Why the World Wide Web would be better without Micro$oft

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 :-).

My new pet

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.

My new gadget

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, what a game

“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.

The dangers of road

Roads always are warning us about their dangers. At the last week, it’s always showing me dangerous situations like if the road was telling me: “Be careful, keep clean your mind and pay attention, or you will crash at the first time you get distracted”.

I say these things because since last Saturday I saw a couple of times the problems that can cause animals in the middle of the road.

Last Saturday I was making sider in my parent’s country house, that is near to AS-1 motorway that connects Mieres with Gijón. It was about 8 o’clock at night and I was taking my things and getting ready to go home, when I hear a claxon, a brake and inmediately a crash. Inmediately it sounds a new crash, a moment of calm and other crash. When I went out to see what was happends, it were 4 cars stopped on the right side of road, and a car in the middle of the road. I couldn’t see any more because it was very dark and I was a little far, but Monday I read in the newspaper that the accident was caused by a horse that walked into the motorway. It dead, but neither of people who crash had health problems.

But it’s not all. Yesterday at night, when I went to Oviedo to take home my girlfriend Eugenia, I ran over a dead wild boar that was in the middle of the road again. At a few meters there was other car on the right side and I stopped behind it to watch if my car was good and if the other driver was good. My car had not anything damaged, but the girl of the other car was very nervous. She still was on the car, and she went down very nervous when she saw us. We calm her a bit, called police and watch her car. It was damaged at the front because she knock down the wild boar, but it wasn’t very much. When she calmed down, she told us how it happened and we were talking and waiting for the police and for her parents. They came near together, and then I took another look to my car with the light of the police to verify that it was all fine and we follow our way to Oviedo.

There was all scares, but sometimes I think that if we were in the motorbike instead of in the car, probably it would be more serious because probably we would crash. So I have to be careful on the road, and much more if I drive my motorbike.

English lessons

Finally, as I wrote last friday in my other blog, I asked for help with English to my friend Xilimbra. As soon as she read the email, she took a look at my first post and she sent me her correction. I though it was impossible to make all these mistakes in a little bunch of words, but it’s possible 🙂 And many of them are caused by the FromLostToTheRiverismo that always chase me when I start writing in English. Think in Spanish and write in English is not a good way.

With that post we start a test time writing (for me) and correcting (for her) posts. I will edit posts to put corrections in them because later that corrections may help me again to go through the good way writing. Thanks, Xilimbra, and comments are allowed to the rest of you.

Continuing customization

Wednesday I started this blog and I started configuring it. I had to leave it without finish, because it was too late and I had to go dinner.

Today I signed up again at wordpress and I continued customizing the blog. Here is a list of things what I did:

• I wrote the page About to describe what is the objective of this blog.
• I customized the blogroll putting my main reference pages. This will earn by the time.
• I tested some themes for the blog. Finally I choose Rubric, a simple, smart two-column theme with some options of configuration.
• In the theme options, I did two changes:
  • Disable snap.
  • Configure widgets, to show sections Meta, Categories, Blogroll, Recent posts, Blog stats and Pages. Some of this sections are not esentials, but I don’t like a almost empty side bar.

For a time, the blog is customized. In the future, if I need more and more widget, I will have to choose other template, a three-column one. But now, with this two-column, there is more width to the text, the main part of a blog though.

Starting at WordPress.com

Now that I decided to start a blog in WordPress, I had to configure it a bit.

I configured about 25 wordpress blogs the last academic year to use them in an assignature of teaching students. They had to go to schools for two months to make practices of teaching, and they shared their experiences with their partners (and with the rest of the world) writing them in a blog. The project was successful, but behind the scenes it was a lot of work from all the organization team.

So I have some experience configuring wordpress blogs. What I made in this blog was:

• Go to the general options and adjust de blog comment, time zone and date and time formats. The default values are english formats, so I only changed the blog comment.

• Test the rest of the options (reading, writing, discuss, privacy..) and adjust the height of the writing box, the number of posts in the main page, the default category, etc

I have some other options and features to change and test, but I have not much time, so step by step. Tomorrow I will write a little more.

Hello world!!

This is my real Hello World! post.

This is my secondary blog. The first one is here an and it’s in Spanish. But I’ve been thinking about to write writing a blog in English, because I read a lot of documents in english English, but I almost ever always write in spanish Spanish, so it’s difficult to me to write in english English. And, at the same time, I test I’m testing the wordpress application as a user (I already testi it I have already tested it as an admin) and play playing a little with it. And maybe, in a some time I export my blogger blog here and write in wordpress in spanish Spanish too.