Alexis’ Blog
Today, I found a good one. Internet Explorer has a “Save As …” feature that let you save a page that you are visiting.
The page I have includes a table with a cell that has the align and valign attributes set to center and middle respectively. Once saved with Internet Explorer, these change to vAlign and align and center and middle respectively. Yes. Meaning that the values are swapped. Now the valign says center instead of middle, which will work with most browsers, but the worst is the align that is set to middle. That should never happen.
This is with Internet Explorer 7. It may be a perpetual bug that they need to keep so people’s websites stay broken forever, but at least they work. It seems to be that it would be easy to fix, however.
Hope this helps you in case you were saving some site with Internet Explorer and looking at the output with FireFox, Opera, Safari or SeaMonkey.
Alexis Wilke
CEO
Made to Order Software Corporation
No more cords for your computers to run? Is that a joke? Not really. All these cords to get electricity to our computers and other gadgets are annoyingly in our way.
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (02/22/1857 – 01/01/1894), a Germain physicist, invented many things as he was researching about electricity. He proved that VHF and UHF existed. In order to do that, he created coils and found out that electricity could go from one coil to another without the need for any direct contact. In other words, the magnetic field generated by one coil can be transmitted to another coil which then transform that field in electricity.
…more
Have you ever thought that it would be great to write one document including all the translations in a single file? Outside of the fact that this makes the document relatively large, it makes the translation really fast, the translator can see the sentence in all the other languages and translate from that.
I actually wrote an HTML test file with two styles. One is named English and the other is named Français. And since a style entry can depend on the currently selected language, you can write style entries that get hidden when on or the other language is selected.
…more
We have finally published version 1.10 of Order Made!®
This version include one important change: the ® after Order Made!. Made to Order Software now owns the Order Made!® trademark.
We also included a few bug fixes, mostly transparent to our users.
Alexis Wilke
CEO
Made to Order Software Corporation
Many people think of the Internet as an incredible system that let people of all nations communicate without a problem.
The fact is that governments are in control, as always.
The Internet was born in 1995 and, with it, cheap worldwide communications. The truth is that the Internet, very early, was used as much by programmers as it was by marketers and political minorities. This is where the problem started.
In 1997, France arrested 3 business men of a newly formed Internet company. The charges were: your website is displaying discriminatory information about Jews. They were detained, in jail, for about 3 months before being acquainted.
In 1998, China decided to block many alien (foreign) websites. They created what is now called the Great Firewall of China. This mainly prevents Chinese people from getting information from the outside. I do not know of specific websites, but more or less, the idea is simple: if you attempt to go to LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, it may not work from China. These websites can be very controversial and thus are blocked by government mandates. And of course, as a Chinese person, you may just not know that these sites exist since you cannot access them (unless you travel outside the country).
In 1999, France asked Yahoo! to remove some content from “France soil”. Yahoo! had (still has?) groups of anti-Semite writing discriminatory messages and French citizens had access to these boards. Such groups are forbidden in France.
In 2007, India asked all the Indian ISPs to block YouTube because one of the video on there was showing something that was contradictory to their culture. We know of this from the outside simply because one of the ISPs, in Hong Kong, made a mistake and most of the planet could not access YouTube for about 4h.
The US has also been contemplating ways to control the freedom. So far, it seems that it has not yet succeeded. However, in 2006 (2007?) the congress sign one regulation: Casinos that charge money are not authorized for any US citizen. And if you access a casino from another country, your credit card bank has to report you to the Federal Government. Whether it is really applied, I do not know, but that’s there and since then I do not see as many ads for Casinos online.
This where we stand with Free Speech on the Internet!
Alexis Wilke
CEO
Made to Order Software Corporation
This year, 2008, I decided to register and go to LinuxWorld. It is in August and my kids are not at school so it was easy to manage. Also, I had to go to the French consulate to get a birth certificate for my daughter. In other words, I had the chance to do two things at once!
