My road to web development nirvana
I’m giving the WordPress iPhone/iPod touch app a try. Not the easiest thing in the world to type on a touchscreen keyboard…
In other news I can apparently type 101 WPM (on an ergonomic keyboard.) I’m a happy camper.
I’m officially writing my first post of WordPress 2.5. Happy Cog definitely helped tighten the admin interface, and gave it that “clean” look. I haven’t noticed much difference in functionality, but then again, I don’t usually go past the usual simple write-and-post process.
The reason for writing this post is that I wanted to share with you something incredible that happened over the weekend. Don’t get too excited; it’s not that great, but made my jaw drop nonetheless.
I went home to St. Joseph to give my mom her birthday present — a new MacBook. She’s been putting up with a clumsy Gateway laptop for a while now, and the problems were starting to mount. After continually singing the praises of OS X, my dad and I both chipped in to buy her a Mac to alleviate these problems.
One recurring theme was that her printer would just stop working for her with the Gateway. Lo and behold, we plug it into the MacBook and it’s ready to go in 3 seconds flat; printed a test page and it worked great.
Since she still needed to use the Gateway for her office, it was time to figure out what was going wrong. After some basic troubleshooting I uninstalled the printer software and drivers in order to start from scratch. We plugged the printer in to the USB port and the New Hardware Wizard appeared, as expected. Also expected was the “No drivers were found” message that appeared on the next screen as well as the “Would you like to search online for drivers?” prompt.
Now get ready…
For the first time in my many, many years of using Windows XP, the internet search for drivers actually worked. Printed a test page and all was well.
Mind blown. The end.
You’ll notice that all of the pictures that were previously in various posts are now missing. This is because of an FTP anomaly when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. For some reason Transmit (an FTP program for OS X) defaults to “Overwrite” instead of “Merge” when uploading files and directories that already exist on the server. As a result, it first deletes your existing data, then replaces it with the new files.
Fail.
You know it’s bad when having to wait for an operating system to load prompts me to boot up my laptop so I can write about how I’m waiting.
It is taking Windows Vista (Business edition, by the way) an inordinate amount of time to load. It’s been displaying the boot screen for over 2 minutes now….
Ah, finally.
But it doesn’t end there. Once I actually get into the operating system I’ll have to deal with the horribly slow update system. The update process for Windows Defender is so slow that it comes close to causing me physical pain. On top of that, I am forced to click through several “permission” screens because Vista has to double-check every single little action with me before it runs. Even from within the control panel!
In contrast, OS X seems to perform its intended tasks with much more grace. Besides actually doing a convincing job of looking pretty (although I suppose that’s more a matter of taste than anything), it doesn’t bother me with inane messages, or annoying bubbles that pop up from the system tray. It handles security beautifully without me having to do anything. And it boots in a matter of seconds, not minutes.
As a final point, consider this: I’m running Vista on a high-end desktop PC. Some specs:
Compared to my Mac laptop:
I find it odd that the PC (with a dual-core processor!) has to labor through Vista, while the dated Mactop just cruises right along. I think you dropped the ball on this one, Microsoft.
For the longest time I’ve been baffled as to why the scrolling text in Winamp would sometimes mysteriously change font on me. Today I finally opened my eyes and saw that it was because of the special characters that sometimes appear in songs. In my case the phenomenon is predominantly caused by umlauts. Example follows.
I’ve been using Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 to write most of my web-related code because of the nice code-highlighting and uploading capabilities. When I found out today that I could check out Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 (essentially Dreamweaver 9, if you were to follow the previous version numbering scheme) I figured I’d give it a shot.
The feature that has me really excited is the integrated validator and especially the “Browser Compatibility Check.” This thing is awesome, although I can’t say for sure yet how thorough it is. Essentially it checks the current document (or whole site) for any problems that might arise in certain browsers. What’s even more brilliant is that it gives a detailed description of what the problem is. I tested it out on one of the sites I’ve created and it found the IE6 3px text jog bug. This piece of software definitely has potential…
I’m currently working with the university’s web development team, as it is one of the only jobs I’ve found outside of freelance work that actively uses the knowledge I’m trying to gain. There are, however, some minor annoyances that come with not being my own boss.
The biggest of these is the team’s complete dedication to Microsoft FrontPage. I’ve never liked MSFP, not because it’s a bad piece of software, but rather because of its complete lack of support for things like web standards and PHP syntax highlighting. Oh if I could only count the number of FrontPage-generated pages I’ve had to correct on the university domain… You’ve never seen code like this! While I understand that Microsoft often must invent its own way of doing things because they are almost always one of the few big developers involved in new technologies, I just don’t get where they pull some of these ideas. On a somewhat related note, I find ASP (using VBScript) to be a complete nightmare, but this could be because I dove into PHP much earlier and am thus simply used to a different syntax.
Dreamweaver, on the other hand, handles things quite well, and as such I don’t have much to complain about. I’d say that completes the short rant.