SeeMySites Blog

I think it’s about time that I wrote this one down. Perhaps if I got it out of my system I would feel better, but I doubt it. As I am trying to come up with a new design for TuneSmith Central, I am butting my head up against some rather stupid problems in Internet Explorer. I personally call IE the whore of all the earth, though one of my associates likes to call it “Internet Exploder.” Both are rather accurate. Honestly, the only browser that is worse than IE which I have personally come across is Konqueror (a Linux browser that seems to be dropping out in favor of Firefox). Even Safari is better than IE in almost every respect except for dynamic editable HTML content - which has been fixed in the lastest version of the code. IE’s JavaScript interpretation, JScript, still is not standards compliant after all these years. I even came across a bug a couple of days ago for using innerHTML on a select to add options - after searching around on the ‘Net, I found out that this bug has been there since version 5 - almost 10 years and Microsoft has never fixed it. Worse, they’ve known about it for almost as long as the bug has been around. CSS support is better with version 7 than in previous versions, but there are still too many bugs. I can get my designs to look great in Firefox, Opera, and Safari with little coding effort - with IE it is almost always laborious to make things look right. There is almost always a small, non-obvious bug that totally trashes a certain aspect of the layout. I pray for the day when M$ is no longer a monopoly. It took the emergence of Firefox for them to start fixing Internet Exploder, but they still have a long way to go.

I figured I would air my opinion of this horrible tragedy that has recently happened to those at VA Tech. First of all, I think the criticism for waiting a “whole two hours” before releasing the information is insane. Two hours is not that long - really. The second I think is more important. Of course people are going to push for more gun control, which is the exact opposite of the real solution to this problem. Think of if at least some of these law abiding students or faculty had a firearm and a good aim. The murderer could have been picked off long before he got to 30 people. The gun haters just don’t get that guns are not going to away no matter how much we try to legislate it. Even if guns were not available, people can still go on these rampages with knives or home made bombs. Most intelligent people know how easy it is to make a bomb. The real solution here is for the law abiding people to be able to defend themselves as much as feasible - not to make us sitting ducks which is what seems to have happened at VA tech. Start thinking about reality people, instead of going into your own little hypothetical worlds where everything operates how you think it should be. I seriously think that most of the people need to live with someone like the shooter. They would realize real quick that the gun is not the problem, the person is the problem. The person is going to find a way to hurt others - the means by which he/she hurts others is simply a detail.

As mentioned previously, I have had some serious problems with my Apple Macbook Pro battery. I have finally come to the conclusion, though it took me a while to get it replaced. There is a local store called MacDoc’s, which is located in Salt Lake City. I first took it into there yesterday, where there was a fairly “green” looking representative and another. The green one was the one helping me, though he got all of the answers to my questions from the other. What they basically told me was this: that I would have to leave my laptop there until they had the time to look at it, which was probably going to be around two days. Then, it was going to be an additional four days (or more) while they ordered the new battery after they looked at it. I was incensed, not only at the amount of time that it was going to take, but also at the fact that they refused to let me keep my laptop for the two days that it was going to just sit on their shelves anyway. I hate it when people use the phrase “I understand” without taking at least a minute to truly understand. I have to have my laptop for work, as it has my entire production environment loaded (Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails, along with all my development apps), and I really cannot wait a week or two for them to get around to replacing a defective battery. When I asked them if there were any other options, they asked me: “Did you purchase it from this store?” I told them no - that I had ordered it online. With that information, they said, sorry, there was nothing else they could do except purchase a new battery. So I left - saying a curt “thank you” as I did so - and vowed that I would never purchase anything from them again.
Next came the call to Apple’s support line. (more…)

I short while ago, I had downloaded coconutBattery to track the battery’s life in my Macbook Pro. I had read two things from Apple’s site and various other sites: that keeping your Macbook plugged in all the time is hard on your battery, and that regularly running the battery down to nothing (once a month) and then letting it “rest” was good for enhancing battery performance. I don’t know how others are faring with these instructions, but now that I have a way of measuring them I am starting to take issue with these instructions.

I installed CB on the 15th. At the time my capacity was 4907 mAh out of 5500, a percentage of 89%. (more…)