in their technology or business practices, but I will not run screaming from All Things Microsoft because they’re from the devil. Sheesh, people, get a grip. Face it, they write some good software. Sure, it could often be improved (what can’t?) and made more secure (what can’t?). So take them to task for that. Not because they are Evil Incarnate.

Similarly, if you have problems with Apple because you don’t like the Mac, come up with some decent reasons. And in my book, “I don’t like how it looks” is a valid reason. As is “I don’t think that computers should be easy to use.” Good for you. Fine. Whatever. I do have some problems with “I haven’t used Macs in years and have certainly never used OS X, but I didn’t much care for the user interface or instability of the MacOS back then so I’m gonna complain as if Apple were still mired in those dark days.” That’s no more valid than my complaining about Windows 2000 Professional because Windows 95 was buggy, unstable, insecure, and a pain in the ass (although a huge improvement over 3.1). Go try OS X on a new Mac and then come talk to me. We’ll probably share some complaints.

And if you’re, say, a tech columnist or contributing editor of a leading computer magazine, you should be able to come up with something better than bashing geeky-looking users.

Some of those people, by the way, have put together a little weblog tracking their switch. I have learned much, including that it’s possible to get Ximian Evolution working on OS X.

VerisignOff.

“The goal of VerisignOff is to help people understand that there are alternatives to Verisign/Network Solutions and that by patronizing these registrars, we help send an important message; consumers expect the companies that they patronize to treat them ethically and respectfully.”

An article in the New York Times about cartoonists’ weblogs (mentioning my favorite comic strip, The Norm). It’s interesting to see more and more articles mention weblogs without defining what the word means. (Never mind the ongoing and often pointless debate about how to define weblogs.) Not quite as interesting, though, as seeing how these artists use their comics’ weblogs. And comments like this:

“People somehow do not seem to comprehend that some marginal level of competency as a writer is necessary to the creation of my cartoon. When they see my words without graphics, they are frequently surprised that I am able to form a coherent sentence.”

The past couple days there’s been a thread on the TCPHP mailing list about text editors. Thankfully the discussion steered clear of zealotry. Started out as a discussion of Komodo, which is quite nice but slow and bloated-feeling. I was first excited about Komodo because it was one of the first Mozilla-based products I’d seen. I even bought a license when they started charging.

I have come to realize that, as Matt Sergeant writes, “I change my text editor like I change my pants.” Religious wars about text editors are even more pointless than religious wars about operating systems. I use whatever seems the most appropriate tool at the time.

S: This car really needs a pterodactyl proximity alert system.

K: What? How about this? (opens moon roof)

S: No, with this visor down to block the sun, I can see the cars in front of us just fine, but…

K: But if a pterodactyl were to come at us from head on…

S: Yeah.

K: …you couldn’t see it until it was too late.

S: Yeah! Exactly!

K: (laughs) You and I live in different worlds.

S: What, you don’t think a pterodactyl is likely to attack?

K: No, it’s just that the visor doesn’t block my field of vision.

S:

S: (finally dawns on him that he’s a foot taller than K and so sees the world very differently). Oh.

mod_survey, an Apache module that creates web-based surveys/questionnaires that are built using an XML notation. Cool. It wouldn’t be that hard to write something that created the XML source files, thus making the whole thing web-based.

PHPGeek: Setting up Apache 2 with PHP on Windows. Also worth a look-see at the documentation on the Apache site.

And dangit, once again I missed the Twin Cities PHP Users Group meeting. That’s — what? — 6 or 8 times in a row now? I start the day with every intention of attending, then completely forget by day’s end. Aargh! OK Sam, repeat after me… July 10, July 10, July 10…