A Saturday in september I went to the Rally Principe de Asturias with some friends. We went to the 12th and 15th Special Stage (the same, they drove it two times), which were the last stage of the rally. I wake up at 7 o’clock, I started my Ford Sierra, I pick up my cousin Jose and our friend Jorge, who came from Ribadeo to go to the rally, and we went to Pola, where Pikero, Omar and Sara were waiting for us in the Pikero’s Ford Capri to go.

We went to La Campa de San Juan, a famous crossroads on what some people sleep the night before the race. There are a couple of curves there that makes the zone spectacular. As we expected, the level was high and cars drove so fast, on the first pass the three first drivers were in fifteen seconds at the global chrono time (unfortunately on the last pass Alberto Hevia had lost many time because of a wheel flat, and the rally was decided). We ate our sandwitches between the first and the second special, and at middle evening we return home. My cousin and Jorge also went home when we arrived Oviedo, so they had to go for an hour and a half more than us to Ribadeo.

Bad luck for Berti Hevia, if that wheel had not puncture, he would made his best rally and he would win the race, or he almost be the second. In an international rally it is a very good position, and he deserved it. So that’s life.

Aries is another framework to develop rich web applications. It is developed by Seresco, the company where I work. It is a very good framework to develop management enterprise applications because it was designed and made thinking about productivity in the develop phase. An Aries developer can develop client search and management screens with all functionality in about 15-20 minutes. Sometimes it looks like magic, things simply works and we don’t know exactly why.

But behind the scenes there are a 4-5 people team thinking and working to make things once. Magic does not exists. Everything have code lines and everything have a convention, too. You can change the default performance of almost everything in Aries, but obviously you have to program it.

An Aries application is like a desktop application inside of your navigator. You have buttons, text fields, data grids, and a bunch of advanced components which are updated with Ajax technology making a good effect because page is never refreshed. It has little limitations compared to desktop applications, so there are some.

Aries is free software licensed with the Mozilla Public License. Binary files, sources and documentation are available in its web page. There is also a demo application to let you see the appearence of an Aries application. Use it at your own risk!

Almost a year and a half ago, I bought an Apple MacBook laptop. It was a hard decision between the MacBook and a Dell XP1330 but finally the MacBook won.

Today I still don’t know if I made de right decision, sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. The Macbook is a good laptop, and Leopard is a good Operating System, better than any Windows of course. But I had to install Windows XP into the MacBook to do some work, and it’s so bad. Windows runs quite good, but not like in laptops made for Windows. There are some details that make the user unhappy, like the power management, and when you have to work three or four hours every day, that details make you hate Microsoft (even more) and the laptop.

Fortunely, I can use Mac OS X now, and I don’t have to use Windows on the Macbook any more if I don’t want. I still don’t know what software to use to do some things, but day by day the use will give me that knowlegde.

Last month, I had some problems with the MacBook related to the battery charge and the keyboard zone. I took it to the Apple shop at Oviedo, and they changed the faulty parts and give it to me again. Unfortunately, gmail filtered the emails which were letting me know that the laptop was repaired and it staid there for more than a month, but finally I pick it up and it works very good.

Everybody is thinking about summer holidays. There are people who are waiting nervously to start them today. There are other people who are enjoying them. There are others (like me) who end them and are living again in the cruel dialy routine.

In these holidays, I returned to las rias baixas, in the occidental coast of Galicia. I went with Euge, my girlfriend, in the new Ford Sierra 2.0i that I bought to my brother-in-law. We spent a week visiting pretty places, going to the beach, eating good local food like Padron peppers, spider crabs and sardines, and drinking good local Albariño wine. We went camping to a very good campsite in San Vicente do Mar, near to O Grove. It is a little far of towns, but it’s so peaceful.

Now that my summer holidays are out, we only have some weekends to go away and travel. At August we want to go to Ciudad Rodrigo with some friends if we can. And at October we have the autum holidays, two weeks to make plans but with more cold weather and less hours of daylight.

Time run away and I’m always doing more and more things. I’m always thinking that I have to update my english (and spanish) blog but I can’t find the time.

Six months ago I made a promise that I couldn’t keep. Now I change it to a less demanding effort, and I will try to write at least one post every month (and keep it).

In this time I had some things to tell. I bought a mare called Queen and it had a foal that we called Kina. It will be a good mare.

Recently I also bought a car, a sixteen-year-old Ford Sierra what was of my sister and my brother-in-law. It is a good car, and it’s good-kept, so I expect to drive it for a long time.

I’m slowly moving all my things to my girlfriend’s house, so I expect that in a little time I will change my official home. Actually, I’m living there since a couple of months, but I still have a lot of things in my parent’s home, so I’m still officially living with them.

