Posts filed under 'Web'
If you’re one of the few poor (thousands, worldwide) users, you will be pretty surprised and upset once you find out why your downloads suddenly don’t work in your shiny new FF3 installation.
So what happened?
The FF developers decided that their Windows Application should respect the OS security settings. In my case, I use IE only for Windows Update, thus I put the update service from microsoft into the trusted zone and set the default seurity zone settings to high. I just don’t trust IE at all.
Why did this work the years before? Because I used FF for downloading everything else and until now FF didn’t respect this setting, which was a great life safer for me.
To make things worst I haven’t yet figured out a way to disable this behaviour in FF3, which means I’ve to suddenly lift the security settings for the complete system! As you guessed I’m pretty pissed about this.
Update: filed a bug report, excited to see what happens to it.
Update 2: Report closed within hours as Wontfix because it’s a deliberate change.
Update 3: My report has been marked as duplicate in favor of bug 445158 (which contains more information and, interestingly, has been opened by someone with an mozilla.com email address. Does that weight more then my request?)
Update 4: First comment on the report from another pissed user. I couldn’t say it in better words.
July 13th, 2008
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve certainly noticed the growing number of prototypes of casual games implemented in browsers using their latest canvas and related technologies.
Actually, this is the kind of start of revolution you’ve been seeing in every computer generation at the beginning, this is just a repeating pattern. Just remember how the PC started around 1992/1993 with their first 3D games and mobile phones started a few years ago, too.
How long will it take until we’ve something like ScummVM ported to a browser? Or Another World? Or think about the Sierra Classics.
May 24th, 2008
Take this example screenshot I made on my system (warning: resolution is 2880×900):
Side by side: Left: Internet Explorer with ads, right: Firefox with Adblock
Question: Do you see the difference?
The thing is, at least for me, I know advertisement is a necessary business. But come on, this is way to obtrusive.
October 4th, 2006
Take a quick look at the navigation at webedition.de. The first thing I thought this was a poll. My brain, before I read what is there, signalled me that this was a poll and it wants that I choose one of them. Before I thought a second time I already clicked one of them (interestingly it was “Produkt kaufen”) just to know what happens. After I saw the same poll on the next page again I realized this was the navigation.
Of course I know this is supposed to be the navigation. But neverthless my brain first signalled me that this was a poll, that I need to choose one of them. I consider this pretty bad usability, sacrificed for the design.
May 7th, 2006
Just in case someone needs this. The ISO 8859-15 has been changed from the ISO 8859-1 in the following ways:
|
Code |
Character in ISO 8859-1 |
Character in ISO 8859-15 |
| xA4 |
General Currency Sign |
Euro Symbol |
| xA6 |
Broken Bar |
Latin Capital Letter S with Caron |
| xA8 |
Dieresis |
Latin Small Letter s with Caron |
| xB4 |
Acute |
Latin Capital Letter Z with Caron |
| xB8 |
Cedilla |
Latin Small Letter z with Caron |
| xBC |
Fraction 1/4 |
Latin Capital Ligature OE |
| xBD |
Fraction 1/2 |
Latin Small Ligature oe |
| xBE |
Fraction 3/4 |
Latin Capital Letter Y with Dieresis |
Summary has been found on jef’s Europage.
December 1st, 2005
Now with the move in of the canvas element in browsers and the first prototypes of even 3D FPS games popping up, how long will it take until someone ports the classic games/engines like ScummVM to a browser near you? Will we see a new generation of web games which don’t require any browser-plugin?
Flash in terms of graphical capabilities is lightyears away from what browsers can do in certain places, but why is it still that I hate flash and would love direct support in the browser instead? Maybe it’s the infection of ads coming from flash. Or that it is a closed binary format (maybe this is not true anymore, someone correct me). Or is it that it’s development environment is not open source and you basically depend on it?
On the other hand, wouldn’t it make much more sense to use SVG for games? The canvas element is bitmapped, thus it has a fixed size in pixels which isn’t very adequat for multi-resolution clients like the users desktop. SVG would fit better because it can scale.
It’s very exciting to whatch the current evolution of browsers, not only in terms of game capability, but also Ajax and stuff. The paradigm is shifting, and it’s shifting fast.
November 28th, 2005
I want to use a self-signed CA for testing purposes. I’ve therefore created a CA certificate and a client cert. The problem I’m having is that, for some reason, the client key and cert moduli do not match.
I’m using these commands to create the CA:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024
openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
then I used these commands to create the client key/cert:
openssl genrsa -out client.key 1024
openssl req -new -key ca.key -in client.key -out client.csr
sh sign.sh client.csr
The sign.sh script is part of the libapache-mod-ssl package in Debian sarge.
At this point I end up with a client.crt.
When I now compare the modulus of the key and the crt file, they differ and I get the following error in apache:
OpenSSL: error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch
In fact I discovered that the modulus in the csr already differs.
$ openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in client.key
Modulus=BF30F9CAA7C092CE...
$ openssl req -noout -modulus -in client.csr
Modulus=BF4E6276BF5CDFC7...
I actually was using these steps a year ago in another environment and it worked.
The openssl version I’m using is OpenSSL 0.9.7e 25 Oct 2004.
Any ideas?
November 23rd, 2005
A new memo from M$ which also states to take Ajax seriously is interesting. Why is it interesting? As noted in this article, Ajax is only possible because of the browser providing the XmlHttpRequest object. Which M$ invented. In 1998. That is seven years ago.
So, again: this technology, invented by M$, seven years ago, available in a browser with a market share above 80%, did not lift off … until other browser vendors, most notable probably Mozilla but also Opera and Safari, provided it.
Conclusion? Take your own mind.
But don’t fly too high: people on one side create technologies which doesn’t lift off until the people on the other side see a practical use-case for it. Lucky that finally the time has come.
November 19th, 2005
I really think the time is right to ask this question. Now that Ajax-Applications/Frameworks are poping up around every corner, when will we see large community applications like phpMyAdmin to support Ajax?
I think there will be a small problem faced: data read from the database can be quite large. Currently, browsers (at least Firefox) can incrementially display data as it arrives over the wire. Can this problem be solved with Ajax? Maybe with splitting one large Ajax requests into smaller ones. Time will tell.
November 4th, 2005
This is the story of how I discovered the wmlbrowser extension.
It’s purpose is to render WML in Firefox. Today I tested one of our sector-specific search engines in WML. I was prompted with a nice basic view of my WML content, forms and links, everything works.
But only after a few hours I discovered that I had installed the wmlbrowser extension. I actually installed it months ago just for fun but never used it. It worked so seemlessly that I thought the ability to render WML pages was part of Firefox. Now this is what I call a great product.
October 27th, 2005
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