Rage against the IE 6

I recently started on this project to develop a site for the Electrical Engineering Society of the university. And all was going well, I tested the site out on Firefox, and it looked cool. But when I tried it out on Internet Explorer, it looked pretty half baked. The reason? I used purely standards compliant design with no tables and only the box model of CSS. It seems that IE has a lot of issues with the box model and many other standards compliant techniques. Now this was driving me up the wall because many users at the campus use IE because it is the default browser on Windows operating system. So I had to rethink the design to suit IE. This is not the only bug that IE6 has. Here is a list of them,

• The Box Model bug
• The Double Margin Bug
• No Min Widths / Min Height
• Stepdown bug (Normally when floating objects you can count on them lining up vertically until they break. That is, you could if you weren’t using IE 6. IE 6 appends a line break effect after each floated block element which will cause “stepdown”.)
• No Hover States (Most modern browsers support hover states on just about any element, but not IE 6. IE 6 only support the hover pseudo-class on anchor <a> elements,)
• No Alpha Transparent PNG Support
• And the list goes on and on and on…

This takes me to the point I am trying to make. We as web designers spend loads of time thinking and rethinking the look of a site, only to find that the site looks like crap on this horrible excuse for a browser known as IE 6 (Sorry about the language, it is just my anger talking!). I know all the web designers agree with me on this one.The time spent on hacks and workarounds for IE6 is time that should be spent on more useful things like improving the design and functionality of the site.

So if you are with me on this, All I am asking is to protest this monopoly of the IE 6 by switching over to a better browser such as Firefox, Opera or even IE7.

And for you webmasters out there who just want to voice your protest, just add the following code to your site with jquery to make your site look washed out on IE6. A neat little kick in the face of IE6 

/*
 *
 * Black'n'White plugin 1.0
 * $Date: 2008-06-17 15:38:15 +0200 (mar, 17 giu 2008) $
 * $Rev: 177 $
 * @requires jQuery v1.2.6
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2008 Massimiliano Balestrieri
 * Examples and docs at: http://maxb.net/blog/
 * Licensed GPL licenses:
 * http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
 *
 */ 

if(!window.BlacknWhite)
    var BlacknWhite = {}; 

BlacknWhite = {
    init     : function(options)
    {
        options = jQuery.extend({minor : 7}, options); 

           if(jQuery.browser.msie && jQuery.browser.version < options.minor)
            jQuery("html").css("filter","gray");
    }
}; 

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    BlacknWhite.init();
    //BlacknWhite.init({minor : 8}); 
}); 

The PC became Personal on that day

I saw this ancient video in the archives of youtube today. The year is 1984,  my birthyear… and it is in January of 1984 that the personal computer was born! This is Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the launch of Apple Macintosh.

Wayback machine

There are search engines and then there are search engines. This search engine I am talking about is gonna knock your socks off! So keep reading. This is definitely one you’d wanna bookmark!

Imagine Google could time travel!  Pretty neat huh. That’s exactly what this search engine does. It gives you your search hits in chronological order. Just for fun, say you typed “www.google.com” in their search box. It will give you a list of results for the Google homepage in 1998,1999,2000… up to the present. Pretty cool huh? This is great for historians and web developers to see the evolution of the web in a whole new way. Also if you forgot to backup your site and the web host went down with your site. This is a great way for you to get your lost site back.It is all in the “Wayback machine”!

Looking at the look and feel of some of the old sites. You can’t keep from smiling at the primitiveness. But in those days, these sites were top notch. The best sites on the net.

Here are some well known sites with their past selves,

• Google.com [1998]>>

• Yahoo.com [1998]>>

• Sourceforge.org [2000]  >>

Additionally, the site is an online museum dedicated to all things wayback. You can get rare images, videos, audio etc.. All from this great site. So here is the site,

http://www.archive.org/

Fox the third is here

Well it is finally here. Firefox 3 with all its glory. Who needs Microsoft when you have kickass products like these. Thankz to Mozilla and the open source community! Firefox 3 is well worth the hype.

For me, Firefox is not only a browser, it is a success story that has proven for once and for all that Open source is the way of the future. Coming to the scene at a time when Microsoft had battered down the competition it had in Netscape, Firefox was the saviour of the internet for most of the commoners like us. Ever wonder what the internet would be like if only IE 6 was there? Ugh… I can’t even bear to think! Anyways, that is history… and Firefox my friends, is the future!

