janos erdelyi

scenario: when booting up my wife’s computer, i kept seeing a notice that the Cool‘n‘Quiet hooks just weren’t there. so i decided it was time to update her BIOS. this is not something i do alot. mostly because once you screw the pooch on it, it’s really not good.

so i got everything downloaded and copied to disc, and got things rolling. ok, fine, here we are with the option to flash the BIOS. it’s what i was here for, so i got it started. everything was going – the blocks were filling up… then RED BLOCK RED BLOCK RED BLOCK, etc. CRAP. it’s not like shutting down will help. it’s a bad flash. the computer is dead, the wife is not happy, etc.

i replaced her system that day and had her back up and running (anything important is backed up daily), so that was resolved, but i had a dead computer here. not a beast of a system, but a respectable socket 939 with an Athlon 64 3500+ – it’s a decent system. It’s also a bummer – especially when it’s just sitting around like a lump with only one bad BIOS chip in it.

for those who care, it appears that you can now have a seamless Adobe AIR experience on linux now.

i installed the framework on my Fedora 10×86_64 machine without any problem, and then proceeded to use badges to install a few things, like the ebay desktop and the HCA Career Desktop – all flawless. good work, Adobe.

i did try things like the Adobe Media Player, but that was not supported – likely due to media protection (DRM) which is expected.

i’m going to keep this short and sweet. i don’t use IE7 for any sort of surfing, but i do use it for testing when i’m building out sites or web-based applications. some of my testing is on non-standard ports, but it’s still web development.

so here’s my gripe: if i do not enter in the protocol explicitly (“http://” in this case) for some url using a nonstandard port – for example “dev.someplace.com:7890“, IE7 will tell me “The webpage cannot be displayed“. So it’s admitting that it might think it’s a webpage, or at least that in some sense that it should make some default assumption that it’s a webpage. and i think we can all agree that the origins of Internet Explorer and any common parlance would reasonably say that IE is a “web browser” and that the common protocol of web pages is HTTP… so why doesn’t IE7 assume or at least TRY the url with “http://” in front? gah!

anyone who has had to develop any sort of blog or content management system has encountered the same thing – making text editors for end-users simply sucks.

it’s a massive effort with heaps and heaps of fragile javascript and quite frankly – loads and loads of bullshit. because let’s face it – HTML is simply not hard and it would make the world a far easier place if everyone just got off their asses, took a few minutes to understand some basic structure, and wrote for the web in the language of the web.

but obviously i’m making a futile attempt to live in a dreamworld.

i wrote a brief article about the cost of ie6 support for work.

while i am far more cut-and-dry and out to kill ie6 in my personal work, things aren’t so clear with my professional life.

so here it is.

i’ve never been a fan of ‘friendly’ error messages. they have 2 major faults –

for a while i had been having rather hideous grey-paned freeze times with Firefox 3 on linux. this was pretty distressful for me, not only because i really like FF, but because while opera is a very good browser, those Java-looking menus it uses are a real deal breaker. i can’t stand them.

after much poking around in about:config and coming up empty, a friend who was having the same problem on his Mac gave me a suggestion – remove any/all add-on’s which came along for the ride from FF2 and add them back in.

bingo! i didn’t end up adding them ALL back in, but FF3 is screaming along now.

a friend and coworker told me yesterday that webmonkey was back. it’s been many years since i’ve been there.

i’m going to check it out. i hope it’s good!

i’ve never been a real big fan of the “social media revolution” or whatever anyone wants to call it. but i’m a misanthropic grump and i rarely see much value in chit-chat so i chalked it up to just me being me. but i’ve gotten to a point where i’m pretty sure it’s not just me.

let’s be very clear – just because you‘re talking it does not mean that you have anything to say.

also, the glorious leveling effect of the internet is also a double-edged sword. open access for all is great – but really leveling everything? not so great. would you want to be trapped in a room with millions of idiots? sure it’s great that everyone in the world goes about doing their own thing, but i don’t necessarily wish to bear any witness to it, because let’s face it, we are not all equal and some people are just plain stupid.

an article over at gizmodo struck a nerve with me. the title says it all – “On Assholes Tracking Steve Job’s Health“.

earlier this week i saw a very brief posting which basically sucked up Apple’s PR response and took it without challenge. in fact, it might as well have been Apple’s site i was was reading.

so back to the article – i’m an asshole for noticing apparently. Brian Lam, you‘re the asshole. get over it. your hero is sick. i feel for the guy. i think he’s such a marketer that he’s crossed the line into being a lying sack of crap many times, but i hate to see such a visionary get worked over by something like cancer. it’s not cool for anyone. BUT! it is real news.