I found it quite interesting to hear that many people were not too excited about the event. Many of the people walking around are like me: they themselves sell their own Linux solution. In other words, they are not going to be customers. I had the chance to talk with Roger Levi, the Vice President of the Open Platform Solutions at Novell. I was surprised to not see them (and RedHat, if that matter) having a large booth as usual. This is why. This show attracts people in the field, not customers.
So why are all of these people attending the show since they already do Linux? Well… they certainly are interested in what their competition does! Although, for us at Made to Order Software, we do not see them as competition since most of the things we do have nothing to do with most of the people present at the show. And on my end, I specifically was in search of a possible partner for an idea I have. And of course, maybe I’d find a few things I had not seen before and could be of interest.
I have to say, it was similar to the first time I went to the show: 50% of the companies present are selling data center or network products. That is probably why the show is not so good for me, in a way. Now, of course, some have terrific solutions. And there are the other 50% of the companies too, many that are really good. There is what I liked and disliked:
Coverity was present! These guys create terrific software that checks your code very closely. It finds a lot of bugs and potential bugs and gives you detailed reports of why those are. For instance, it will tell you if you are eventually going to use an uninitialized variable in C or C++.
From what I understand, they now fully support Java. Good thing, also variables are always initialized, there are ways to write bogus code in Java too.
This company creates more than complete computers that run on nearly no power. They were showing the computer at LinuxWorld displaying a movie, using a lot of processor power, and yet, the AMP on their meter was very low. (I do not remember how much, but in comparison to usual monster computers, it is like 1/10th.)
If you want to run a farm and don’t want to break the bank on electricity, this is your solution! Send them an email at inquiry@sustaincomputing.com
This small company already has 300 customers. All wireless ISPs. They offer a software written in PHP to control all your ISP servers including emails, websites, billing and filters (fast & dirty as well as deep packet sniffers.)
I was impressed because I always thought of an ISP as a huge complex set of heavy tools to control all sorts of things, but in fact, it is rather simple. Of course, I’ve been in I.T. for a while, thus simple for me is not equal to simple to you, but that’s my way of saying that there is really no magic other than what I already know of running a set of servers. …more
I heard of Voyager 2 and the fact that it was still functional: 30 years after it left Earth! Just that is amazing to me.
The craft went through the termination shock several times now (5 if I’m correct). This is far. Further away from the Sun than Pluto. And Pluto is on average around 39.5 AU from the Sun. It is even further than Eris and Eris lies at about 67 AU on average.
Now, July 2008, we finally got enough data from Voyager 2 to know what is happening at the termination shock. It is what I would call the first edge of the Solar system. Some 84 AU but really it changes all the time, which explains why Voyager 2 already went in and out several times. That place is where the Solar wind slow down from 350 km/s to only 130 km/s. Solar winds are formed of atoms that are ejected by the Sun and travel very, very far. This forms a bubble inside which the planets reside. In some respect, it is protective, in others, it is quite destructive. On Earth, we are protected because of the Earth magnetic field (our atmosphere protects us from some light waves, not the Solar wind.)
And now we have finally recorded measurements of the amount of particles that reside at the edge. The results are quite different from what was expected…
And, I thought it was quite interesting to read that all the theories used a couple months ago where no good to explain what really happens at the edge of any star bubble. With that in mind, how can we really tell about anything beyond our solar system?
This brings me to a good analogy in software development. You write thousands and thousands of lines of code and it looks like it works great. You start selling your product and once in a while, a customer tells you that it does not work for them. And you have no clue why it fails on that customer computer…
So… our theory was: it works for me, therefore the code is working, ready for sale and it will work on all computers since they are all alike. The truth is: there is still at least one bug, and really very likely more.
Anyhow, I hope we’ll learn a lot more about the outside of the solar system as Voyager 1 & 2 continue their journey.
Alexis Wilke
CEO
Made to Order Software Corporation
This week, Amazon published a brand new set of tools for merchants. We already had PayPal and Google Checkout, now we have the same with Amazon.
