Worlds Violently Colliding

RIP WebMonkey

It's official. WebMonkey is dead.

After roughly eight years of being a valuable resource to many people, Terra Lycos is pulling the plug. It's been a long time coming; like many other sites, it really started downhill at the beginning of 2000. The bust was rough on a lot of sites, and WebMonkey was hit hard. The unbelievable amount of page views and banner ads stopped flowing, staff was cut, and the site continued to limp forth, a shell of it's previous glory.

While I can't say that I personally used the resource more than once or twice, I know a lot of people who did. It was the poster child for getting up to speed with web technologies in the late 90s. So at long last, another dot-com child is killed off.

Rest In Peace, WebMonkey.

XP Widgets in IE6 and Firefox

I've written about Windows XP several times in the past. This time, I thought I'd make an entry pointing out the differences in how IE 6 and Mozilla Firefox handle Windows XP widgets. The results are pretty interesting.

First, a screenshot of Firefox, displaying several form elements in Windows XP.

Everything essentially looks as it should. Long and short buttons, a radio button, and a check box. Look carefully at that checkbox though; it has focus. Note the dashed border around it. It's a little tough to see, but this next screenshot should help illustrate my problem with this.

There, now that is more easily noticeable, isn't it? That border is absolutely hideous, and really shouldn't be there. It makes the widget itself difficult to see, and it just looks awful. Also, I should note here that the text next to the radio button is inside a label tag. Here is another thing Firefox doesn't do correctly; if you mouse over the radio button itself, it will perform the proper mouse over change; mouse over the label, and it doesn't do the mouse over. This is different from the IE 6 native behavior. Mousing over a label in IE 6 will cause the radio button to change colors.

Don't start rejoicing for IE, though, just look at what it gets wrong...

Take a good, hard look at that long form button! This is something I didn't notice until a few months ago, as I never created buttons with that amount of text. I just happened to see a website on a friend's machine opened in IE, and noticed that something was majorly wrong with the submit button on the site. Turns out that if you go past a certain character length, IE doesn't handle XP's own native widgets correctly! Not only does the same code produce a much longer button in general in IE, but those corners are horrible. Very pixelated, and they look just terrible.

So at the very least, Firefox scores several points for rendering Microsoft's own widgets better than Microsoft's own browser does. However, the other issues I've pointed out here should be resolved; it's the little polish here and there that adds up to a perfect browser, and fixing those types of little issues will make all the difference.

Give it up for Onslaught!

All weekend long, I played the Unreal Tournament 2004 Linux Demo. It's smooth as silk.

The network play seems much tighter than UT2003, not to mention the fact that they finally brought back Assault (my favorite UT game mode), and added in Onslaught, a mode which I have become obsessed with. I'm on a mission to be able to conquer the "Torlan" stage in under five minutes. I've come pretty damn close too.

That said, I feel a lot like Gabe; I can't find a reason to justify playiing online. The bots are good enough, no whining, no lag, just fun when I want it. That said, I'll tell you the one thing about Onslaught that pisses me off to no end; when I reach a power node, jump out of my vehicle to claim it and power up, and one of the bots on my own team decides to hop into it and take off. Especially with Raptors, the bots never utilize them as well as I do, and they are only generated at the bases and the middle node. Irritating to say the least. Why can't I force the bot to give up any vehicle I want?

Also, the bots don't handle the vehicles as well as I'd like. I watched a bot drive a Manta into a wall over & over for about, oh, four minutes. I left the area, came back, and the bot was still driving it into the wall. Unbelievably stupid.

That said, I still want the full version of this game, moreso than either of the previous Unreal Tournaments. The "Buy Now" message at the end of the demo taunts me every time...I would buy it, if I could! The end of March can't come fast enough.

Microsoft Source Leak Follow-up

Well, it's official. From what I've seen reported today, it looks as though the source in question was from Win2k SP1. Apparently, it contains all of the code for IE. Ouch. I'm still staying away from it; that source is like a giant minefield, with random oil fires burning in it, surrounded by booby-traps, tripwires, poison oak, and Carrot Top. Stay away.

That said, I noticed something interesting in this eWeek article about the leak.

The leaked code includes 30,915 files and was apparently removed from a Linux computer used by Mainsoft for development purposes.

The emphasis there is mine. Why would they mention what type of machine it was? I know Mainsoft ports Windows apps to *nix, but why did they feel the need to throw Linux in there?

