I am sure you all know about Mictosoft’s IE9 Testdrive. Its main target was, for now, the developer – in an attempt to showcase the improvements in IE9 and maybe make us be more nice to them and forget how much time we waste with IE6.

What I was interested as a frontend developer was the the compatibility tables for features like SVG, CSS3 and DOM. And the test results, as per Microsoft’s page, are all gorgeous.

A more detailed list of supported features can be seen by checking their website but long story short, everything is green for them and not so green for the other browsers, except CSS3 :nth-child selector and CSS comments

and DOM level 2 style @import inside of @media

Another very interesting source of information regarding the present and future features supported by the browsers is When can I use… that also includes HTML5 elements – I notice IE9 testdrive page is not mentioning anything about HTML5 altough IE9 is expecting to support it in a certain percentage. They have also calculated the support that past and future browsers have for some features and their numbers are like this:

But you’d better check their website to see the features they worked with cause there are some differences that worth being taking into account.

We salute Microsofts initiative, altough we would love to see some of these CSS3 borders, backgrounds and selectors embedded in an IE8 update…cause we all check our statistics….

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Today ICANN approved the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process which means we soon will see Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters. That is a fair thing to do since maybe half of the world population is not writing with latin characters.

The process will begin on November 16th and will allow nations to apply for Internet address names that reflect their name in their own language.  Of course all these names will be evaluated and will take forever to be approved but at least the first step is made and the future will bring a lot of diversity in the domain-names’ world.

More news about the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process can be found here.

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There’s no reason for our Google Maps to look ugly because of  the icons Google used to offer. Now have become available a huge number of icons offered by Nico Mollet under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. The cherry on the cake is that they give away everything related to these icons so everybody can develop their own icons based on the original Photoshop files.

The Google Map icons set now includes:

1. Grocery
2. water sports
3. winter
4. Administration, Office & Industry
5. Culture & Entertainment
6. Education & Kids
7. Events & Weather
8. Friends, Family & Real Estate
9. Media
10. Miscellaneous
11. Restaurants & Hotels
12. Sports, Health & Beauty
13. Stores
14. Tourism & Nature
15. Transportation

As far as I see they intend to continue developing icons so the future looks bright for our Google Maps.

Related posts:

1. 3 free icons sets – webiconset.com

Today was a great day for Microsoft…or not.  The company finally reached a deal with the European Commision in the never ending fight concerning Microsoft attempts to impose IE as a unique browser for Windows and not willing to help the developers build compatible software with MS products. The measures that Microsoft will take are (quoting their press release):

• ensures that PC manufacturers will continue to be able to install any browser on top of Windows and make any browser the default
• PC manufacturers and users will be able to turn Internet Explorer on and off
• for the next five years in Europe, PC users who are running Internet Explorer as their default browser will receive a ballot screen that will enable them to easily download and install another browser if they would like
• PC users can make any other browser the default if they prefer. They can even turn Internet Explorer off, although there’s no need to turn off Internet Explorer in order to use a different browser or make another browser the default.
• developers throughout the industry, including in the open source community, will have access to technical documentation to assist them in building products that work well with Microsoft products
• Microsoft will also be required to support certain industry standards in its products and to fully document how these standards are supported. Microsoft’s proposed undertaking will make available legally-binding warranties that would be offered to third parties.

You can read the full press release here.

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Ok, we all know now Google Frame. What is it ?

It’s a plugin for IE that  creates a frame inside and uses Webkit as renderer & javascript engine. All great because it allows you (the IE user) to see all the fancy new stuff like canvas, HTML5, SVG( maybe?).

But why?

I mean why would I take the overhead and want to use some sort of webkit disguised in IE, when I can have  the real Chrome on my computer?

I believe is just a manner of saying “because we can”, because in the real world we won’t be able to use this in a productive manner.

IE is (sadly) still used in a very big percentage, meaning the final users don’t care, or don’t know or don’t want to use another browser. Most of the time all the news and efforts to popularize a better browser are done in a restricted “geeky” circle. How many computer users know about Chrome? or about Firefox? How many of them care about which browser helps them find information?

How  about corporations? I’m stunned that a big telecommunication company used to register my personal data using IE6 –  come on, they are internet providers, they are a telecommunication company, they don’t sell shoes – and still they don’t give a sh*t.

As developers (web developers) we have all sort of browsers on our machines, to test and make our work cross-browser, but for the others one browser is enough, and guess what : this one is still IE, the old pure IE ( 6 of course ).

So going back to Chrome frame:

-  yes, it’s a nice plugin and in a smart company that does not want to disrupt the employees workflow with learning a new browser this would be a solution, even if implies a lot of work from the network admins –   printing is still not working so this may be an issue.

- yes, it’s a nice tool to allow the latest web technologies work in IE

- yes, it’s a nice idea –  just for the fun of having IE hacked

But regarding the real world with practical and pure pragmatical applications –  I believe it won’t make a difference.

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I know almost every blogger wrote about this subject (lately all complaining about IE6 still being used by common users) – but this time I think we should take all this to the next level and start doing something about it.

I admit I don’t usually have contact with the final clients or have access to their websites stats – working as a freelancer made me lose contact with the real world and soon I started to believe that IE6 is slowly dissapearing. My sites’ stats show that Mozilla “rulz” when it comes to browsers and slowly, over the years, I began hoping that maybe one day I won’t have to code for IE6 anymore. The release of IE8 should have been the final stroke.

I was wrong. On most of the websites I code Internet Explorer is the master and mostly IE6 (I saw IE 5 too). We’re talking about brochure sites for small companies from Western Europe targeting users over 30years. Not IT sites read by coders who probably have all the existent brosers installed on their computers.

