On the subject of standards compliance, I logged on to American Express’s new online account service with Firefox and was stunned to find it barely worked!  Under Firefox it demonstrates some extremely odd layout issues such as drop boxes with ill fitting text and portions of the text obscured by colored boxes.

Its hard to believe that in December of 2005, a major corporation has released a keystone of their online self service system in an Internet Explorer only form – even more importantly, the way it works would tend to imply it was never tested with Firefox – and this for a financial services application!

I’m not a zealot, I’ll use IE if I have to with the Amex site and this issue is probably not a deal breaker, but throw it together with their high interest rates, Indian call center*, the fact they resell your information to all sorts of people, and the problem of not all vendors accepting the card and it really makes me wonder what I get out of it.

*I’ve had positive experiences with Dell’s call center in India, but I’ve finished more than one conversation with Amex’s in an angry tone.  They seem to have a curious combination of inflexibility, misinformation and stupidity.

What is the only thing you can do with a computer that is more painful and less rewarding than a trip to the dentist – I suggest that its making your web pages pass CSS2/XHTML validation.  Or to requote the old stand by:

“Making my CSS/HTML pass W3 validation is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices”

Yes, my personal homepage and a few other selected pages on my website now pass validation.  It all started with www.herod.net/steven/ but in a fit of drunken madness I decided on Sunday to revise the herod.net home page and a few other ‘selected’ pages.

And what have I learned?  Well, I’ve learned is this:

• The CSS2 spec is not written for quick reference.
• That IE/Firefox have many of the quirks I used to enjoy in the good old days when I last believed in web standards (1999 – IE 4 vs NS 4), the difference is these days you will be able to find a workable middle ground.
• That you can live without tables… my god, I never thought I’d say that.
• That Style Master 4.0 is….. incomprehensible  (Sorry John)
• That you can lower your pages sizes…  and occasionally increase them.
• That at the end of the day, you can’t tell the difference in what it looks like.
• I miss vertical centering
• Expect to be frustrated and curse the gods.
• It’s a way of thinking, and getting in that way of thinking is the key.

So, now I know what I should do, and I’m familiar with how to replicate in CSS what I used to do with good old fashioned html tags.

An now, at the end of it, I can put some icons on my site and walk around with a feeling self satisfaction – (but I’ll never get those 6 hours of my life back).

Radiators and baby goods…. I mean, the synergies are obvious, its a brilliant idea.

???

Nordic baby goods and radiators

Well, another 2 hours of my life killed thanks to Empire Earth II.

The house isn’t any cleaner, no more work has been done, no money earned, no dog’s played with, no bonding with the wife.

It didn’t even play fair in the game (I started with 2100AD tech, the other computer players started in 1400AD.)

So why did I waste the the time…. tut, tut, tut….

Oh, loobylu is expecting again… congratulations! (loobylu)

I still have a soft spot for Jennifer Love Hewitt

sob

Turns out it was a language setting in the operating system (Windows XP Pro, SP2)

My operating system was set to English (Australian), and Oracle hangs on install because of that. I reset the locale back to English (United States) and all was fine.

Which is seriously stupid, not that it is a limitation, but more the fact that a major software application deals with the problem by effectively hanging.

My thanks to this article here: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=326124&tstart=0

You wouldn’t think that installing something would be so hard would you?

I’ve tried reinstalling ‘Oracle Express Edition’ on this laptop - all went well until the final stage of configuration where upon it hung.

The same thing has occured with Oracle 10g - all is well until it tries to startup a database, and then it hangs with nothing in the log files (or at least none of the log files I can find).

There is obviously something on this laptop that doesn’t not agree with Oracle.  But what? 

It wouldn’t be so bad, but this seems to occur all the time with Oracle, its 9g installer was not much better, it’s 8i installer refused to run on certain types of HP desktops we had and its linux installer was no better.

If you are a DBA, these things would probably be no obsticle, but for the casual developer….

It seems PowerBlog doesn’t work with blogger quite the way I had hoped.   The date and category features do not seem to work the way one hopes, I probably need to read the manual.

Anyway, its a lovely day outside the train, quite at odds with the stormy rain clouds I left behind this morning.  These same rain clouds left a puddle in my kitchen and my gutters overflowing.

Unfortunately, it seems the guys that put the extension on our house under the direction of prior owners did not ’scale’ our guttering, and thus everytime it rains, it over flows.  Throw in blockages from the neighbours tree and the gutter starts poring minutes after the deluge starts.

Additionally, the water doesn’t cleanly overflow, rather it overflows into the eaves of the house - this is not a good thing.

So tonight, I’m endeavouring to fix it in the 2 hours of daylight I have available to me, the first thing I’m going to do is re-route the old drain pipe to not use the new section of guttering and to simply discharge onto the ground.  It does it anyway when the rain falls, so why not just do it straight away without the detour through the house

That all said, I’m still not convinced that the new section drains correctly, it seems to me that its still blocked within the down pipe, the amount of water that flows out of the downpipe seems to not match its capacity at the top, so something is just not right.

Anyway, I’m sure this is all very confusing, and not particularly interesting, a photo would help, but I’m afraid I’m not taking my digital SLR onto the roof for the purpose of this blog!

Apart from a thirsty desire for fame and fortune (why else does anyone blog???)

·       Is it a technology blog?  (That’ll bring the girls in won’t it..)

·       Is it a confessional blog? (I never wanted to do this, I always wanted to be a lumberjack…)

·       Is it a travel blog? (Well, I am on the train at the moment…)

·       Is it a soon to be abandoned blog (This is my third or forth attempt at writing a regular blog)

Chances are, its going to be all of that, especially point 4, but who knows, I might surprise myself.

There is an element of public masturbation about blogging, you get a tingling sensation and enjoy yourself, but everybody else is embarrassed to find out your doing it.

Of course, I’m not speaking from experience.  That incident in the library was entirely overblown.

for the humor impaired, that was a joke, we all know masturbation is a sin (but if it is, where does that leave blogging?)

Well, I just finished Peter F Hamiltons latest book: ‘Judas Unchained’

I first found Peter with ‘The Reality Dysfunction’, what I enjoyed about it was its combination of a complex universe and it’s space opera.

He’s tried this again with ‘The Commonwealth Saga’, but I really don’t think he’s been anywhere near as successful.

Firsly, its LONG, at 2400 pages over both books, it tends to ramble and ramble, you can’t go anywhere in the book without having to sit through pages and pages of background material about the planet and its settlement history, every object needs a background.

Apart from that there’s the usual Peter Hamilton features:  Beautiful People, Casual Sex, Wealth and Technology;  This time however, it comes across as a strange mixture of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Jackie Collins.

Nothing terribly awful happens to anyone, there is always a worm hole or a regeneration tank or a ‘re-life’procedure to rescue anyone who dies or is injured.   Fantastic new technologies are whipped up in weeks/days/hours - and invaribly countered on the next page by an equally fantastic opposing technology.

In the end, it felt like ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, if nothing truly bad can happen to anyone, why should I care…. they don’t seem to!

The other problem:  I accidently destroyed my copy of the book - left it under a dripping tap sigh, don’t ask.