Author Archives: illiniguy

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 10:31 am on May 2, 2005  

Fujitsu Consulting acquires BORN

Some of you knew something was going on, what with the company meetings, etc. Yes, it’s official, we’ve been acquired by Fujitsu Consulting! Quite the news story in this part of the world, as BORN is a big name in this area…

We had the internal announcement and Q&A meeting, and so far I’m very high on the move…I haven’t heard anything to scare me into the ‘run to the hills’ mentality, being the common knee-jerk reaction…didn’t feel any of that afterwards…

UPDATE: I’ll post links as I find more articles; as long as they provide more info:
BORN (looks like same press release, but had to include for completeness)
StarTribune (kind of a negative title IMHO)
Pioneer Press
bizjournals.com

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:08 pm on April 28, 2005  

Opera CEO all wet

Opera’s CEO, in a fit of festiveness, proclaimed last week that if Opera was downloaded 1,000,000 times in 4 days, he would swim the Atlantic. Well, as you can tell, it was obviously a meeting-room remark made in jest (as to actually carrying his end of the deal), but the marketing team swooped in quickly. As you can tell, it was ‘rigged’….but still quite humorous.

…something I love about Opera, their community and company is alot more fun than Mozilla…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:59 pm on April 27, 2005  

Hey, browser sniffers!

Let me join the chorus of people out there in the developer community who have been saying to other website developers for years: ‘don’t use a browser’s user-agent to customize your site’! Why? Because if you look on my PC tools page, you’ll notice I use a web proxy. And using that proxy I can hide or alter anything about a web request I want, including what browser you think I have. Plus half the sniffing out there resuls in incorrect decisions. Alot of sites think, for example, that Opera can’t handle alot of things it does, and sometimes you get the ‘upgrade your browser’ page, as they only look at user-agent. But if they’d have just verified via JavaScript…

Now I don’t fault anyone still doing this out of not knowing an alternative, parsing the user-agent string, because that’s where I started way back when. But looking back I realize doing functionality tests via JavaScript is still the better method of ‘sniffing’ one’s browser. E.g., check to see if it supports document.all, not if ‘MSIE’ is in its user-agent. That way your site functions properly for everyone…

The next, more interesting question, though, is what to do on server-side? How do I know, e.g., what stylesheet to serve up? .NET’s built-in browser capability detection uses the method I just blew holes in. But by using a Session var and doing a quick redirect upon a session’s first request, to do a Javascript check, your code could then make the right decision.

BTW, for any proxy users out there who need to circumvent the sniffers, a nice list of user-agents can be found here.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:49 pm on April 27, 2005  

Disco Stu, I love you…

He makes one of the best browser skins I’ve seen in awhile; well, for the nostalgia effect. Check out the Opera 1.0 skin here. Ah, Windows 3.1….

Phoenity Redux ain’t too shabby, either, of course.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:03 pm on April 20, 2005  

Site Update: my PC tools

Just FYI, to the left you’ll notice I’ve added my first non-blog section, called ‘my PC tools‘. Somewhat self-explanatory, it’s a definite WIP and it’ll be updated regularly w/out further notice here…enjoy!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:25 pm on April 20, 2005  

Deron’s going pro!

Anyone who knows enough knew this was inevitable. It was a mixed blessing that came about from their run in the NCAA, but Illinois’ Deron Williams is going pro. I’m sad to see him go, he was pry the most important piece of the puzzle this year, but he’s a lock for the lottery, they say he may go higher than any UNC player, so I can’t blame him.

What would be ultra-sweet is if the Wolves get near him, since I live in Saint Paul! They definitely need a point guard, and he’s not a shoot-first type so I think he’d fit in well. Have to watch the ping-pong balls in a bit and see if they have a chance…

Now we’ll have to wait and see if Dee goes pro; hopefully not. I agree he should come back and run the point, it’ll help him in the draft, not to mention improve our team immensely.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 6:31 pm on April 19, 2005  

Opera 8 released

Opera 8 was released today, and I must say it’s about time 🙂 They’ve simplified the interface immensely, so as to not intimidate the n00bs, although I’m sure it’s not dumbed-down enough; don’t worry, for us power-users it still has all the bells and whistles there ‘in back’. But with voice, SVG, and User Javascript support (ala GreaseMonkey), it’s one of their bigger releases. The full changelog is on their site, I’m merely passing by them here….but it’s actually been getting decent response, even on Slashdot (believe me, that’s ‘decent’ for how /. normally looks upon non-Firefox products.

I can’t say I’m too impressed by their new ‘marketing’ on their website, er, the images that is. Some poor man’s superhero? Come on, paying customers demand more….

Still kicks the crap out of Firefox, though!

Oh, yeah, guess I should mention, Firefox 1.0.3 was released last week. Not much outside of security fixes…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:16 pm on April 15, 2005  

Whidbey Beta 2!!!

Just got my email for the beta, apparently it will be put on MSDN Subscriber Downloads in a few days and the kits will start arriving first week of May.

Whoooo-hooooo!!!!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:09 am on April 15, 2005  

Tax Day, and a small update

As if you needed a reminder, today’s that day alot of us dread, tax day…luckily this year was another straightforward year for us to file. Not a ton of peculiar situations, deductions, etc. especially as my wife’s business did not kick into gear until this year. So rather than pay the $300 fee our previous accountant charged (needless to say they did other family business and were easy to go with intially), I decided to pony up the $100 or so (yet refundable via rebate) for TurboTax.

Last year I gave TaxCut from H&R Block a try; but after using TurboTax there’s no comparison. It’s just so much more intuitive and filled with information and help that I didn’t struggle too much, even on those stock sales we run across year-to-year (so happy I now know what ‘cash basis’ is, ya)….

Anyway, the only downside was when I e-filed last nite, it said it would take 24-48 hours for the returns to be accepted by the federal/state systems, and to check back then. Only problem is April 14th 11:00PM + 24 hours = almost assured late filing. I would assume it won’t take that long, and even if rejected initially I can still resubmit with no penalty….wishful thinking, more than likely, though….

FYI, this year, paying in…major goof on my part….

Next year, it’s a full-fledged accountant all the way as we’ll have small-business written all over this year…

Anyhoo, sorry it’s been a slow week; I do have alot on my mind, but also on my plate. I took a Microsoft cert test on Monday (more on that this weekend; I passed, btw 🙂 ), started a new client on Tuesday and didn’t get home until 8:30 last nite from work-related functions, after which all of the above was needing to be wrapped up…perhaps I’ll have time to chat this afternoon, but until then….