We will notice that Google Checkout has had a hard time to really catch up with PayPal. I’m sure Google is doing okay on that front, but you rarely see a website with a Google Checkout button. One reason why the Google Checkout was not being used so much is that their interface is excellent in complexity (we can clearly see that it was written by people with doctorates.) I did not see Amazon’s yet, but I’d bet that their API is straight forward in comparison. If implementing a cart payment takes you a whole month, you may just as well not do it (well, Made to Order Software has done it! But still…)
On the other hand, Amazon already has millions of links from everyday people to sell whatever Amazon accepts to sell (which is pretty much everything you can imagine as long as it is legal.) Their weight cannot be ignored. Paypal is just that, Paypal. Amazon is a lot more. It already includes the stores.
And of course, Paypal is somewhat difficult to use. Amazon has worked on their Checkout process for years to make it as user friendly as possible (heard of that One Click patent?) So having an Amazon button will make a lot of sense to a lot of people. It will certainly spread quickly. And we will probably soon offer that option on our own website!
Alexis Wilke
CEO
Made to Order Software Corporation
Dear reader,
Yes. With all these terms, it is quite easy to get lost.
As a developer, my skills are quite extensive. I started with Logo, learned assembly language, BASIC, C, C++… and all these other languages in between, those that most people pass by such as Ada, Eiffel, Icon… And the languages you kind of have to learn because you’re in it: Bourne Shell, configuration files for 100 different software, Makefile, etc.
And once you know all of these languages, you think you’re done. Well… Not quite!
The web has got it’s own set of languages! It started a while back with SGML. A simple markup language primarily used to describe documents with simple formatting or features. SGML used tags like HTML. HTML strengthen the language so it could be extended, was easier to write, and less prone to errors. Then came XML. This is like HTML with one more aspect: every tag must be closed or marked empty. So <br> became <br/> and <td> must be closed with </td>.
…more
Today, I stumbled upon a new link in Google. A link that brought me to a page full of tools a webmaster can use to know how their website is doing according to the Google Spider (the program that search all the pages on your website.)
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
I was not aware of the fact that you could download a CSV file (spreadsheet file compatible with Open Office and MS Excel) with all the errors last generated by the Google spider. You can also look at the errors directly in your account.
So… did I have errors? Well! Many. In part because each page is duplicated 3 times (English, French and Spanish), but also because, as I discovered, the Google Spider will at times change the case of your filenames before querying a new page. Some people say that Google is case sensitive as expected, but I say that Google must have an strtolower() call somewhere. Either that, or they use invalid links from other pages (pages outside of our website.)
The main problem here is that they do not show any referrer. So I cannot know whether it is Google or not. For sure, Google uses these wrong filenames to access our site.
Now, in most cases, I use lowercase names for my pages. Actually, I do not think that any page has a name written with capital letters. However, the files generated by Doxygen do. And that’s the ones that generate the case errors. I’m not too sure whether we can fix the Doxyfile, but I found a website mentioning the fact that the mod_speling module from Apache can do that for you automatically. So I turned that feature on to make sure that it would work properly. I will have to wait a week or so to see whether they still have problems. One concern is that the content of the all lowercase file will be 100% the same as the file without all the lowercase, meaning that Google will see what looks like duplicates.
In regard to mod_speling, you can find the documentation on the Apache website (apache.org). The module is defined in details and current supports two options: CheckCaseOnly and CheckSpelling. The first option will make sure that only the case sensitivity is removed. The second option turns on the spelling feature. Any filename that is different by only one character is accepted (it may also be two swapped letters as in: foo76.html instead of foo67.html) I suggest you be careful with the second option. The spelling feature is powerful but it can also generate strange behaviors. The first option is what I used.
Note that you can use that feature within a Directory tag. I also use that because the problem only happens on the Doxygen files, not all the files. Thus, I have the following in my Apache configuration file:
<Directory “…/en/sswf_docs”>
CheckCaseOnly on
</Directory>
Thank you.
Alexis Wilke
Made to Order Software Corp.