… I started a project to practise my English. Now, more than a year ago, there are only nine posts in this blog. It’s more than nothing, but less than wished.

There were hard times ending my engineering, and it provoked to leave other projects, almost all the projects I had, during the last 6 months. I reduced the time for other projects to the minimum and I spend all this time in the engineering project. So blogs, specially this, were the first thing I leave.

Now I restart it with the solid intention of writing at least a post every week. We’ll see if I achieve the goal.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend and she commented me the “benefits” from ASP compared to PHP. Comparisons are odious, and more in case of Microsoft. She told me that with ASP you can do almost all you need, but in many cases you have to pay an add-on or a plugin. In PHP, you can do almost all you need writing a line or a couple of lines of code.

In this case I can’t give my opinion because I never wrote a line of ASP code, and with PHP I only wrote a couple of hundreds of lines in simply scripts. But today, at my work, the title of this post came to my mind. Why? Because of Internet Explorer.

Have you ever noted that Internet Explorer 7 adds a useless vertical scroll bar in every pages that have no scroll? Ok, me neither (so it can be because I use Firefox :-/ ). Look at the demo. Just open Google and look at the right of the page. Can you see the scroll bar? If you can’t, probably you forgot to use IE 7. Or maybe you are using a beta version of the explorer :-!

Well, my job was to make it dissapear. It’s horrible to have a good-for-nothing scroll bar there for all the time, and sometimes, when you really have scroll, to have a div’s scrollbar and near of it that ugly grey bar.

All were indicating that it would be a CSS job. CSS has an style attribute named overflow. Default value for overflow is auto, and other values are scroll and hidden. Specifying it, you can control whether a page element shows the scrollbar or not. So it’s done. I started to review from down to up in the element’s hierarchy what element had its overflow: scroll style attribute, and all of them that specified overflow was to set it hidden. Furthermore, the body element had overflow: hidden. I can’t believe it. I started to search in nextapp’s echo forums (we are using echo2 framework) and in one topic I found that there was a quirk on IE6 that was fixed in some beta of IE7 and reappeared in the final version. The fix was to put overflow style in the html tag. In the html tag!! What will be the next, activate it on the browser preferences??

And what is the answer to the title’s question? Because people would use a real internet navigator, and because programmers won’t have to waste many time making specific workarounds for the IE bugs, and because www would be made with standards and probably we could see not-mobile web pages in cell phones and because the most used web navigator won’t be a f****** rubbish.

If Internet Explorer were an Open source project, it will be abandoned very much time ago, and almost nobody would use it. I’m sure that there is some minor open source navigators with much more quality than Internet Explorer. But that’s the life.

 Edit: Safari seems to be a little bad in some cases too. It generated me a lot of rubbish in this wordpress editor, but it can’t separate the paragraphs as I like. Sometimes I think it’s me the bad thing .

It is my new pet.

She is a spanish dapple-grey mare, and her name is Pedricera. I adopted her last year in December and since this we make long walks between the trees into the forest. Obviously she carry me. And when I ride her she adopts a wonderful pose, and she curve her neck and gets a middle trot that make us go so elegant.

Here is a photo to ilustrate our pose:

The first time I saw her, I said: “I’ll adopt her if I can”. And I could. I hope she lives for many years, and also hope we have good moments like the photo’s one.

I have a new gadget, my new MacBook. I’m still learning how to use it , and I’m still waiting to know why some people say “If you use a MacBook, you won’t ever want other”. It is a very nice laptop, but there is other laptops at the same level.

And its OS doesn’t have a penguin. It seems like it is a little daemon.

I’ll tell you my advances using the laptop. Maybe after some time I write a sentence like that.

“El toro” (traduced: the bull) is a funny game for the weekend nights. It’s a modified version of “La peseta”, a popular game for the asturian teens.

“La peseta”, that universaly we could name the coin, consists on putting four little glasses together in the middle of a table, half fill them with calimocho (a drink made with wine and coke) or beer or wathever you want to drink, and, in turns, try to bounce the coin in the table to put it into a glass. If you put the coin into one of the glasses, you may order another player to drink it, and you throw the coin again. If you put the coin into the middle of the glasses (there is a hole between the four glasses) you order to other players to drink all of the glasses.

In el toro, rules are different. The mecanism to throw the coin is the same, but in this time you only have one glass half filled. When the coin comes to you, you have to throw it until you put it into the glass, drink it and give the coin to the next player. There are two (or more) coins in the table, and when the second coin comes to a player that is still throwing the first one, this player drinks all the glasses of the table because he was catched by the bull. It is a stressing game, and in half an hour you are really filled of drink, and sometimes a little drunk, but it’s so funny.

Last friday we were playing to el toro, and we laugh a lot the players and the drivers, that were watching the game without drink. Some of us got a little drunk, but it was not so serious. It was a good night.