Ten bucks says we will see a Linux backlash from this. Either in the form of SCO-style lawsuits from Microsoft ("Our IP is in Linux!") by this time in 2006, or a compaign from Microsoft talking about how Linux is so insecure, it allowed people to grab Microsoft source. Frankly, neither would surprise me, but the latter seems more immediately plausible. Here's to hoping nothing happens, but I'm not holding my breath.

Windows 2000 Source Code Leak

You know, I was going to talk today about Firefox, but that entry is being pushed back until tomorrow. Today...well, there is a much bigger story today.

I opened up slashdot earlier today, and this is what greeted me.

And well, it's cropping up all over the news. The story wasn't even posted on Slashdot yet, and the link to Neowin was already completely dead. Sure enough, Microsoft admitted to the partial source code leak. Even if they find the party/parties responsible, the cat is out of the bag. Although it is only a small portion of the total source code, it supposedly contains some interesting stuff, like a good chunk of the source to IE 5 and the 2000 Kernel. I suppose it was just a matter of time, but depending on what exactly is in those files (which I won't be even trying to look at), this could be a very, very big deal.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if a bigger leak happened in the near future. Now that one is out there, another leak could easily sneak onto the scene without as much chatter initially surrounding it.

More on Firefox

I wrote a brief entry about Firefox two days ago, so I thought I would expand on that entry now. Firefox is missing a few things that I was hoping would make it in by the dot eight release, but obviously didn't.

For one thing, the nightlies from early February had a few welcome additions to the Help menu. In this screenshot, you can see two new items that were backed out from the dot eight Firefox release.

Of course, looking at the actual new additions, it's much more clear why they were backed out of this release.

As you can see, the icons were looking pretty rough around the edges, and the toolkit on the left looks a lot like the Mozilla Classic theme (aka Navigator 4.0). Plus, it of course still said Firebird everywhere, a no-no for a product whose name is changing. I should note, however, that there actually is a very decent amount of text in this help system, so it's obvious that a lot of time was put into it. I'm sure by the dot nine Firefox release, this will be very clean.

I have a few other small complaints as well. Firstly, Bug #198616 is still wide open, something I was hoping would be on target for the dot eight release. This bug deals with the fact that if you open the History sidebar in Firefox, right click on an entry, and then select "Copy Link Location"...nothing happens. I haven't had any time recently to research the issue to the point of writing a patch for it; that said, it keeps biting me in the ass, so maybe I'll be motivated enough shortly to sit down and fix it.

Secondly, the new Firefox icon. Sure, it looks great in the About dialog, and in the Firefox buttons, but it's not nearly as crisp as the dot seven nightly logo. Here is a quick comparison of the two on my Windows 2000 desktop.

I personally think the Firebird logo was much more sharp & crisp at smaller sizes. It seems to me that the new Firefox logo doesn't scale very well. Hopefully something can be done about this; otherwise it's a great logo, and I adore it.

Of course, all of the other little things that I'd like to see are on my wishlist. I'll be announcing that later this week.

No, I think he is the crazy one...

I honestly have no idea what to make of this story.

The pilot came on to greet everyone and give his comments for the morning, and he said he'd recently been on a mission trip, and he'd like all the Christians to please raise their hands," said passenger Jen Dorsey.

He said, 'If you are a Christian, raise your hand.' He said, 'If you are not, you're crazy,'" said Austin.

Not only is that incredibly insulting to the non-Christian passengers on that flight, it seems to have made everyone quite uncomfortable. I probably would have spent the flight pointing out Christian hypocrisy and Biblical mistranslations.

Of course, it's well known that I'm not much of a fan of Christianity. To quote Dan Barker, "The Christian is a person who cuts you with a knife and then tries to sell you a bandage."

So, basically, when I hear about stories like this, I chalk them up to bad attempts at evangelism that do more harm than good. And then I chuckle and move on.

Say Hello to Firefox

In an effort to resolve the name issue with the Firebird Database, "The Browser Formerly Known As Mozilla Firebird", which was in turn "The Browser Formerly Known As Phoenix", has changed it's name for the third (and hopefully last) time. Along with the name change, we have a very sweet new 0.8 release with some excellent features.

Say Hello To Firefox!

(P.S. There is also a new version of Mozilla Thunderbird, for all your mail & news needs. Grab it right away, it's nice and smooth.)