So it’s time to do something – we cannot talk to everybody asking to upgrade but we can add some custom message into our code to encourage users to upgrade. It’s safe, it’s free and it’s recommended. Starting from simple messages/ icons in the footer/sidebars of the websites you code to a more “extreme” solution like “IE6 Upgrade Warning Script” asking you to upgrade your browser and choose from IE8, Mozilla, Safari, Opera & Chrome. I think this kind of script scares people but maybe a small percentage will actually click.

I know I did not re-invent the wheel, coders wrote about this a long time ago – but no common user is reading IT blogs or actually talking about browsers at the pub – so I think a lot of messages shot blank by addressing to the wrong users. Asking permission from the final client to use their site help people move on from IE6 towards something better is my idea.

I look forward to reading about yours.

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We made an usability case study for Kroppr.

Read it here.

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We updated our online cropping script Kroppr, to version v1.2

This version fixes some problems for certain servers configuration:

 - servers that do not allow to write the cropped image into the cache folder, due to a server configuration setting,

 - servers with magic_quotes_gpc set to On.

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If you are a web developer you are forced to run multiple operating systems, to check your code and design in as many browsers as possible. Well, the main problem is the IE – as it always do strange things….

This can be done using a virtual machine, or multiple computers. The first case can be done using some software like VMware, VirtualBox os VirtualPC.

The second case is when you have more than one computers.

If you are like me – I have a G4 Mac and an HP – I think the second solution is better as for G4 only VirtualPC works and is in emulated mode, not virtualised, so is way too slow.

Ok, so I setup my G4 in my front and the HP in the left – let’s work. After some time (short time) I managed to mix the 2 mouses, type on the HP keyboard wondering why my mac is not working and so on…not good.

After a small search on the internet a found Synergy 2. ” Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).”

It is cross-platform so it can run on Os X, windows and linux.

You have to setup a server on one computer, a client on the other, or others, and you will be able to use the main’s computer mouse and keyboard on the other one.

For Os X it’s a a little hard to do this as you have to configure a file and run the software form the terminal. In a next post I’ll show how to bring this on your applications folder as any other app, being able to add it to dock or make a link to it on the desktop.

So after I downloaded the software I put it in my application folder, I downloaded the software for windows on my HP and installed it.

The configuration file is pretty simple, the instructions on the site and on the sample config are very clear, the only thing that needs to be said is that in the config file on the hostname for os x you have to add a “.local”, so it looks something like “powerbook.local”

below is my config file:

section: screens
mobilegarth:
powerbook.local:
end
 
section: links
mobilegarth:
right = powerbook.local
powerbook.local:
left  = mobilegarth
end
 
section: aliases
 
end
 
section: options
switchDelay = 350
end

mobilegarth is the HP.

after this you need to start the terminal, and run

/Applications/synergy/synergys --config synergy.conf -f

the “-f” will keep the application in front, so you can see what messages it returns.

All this being set go to windows computer, start the synergy client, put the server name “powerbook” in this case and this should be all.

Moving the mouse on the left side of the screen will trigger the switch and your mouse and keyboard will work on the other computer, until you come back on the right side this time to your main computer.

As I said before in one of the next posts I will show you how to setup a “shortcut” to run this as any other normal application without the need of terminal.

Let me know your thoughts.

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Perl comes from Practical Extraction and Report Language which is quite famous and used by many web application.

A Perl5 database interface to the MySQL database is provided by libdbd perl mysql shared library.

You can install perl support via mod_fastcgi or mod_cgi.

Following are essential steps to run perl based application in chrooted lighttpd setup along with MySQL

This article is part of securing and running Lighttpd in chrooted jail.

Step #1: Enable mod_cgi

# lighty-enable-mod cgiOutput:

Available modules: auth cgi cml fastcgi proxy simple-vhost ssi ssl trigger-b4-dl userdir
Already enabled modules:
Enabling cgi: ok
Run /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload to enable changes

Now modify the file /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf file as per our chrooted jail setup:
# cp /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf /root/
# vi /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf
Modify the file as follows:
server.modules += ( “mod_cgi” )
alias.url += ( “/cgi-bin/” => “/home/lighttpd/cgi-bin/” )
cgi.assign = (
“.pl” => “/usr/bin/perl”,
)

Save and close the file.

Step #2: Prepare the file system for perl

# mkdir /webroot/usr/share -p
# mkdir /webroot/usr/lib -p
# mkdir /webroot/home/lighttpd/cgi-bin/ -p
# chown www-data:www-data /webroot/home/lighttpd/cgi-bin/

Step #3: Put Perl in the jail

Copy /usr/bin/perl to /webroot/usr/bin directory:# cp /usr/bin/perl /webroot/usr/bin

Install shared object/liberires used by perl:# /bin/l2chroot /usr/bin/perl

Now copy all perl files and modules stored in /usr directory:
# cp -avr /usr/share/perl /webroot/usr/share
# cp -avr /usr/share/perl5 /webroot/usr/share
# cp -avr /usr/lib/perl /webroot/usr/lib
# cp -avr /usr/lib/perl5 /webroot/usr/lib

Step #4: Put Perl MySQL DBD shared libraries in the jail

Copy shared libraries needed to load perl mysql.so (which is stored at /webroot/usr/lib/perl5/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.so). Type the following command:
# /bin/l2chroot /usr/lib/perl5/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.so

Please note that you have just enabled perl mysql support. However /usr/lib/perl5/ directory contains other shared object used by perl. You need to enable them to use rest of Perl features.

Step #5: Restart the lighttpd

# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

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