The second beta (and first public one) of Internet Explorer was released today. Much to my surprise, I’m actually liking it.
The section categories and dates are a bit too far to the right, but the position: fixed stuff works. Not that there are any PNGs here, but it also handles 8-bit transparancy on PNGs properly, though like just about every other browser color correction and gamma correction don’t work.
Microsoft have finally released .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Also available are the Express editions, which will remain free to download until November 6, 2006. The free editions are pretty nice, but the lack of any extensibility outside of an external tools menu is disappointing. I can undestand why Microsoft wouldn’t want people to create addons for a free product, but it still would have been nice to use IronPython to create a Mercurial plugin.
Here’s my first take on a stylesheet to make the site slightly less ugly. It looks pretty good in Mozilla Firefox. There are a few oddities in Internet Explorer, but I don’t really feel that compelled to fix them with version 7 due RSN. Since I haven’t bothered to install Opera yet, I don’t know how it looks there.
I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and it was rather disappointing overall. I prefer Wilder’s Willy Wonka from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to Depp’s dolting one. I didn’t care much for the new
songs either—they seemed unsynced (with the Oompa Loompa’s lip movements) and felt over-produced.
I give it 2 out of 5 arbitrary units.
When the various guides to slipstreaming suggest burning to a CD-RW while testing the images, their advice should be heeded. I went through fifteen discs trying to produce one that actually worked. I did this because I wanted to change Documents and Settings
to Users
and Program Files
to Programs
—some software still don’t handle paths with spaces very gracefully.
During testing, the floppy I had been using to install the SATA drivers for my motherboard finally became unreadable enough to force me to add SATA drivers to the mix. This was perhaps one of the biggest generators of coasters. In the end, I managed to generate a usable disc using GreenMarine’s SATA/RAID driver guide.
I put a copy of the winnt.sif
I used in my files folder. MSFN’s Unattended XP CD was helpful in creating it.
After tiring of sites using cookies to open popups, I wrote a plugin for Epiphany to expose its (and Mozilla’s) ability to more finely control which sites are allowed to open popups. What it does is to add an Allow Cookies
item to the edit menu, which is checked when a site may set cookies and unchecked when it may not. Its biggest limitation is that it doesn’t expose a way of manipulating third-party cookies.
CookiePerms, my extension, requires Epiphany 1.6 with the Pyphany extension. It should work with Epiphany 1.7, which includes Pyphany, but I haven’t tried it to find out. It also requires PyGTK, but so does Pyphany.
CookiePerms may be installed by copying the contents of the CookiePerms
directory in the tarball to your Epiphany extensions directory.
I saw Revenge of the Sith tonight. While it wasn’t as bad as The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, it still lacked the chemistry between characters that the others had. The action sequences were entertaining, but I didn’t care much for the lightsaber duels.
I give it 3 out of 5 arbitrary units.
For the amusement of the only person who reads this anyway, I redesigned this site to use only one blog instead of three. Having separate project pages seemed like a neat concept, but it turned out to be more of a nuisance to maintain than anything.
Now that I have the structure of the markup the way I like it (more or less), I can put back some of the old stuff I had before. I’ll probably put Ej back up, and I have a rewrite of PassGen that I did in Python. The old, Java version proved to be somewhat limited because too many sites seem to disallow usefully long passwords. Now it can do login passwords and add some random characters between words as well. Hoo-ray.