Ernies Tech Thoughts

The ongoing pain of web development is that a particular OS and browser of the end user is not guaranteed, and so many must be catered for. This is not as bad as it used to be, now that Netscape 4, and Internet Explorer 5 and earlier have been consigned to history. This leave IE6, 7 and soon 8, Firefox, Safari and Opera. This leaves plenty of scope for variation, and the general problem is IE6. So the decision by 37Signals to discontinue support for IE6 in mid August is an interesting development. It is also a bold move, but that is the way 37 Signals so things, by not catering to the entire world.
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For the last 2 years I had planned to attend the Web Directions conference in Sydney, but various work and family commitments have meant this has not happened. Well this year there are no excuses, and I am there. I have signed up for the 2 day conference plus ‘Javascript - The Good Parts’ workshop by Douglas Crockford. From a front end perspective, Javascript is my relative technical weakness, but something I am looking to fill in, now that I have moved past my all javascript is evil mindset.
The one problem I do have with the conference program is that I know there will be clashes between presentations I want to see, as it is divided into 3 tracks, and my interest crosses all 3. But what a problem to have. The presentations I am most looking forward to are : ‘Elegant Web Typography’, ‘Javascript libraries - Putting the cross in cross-browser compatible’ and ‘Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide’.

See you there.

The major hassle of doing web development on Kubuntu (or any non Windows system) is the inevitable hassles with the browser which still has the majority of users (IE6). Options to deal with this include:

• Dual booting with Windows
• Using services such as browsershot and browsercam
• Multiple PCs in a network with different OS
• Let IE users be dammed

All these options have disadvantages in terms of cost and/or time. Having tried most of them, I decided now was the time to try another option - visualisation or running an OS inside another.
In this case I have started to run Win XP with Kubuntu. Again their are a couple of options, but I went with qemu. There are a number of good resources for this on the net including:

• How to run Windows XP under Ubuntu Dapper
• Windows XP under qemu with Ubuntu Breezy
• Installing Windows XP under Debian with QEMU

Here are the list of instructions I used for Win XP on Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn.
em1:~$ mkdir virtual_os
em1:~$ cd virtual_os
em1:~/virtual_os$ qemu-img create winxp.img 3500M[Suggested size seems to be at least 3 Gig.]
em1:~/virtual_os$ qemu -boot d -hda winxp.img -cdrom /dev/hdc -m 256 -localtime[The /dev/hdc will be specific to your setup. /dev/cdrom did not work for me. This will start the install from CDROM, and expect the process to take time]
em1:~/virtual_os$ qemu -boot c -hda winxp.img -m 256 -localtime[Once installed this is my command to run the guest OS. The number after -m is the amount of memory to allow the guest OS. If you have plenty give it more.]
And that was it. Internet connection was working straight off. Things are a little slower but using only IE it was workable. I just need to get used to Ctrl-Alt to break out of the guest OS back to my native desktop.

Things still to do:

1. Have the guest OS interact with the host
2. Try Win 98 as it should be less system intensive.
3. Have Win XP with IE7 and 98 with IE6.

ALA (A List Apart) are running a first annual Web Design Survey. Its pretty quick to complete, with mainly radio button single choice answers, some multiple selection, and 2 free form text. Seems there is a random prize, and non US people are not dudded from it. Be interested to see the results that come from it.

For a site we developed, a custom guestbook was added by us, to replace a previous 3rd party guestbook, which had been turned off a while ago due to security problems. A relatively simple affair to create, but with effort put in to make it secure against database injection and other nasties. And in this purpose it has been all good.
All entries are moderated, and this is made quite clear. Do you think this would deter the spammers? Not one bit. First week things are pretty quiet, second week about 30 attempted spam entries, and for week 3 almost 200. Wow there are some bored and desperate people. Not one of them got their viagra spam links on, but it didn’t stop repeated attempts. So possible bot activity as well.

A few extra lines of code to highlight the types of attempted spam we had seen, and auto reject the submission. This has had a positive effect, and the next week is down to under 30. I am not sure what these are trying achieve. Maybe the ‘Thank you for your submission entry’ makes them feel loved.

As an extra step we are adding some IP related filtering, and tweaking the word filtering. This should bring it back to single digits which is liveable.

We did consider captcha entry, email verification, but it was agreed this provides and inconvenience to the real users.