June 2003 - Posts

• emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf

  I decided to start reading Open Source Web Development with LAMP over on Safari to broden my horizons.  Everything is going fine until I get to this paragraph in the intro: "This book was written entirely with Open Source software: emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf on Linux and OS X. Frankly we couldn't imagine writing something of this length and complexity in Word. Shudder!" I don't know what to do.  The authors lost me.  So all I need is  emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf to replace Word?  Sign me up!  And I'm not totally sure what they are talking about with Word not being able to handle a document of their complexity.  We are talking about a 500pg document, that seems to be almost completely text.  Now perhaps they only have 8mb of ram or something on their machine, then I can see Word choking.  But I'll assume when you load up , vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf they take up a bit of resources themselves.  If I didn't have to wait 30 days to dump this book, I'd do so immediately.  While I wait, I might venture back into the book and hope that the authors just had a brief lasp in judgement, or just gave up on Word too soon.  Heck, I know it took me something like 3 or 4 minutes to figure out how to do a table of contents in Word.  And don't get me started on figuring out how to create a style in Word XP.  Let's just say that's three minutes of my life I'm not getting back! Humph.  Family Guy is on soon.  That should put me in a better mood.  Posted Jun 05 2003, 11:08 PM by Phil Scott with 4 comment(s)

• IIS 6.0, Content-Encoding: gzip

  Today I decided to play around with IIS 6.0 and kick the tires when it came to gzip support.  IIS 5.0 was all but useless when it came to gzip unless you had some serious cash to buy third party support for it, so I was interested to see if gzip even worked.  My first problem was just finding the darn thing, and I feel like an idiot for even having to post how to find the options for enabling compression.  But I am an idiot, so this kinda all works out.  What you need to do is hop into IIS manager, and right click on the Web Sites folder.  Not the computer, not the default web site, not a folder but the web sites folder.  Bring up the properties window, and the last tab is called Service.  It looks a little something like this: I went ahead and checked off both static files, and application files and let it grow to however big it needs to get.  Here's my results brought to you by the swell live http headers plug-in of Mozilla (I've snipped out a lot of unimportant stuff). Normal, non-gzipped request: GET /yahoo.htm HTTP/1.1 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Response HTTP/1.x 200 OK Content-Length: 39762 Gzipped Request: GET /yahoo.htm HTTP/1.1 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Response HTTP/1.x 200 OK Content-Length: 10304 Content-Encoding: gzip That's a pretty decent chunk taken off there.  Now, I tried my best to reproduce the 2048 bug.  I even downloaded freakin' Real Download (thank Jebus for VMWare) and tried it out.  The only thing I didn't try was connecting via a proxy to my server, which I've heard might be at the cause of the 2048 bug.  Sooo...It seems compression support is safe for now in IIS 6, short of the proxy check.  Anyone else have a better view of this than my guess and check opinion?  I checked out Microsoft's site and they seem to be only running gzip on css and js files.  WTF?  Actually, I can't find anyone running gzip and windows 2003.  mod_gzip is all over the place though, so I can't really think that a site like NasDaq.com would honestly care if someone in Netscape 3 or IE 3 can't view their site.  Hmmmm.  Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K. Posted Jun 05 2003, 05:31 PM by Phil Scott with 6 comment(s)

• Moving to Firebird/Phoenix

  I moved to Firebird about a month ago.  I've had some sort of gecko based browser on my machine for a while, mainly for testing out web pages and making sure they worked in non-IE browsers.  After a while I found that if I designed solely for Gecko browsers, then the sites would look fine in Opera/Gecko and usually IE.  The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS.  The other day I went and set Firebird to be my default browser.  I deleted the IE link in quicklaunch bar.  The only IE I use is when an app embeds the IE control in the app.  See the this post from Charles Cook on embeding Gecko in .NET apps. The day IE 6/7/8 actually renders css/edge I may switch back.  Until then, Firebird is just a better browser.  Edit: for comfirmation, the max-height stab was done in sarcasm.  I guess IE is having trouble rendering the <sarcasm> tags :-).  My point is that fixing CSS bugs is not something done in a service pack, you need IE 6.5 if you are changing the way it renders elements.  IE 6.5 doesn't appear to be coming our way. Posted Jun 05 2003, 10:00 AM by Phil Scott with 5 comment(s)