The browser has smashed its target of five million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, acheiving a final tally of 8,290,545 downloads of the new browser, and reaching a market share that peaked at over six percent.

Mozilla was aiming to set a Guinness world record for the total number of downloads of a piece of software in a 24-hour period. As part of its marketing effort, it encouraged users to pledge to download Firefox 3 on its release, and to hold download parties.

Online metrics company Net Applications said market share of Firefox 3 peaked at 6.2 percent of all browser usage at 5am EDT on 19 June — less than 48 hours after release.

Just under 300,000 of the downloads in the first 24 hours came from the UK, with the vast majority — 6.5 million — from the US.

Did you miss out on the download day? See what happened here

MDK, you don’t have to understand it to love it!

When I was at school in my  year 12 class I think, my friend Gayan gave me a game called MDK. It was on CD (this was back when games came on CD) and I went home and promptly installed it. Wow! I was quckly in love with the awesome graphics of that game. You must understand that this was back in 1999 or so: back then, the best looking game I had played was Delta force 1! So this was a game that I remembered clearly and cinematically in my head. I dont know if you will like it. But I sure did.

In MDK the players take on the role of Kurt Hectic, an unfortunate young man who’s been temporarily stuck in space with Dr. Fluke Hawkins. Hawkins and Kurt had originally gone into space to discover Flange Orbits, but, when that didn’t pan out, the doctor decided to stay and conduct other research. As the doctor didn’t bother to invent a way to get back to Earth, Kurt is stuck with him.

To relieve the boredom the Doc creates Bones, a six-legged dog who’s supposed to help out with the chores. Bones–who calls himself Max–is pretty smart though, and soon he’s helping the doctor conduct research (and fix the coffee machine). Fluke and Max discover that aliens are about to invade Earth, and when their warnings to NASA go unheeded, that’s exactly what happens. Naturally someone has to go down and get rid of the aliens–who are systematically strip mining Earth’s cities–and Kurt seems like the logical choice (plus it will give him something to do).

The doctor creates a “coil” suit for Kurt to give him some protection against the enemy, and it also contains a parachute that will let Kurt glide from heights (and get him down to Earth). His main armament is a chain gun with unlimited rounds that can also attach to his facemask to create a sniper gun. Periodically Max and the doctor will also be sending down some power-ups, like hand grenades, homing bullets, inflatable decoys and the like. Kurt’s job is, of course, to infiltrate and destroy the enemy minecrawlers that are headed for some of Earth’s not-so-major cities (such as Kircaldy, Scotland, and Sparrow Pit, England, to name two).

Despite its elaborate sounding plot–which is entirely contrived and almost incidental to play–MDK is a fairly straightforward game. All of the action takes place in a third-person perspective a la Tomb Raider, where players “see” from a position just behind and slightly above Kurt. Players control Kurt’s movement through simple keyboard commands or via a joystick, and while at first it seems like there is a lot to learn–parachuting, side-stepping, sniping, etc.–the controls actually take little time to master.

The complexity is left to the game itself, which has beautiful 3-D graphics, outstanding sound effects and increasingly intricate levels of play. But the odd thing is that none of these elements, even though they are all executed wonderfully, seem to actually go together. For instance, half of the robot enemies seem deadly serious and just plain, well, deadly, while the other half taunt Kurt with obscene-sounding (though ultimately unintelligible) shouts and weird little dances. And aside from standard power-ups like grenades and mortars, there are also things like the “World’s Smallest Nuclear Explosion” and a decoy made up of a balloon on wheels with Kurt’s picture painted on it. The game’s juvenile attitude, while amusing, doesn’t seem to have rhyme or reason.

Of course, when a game is as flat-out fun to play as MDK is, it really doesn’t need a reason. And the bizarre twists that pop up, such as the snowboarding sections played to a James Bond theme, keep things fresh and interesting. And there’s no question that everything players see, hear and do, while nonsensical, is breathtakingly beautiful, making for a game that’s like none other, and that’s definitely worth playing. I don’t know if the game is still available for download, but I hope a sequel will come up sometime.