Why you should give up coding for IE6

Lately there has been a lot of talk about whether or not to have web sites support Internet Explorer 6. Personally I think we should get rid of it NOW. Out with the old, in with the new is how the phrase goes. Well in my mind, there is only one way to make users who haven’t yet switch to make the switch: force them.

We can easily get the browser info when a visitor comes to your site so I say if it’s IE6, tell them they can’t view the site until they get a real browser *COUGH FireFox COUGH* and try viewing your site again correctly. Or if that’s a bit too harsh, still code for something better than IE6 and give visitors a message to upgrade and show them the crappy version of your site.

Nothing will change until it is forced onto people. They will stay with IE6 because they are scared to upgrade, too lazy or some other asinine reason. Well enough! If everyone stops making sites that work in IE6, people will change. Plain and simple. Please join me in my crusade to rid the Internet of this horrible beast. Then maybe we can move to get rid of IE in general but that’s a rant for another time.

Phoenix .NET User Group Experience

Last night I was lucky enough to attend my first Phoenix .NET User Group meeting and enjoyed it.  Microsoft is nice enough to let them use a room in their Phoenix office and gave away a keyboard/mouse set, a web cam, and a few books.

Tim Rayburn started it off with an Intro to WCF Services and for a guy who has barely touched these, it was very informative.  Tim did an excellent job presenting and made it easy to follow along.

Rob Paveza followed up with a discussion on a new Facebook API that he has developed.  I worked with Rob at Terralever and know that he does an awesome job whenever he has the chance to run wild in code and from the looks of it, this isn’t any different.  It’s not released as of yet but it will be found here by the end of the week so check it out.

Thanks to Scott Cate and Rob Bagby for helping out with this.  I hope to check out a few more of these in the future.

iPod Touch versus iPhone – Part Three

Back in October, I wrote this article discussing the iPod Touch versus the iPhone. Well I did in fact purchase a 16GB iPod about a month ago and overall, I have to say that I like it. There are some things that I’m not in love with but the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

The pros about it are basically the same as they always have been with a few additions. I have always liked the iPod line and the Touch is no exception. I really enjoy the Safari browser on it and the ease that web pages display on it. In my last post, I have written that I wasn’t looking forward to that too much but I was wrong. It blows away anything my Dash can do. I also really like that iTunes is nice enough to transfer any songs that I purchase from my iPod to iTunes. For some reason, I was thinking that was going to be a huge pain.

For the cons, I have a few. The most glaring is that on my home computer (64 bit) cannot find my new iPod correctly because Apple won’t allow it. I’m totally fine with that but I’m not fine with the fact that my 2 older iPods work perfectly on it. Apparently someone at Apple decided to take a crap on the new iPod and anyone who uses Windows 64 bit OS’s. That’s what I can’t get. I even submitted an email to Apple on their site about a week ago but still no answer. Oh well. Just sucks that I can’t use my iPod on my home computer. I also just attempted to upgrade my iTunes to 7.6 and was told that the installer requires that I use Vista 64-bit rather than XP 64-bit. Kinda funny since every version up until now has worked.

I also do not like the fact that I had to jailbreak the iPod to get it to add extra programs. That’s something I should be able to do anytime. I’m pretty sure on Macs that you are allowed to add new programs whenever you want. I should be able to do that on my pocket Mac/iPod.

Just yesterday, Apple announced that it was adding 5 new programs to the iPod Touch. Mail and Google Maps are the only two that concern me too much (Notes, Weather, and Stocks are the other 3). I was excited about this only to learn that for being such a good customer, I get the fun of spending $20 for those. Thanks Apple. Even if I wanted them, I can’t because iTunes won’t work on my computer. But above that, someone will offer them for free in a week I’m sure. so I’ll wait until then

Overall, I give my iPod Touch a 7/10. It still is an excellent music player but if Apple is going to tease me with extra features, I’m going to expect them.

Installing Ubuntu on an XP Box

I was online tonight and after reading a couple of articles and thinking about this for some time now, I have decided to install Ubuntu on my home computer and dual boot it with my XP that lives there now. I should have done this as a play-by-play blog entry but I think after an hour, I can catch you up.

10:15pm-ish: Burned Ubuntu disc onto CD and shut down computer to boot from CD.

10:20pm-ish: After turning on the computer, it boots straight to XP without regard to the disc sitting in its drive. I wonder how this is…

10:22pm-ish: Changed boot.ini file to have just the default info according to Microsoft’s site. Shut down

10:23pm-ish: XP immediately boots up. YAY!!!!! I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on.

10:45pm-ish: After several changes to the boot.ini file followed by several shut downs, I have no clue. Keeps booting directly to XP. There is no stopping it. I add this “/REDIRECT” to my boot.ini and…

10:46pm-ish: Not sure if it was the “/REDIRECT” or me randomly pushing F-keys while the boot happened but I got to the BIOS info. I can’t see anything in there that specifies booting from the CD drive. I’m not an expert in this at all but I thought it was right there. Ended up not doing anything.

11:00pm-ish: More restarts and more XP screens. Starting writing this down now.

11:20pm: Finally found it buried in the BIOS. BTW, if you push F8, F11, F12, and DELETE, one of those opens the BIOS. Good for me to know.

11:24pm: I have seen the Ubuntu install screen. Happiness is here finally.

11:27pm: The OS seems to be loading. I am answering the questions as to where I am and how I want my drive partitioned.

11:29pm: Used default partition and it took about 10 seconds.

11:31pm: I am asked if I would like to import any accounts from my Windows login. This is really cool. I pick my browser settings for IE and FF and move on.

11:33pm: I have to say that this is pretty easy. I get a “Ready to Install” window. Cool.

11:34pm: Official start time. Let’s see how long this actually takes.

11:44pm: Install done and restarting computer. I hope this works.

11:47pm: I am loading Ubuntu now and am very happy that I finally got this to work.

11:50pm: Downloading and installing updates. Everything seems to be working. I can connect to the internet perfectly. This has been a really easy process once I got past the initial “How to boot from a CD” fiasco.

I’ll have more to come once I get a change to bounce around in here.

UPDATE – I got it installed and everything working. I went to check to make sure XP would load correctly and it did perfectly. I did receive a hardware found message that I read I would see. It finished what it needed to do and did a reboot. This is where the trouble started for me. Upon the load, I see a GRUB Error 17 (or something to that matter) on the screen and nothing happens. It just stopped in its tracks. I push the power button to shut it down and start it back up and same thing. It will boot Ubuntu with the disc in but no Windows. I read online that I need to put something called SuperGrubDisk so I go to its site and get an ISO for a bootable disc. Thing is, my Ubuntu CD that I have in the box won’t come out because it’s running the OS currently. So I’ll burn it from another computer and load it tonight when I get home. But as of now, my computer is a nice paper weight.

Failed Debugging with IIS7

Yesterday I ran into an issue when I was debugging a web application that I was building. It was debugging but as soon as I installed the “Not So” RAD Controls on my machine and restarted Visual Studio, I was lucky enough to receive this error every time I wanted to debug and step through my application:

Debugging Failed Because Integrated Windows Authentication Is Not Enabled iis 7

I wasn’t sure if it was the “Not So” RAD Controls or something else. So I went to Google and did a search for my error and came across this page. Very helpful as apparently at that time, my computer realized that I needed that patch. Weird but it worked so if you run across this, get the hotfix from Microsoft.