I decided to take this Sunday and work on the website instead of Flex. I have improved the formatting of user comments and updated the blog calendar. User comments will now show formatting such as return characters and is aligned on the left not to wrap underneath the avatar picture. The blog post calendar will now show the title of the post when you mouse-over the date. The blog calendar update in particular was a much needed improvement in my opinion.

There is a known bug with the blog post pages that display user comments. The web-server will randomly return a "this page cannot be displayed" error. You just have to refresh the page a few times. Brock and I traced this to software called ion-cube in combination with PHP's XML parser running on the web-server. We were unable to re-create the error on my development environment (XAMPP) and my test Linux machine that runs fedora core 4 so the error still randomly crops up.

Another known bug is with the tag cloud generator located on the left side of the main page. This is Johann Burkard's Dynacloud that utilizes Jquery. It is supposed to generate tag clouds based on frequency of word usage across the entire main page. However it seems to rank links and items inside div tags much higher then normal text. I also have to manually adjust the maximum allowed font size of this script whenever I update the site due to the irregularities in rating words. Perhaps a future update will be to fix the cloud myself or find another candidate. In any case, thanks to Johann for his nice contribution!

While messing with the CSS for the comment posting, I learned a nice little tidbit. When you place an asterisk "*" in front of a line of CSS, it means that only IE will read that line. This came in handy for the chunk that I use on the comment formatting. Take a look:



I wanted to mention Marc Grabanski and Keith Wood for their work on the Jquery UI Datepicker. The blog calendar on this site is a modified version of the UI Datepicker before it became officially integrated into the standard Jquery UI components. I again modified the core of the Datepicker to include the blog post titles. These modifications haven't been that difficult due to the excellent job Marc and Keith did on the Datepicker. Thanks fella's.

People really need to stop knocking Windows Vista. I listen to a lot of technology podcasts and I used to subscribe to the "vista is junk" paradigm before I actually used it. My job is so awesome that they got me a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram and a roughly 30 inch LCD that runs Vista. I'll admit that performance problems can't even come close to the machine I use, but Vista is pretty awesome. I have been using it to develop applications and I haven't had any problems except for a driver for an old webcam.

I think probably the biggest problem that the average user has with Vista is that they didn't just change a few things, they changed the functionality of everything. Win 2k to XP wasn't too bad because most of the functionality stayed in place. However Vista completely changes (and renames) many of the usability aspects that you look for in Windows. I don't have a clue why people are complaining about UAC. I like it because I know exactly what the machine is doing.

You might be thinking, "man this guy doesn't know what he is talking about and he is a Windows loyalist". In fact I am far from it. I detest developing applications that have to do with anything .NET because documentation is horrible. PHP is my favorite scripting language and I think Ubuntu 8 is simply wonderful! However, I like to play video games every now and then and Linux doesn't offer anything in that flavor.

The Windows Vista "is bad stuff" paradigm is total crap. Also anyone that brings up a blue screen in any modern Windows OS is not qualified to have an opinion. They probably got a blue screen because they were stupid enough to get malware/trojans/...etc on their machine. As a developer that doesn't run any type of anti-virus and has scripting turned off, I haven't gotten a blue screen in years. The hardcore Linux and Mac loyalists can complain all that they want, but the work that Microsoft did in order to transition to the NT architecture under Cutler was amazing from a technology standpoint.

I'm definitely an Ubuntu and Fedora Core fan, but for usability and getting down to business, Microsoft still gets my vote, except for developing in their environments. I commend the Windows Vista team for taking a chance, their hard work, and hope they get some recognition eventually.