5 entries tagged microsoft

Webclasses considered harmful

After a hiatus of a couple of years, here is a new essay about web development. I’m afraid this time the experience I am drawing on is negative rather than positive: Just say No to webclasses. OK, I admit this is something of an obscure topic for a rant—you probably will never have heard of this particular web-application framework before today. But it is sadly occuplying all to much of my working life these days... :-(

Microsoft’s ‘X-UA-Compatible’ Rethought in the Style of HTTP

There is some controversy over the proposal by the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 team to support a new header X-UA-Compatible in IE8. Leaving aside the argument as to whether this header should exist at all, there is the question of whether anyone at Microsoft has read RFC 2616 (the HTTP 1.1 specification) and spent as much as five minutes considering how to make their header fit in to the established conventions. Read more

Someone Needs to Buy their Copy-Editor a Dictionary of Proverbs

It is reported that Steve Ballmer said, on the subject of whether Windows 7 will succeed where Windows Vista has failed, ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’ This is strange, because ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ is one of the rare proverbial phrases that actually makes sense without gloss from a scholar of Semi-Early Modern English. (That said, it makes more sense if you know that ‘proof’ used to be used to mean ‘test’.) Read more

WAMP (1): Copying Files

WAMP is a perverted forward-backronym from LAMP, for people who want to do web development, but have some overriding reason to use Microsoft Windows (generally corporate IT policy). To test a web site on Windows, I have a VirtualBox instance set up for my by ievms, and naturally I need to copy files on to it. Which is a problem, because Windows is terrible at that sort of complicated system administration. Read more