Date : Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:39:56 +0100
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: New Retro Auction Website
Rob wrote:
> Yep.. I find it much more reliable than any of the alternatives, at
> least for my machine with my browsing habits.
Well... yes. I _like_ Firefox and my collection of add-ons, but I have
to admit there's a hell of a memory leak somewhere. On an eeePC with 1Gb
RAM and SSDs, there is NO swapfile (save burning out the SSD!), so
eventually Windows will choke on running out of memory, and Firefox will
vanish from the task bar. Though I can usually tell when it is imminent
as all the pictures and icons vanish first. Nicely, giving the system a
kick isn't THAT difficult as Firefox will restore previous tabs. But
there is still a memory leak.
Ironically, MSIE8 handles it better, with individual tabs able to crash
and reload themselves. I've not used MSIE8 enough to know it because it
is totally different to the look'n'feel of MSIE 6/7 and, frankly, I
don't like it. At all. I only really use it for checking WindowsUpdate
and those rare webcams that are some crappy MSIE-only ActiveX jobbie.
> Yup... I've not looked at the page source, but it looks like a case of
> developers assuming certain behaviour from browsers rather than
> specifying what they want to happen.
:-) Maybe some distant day MSIE will actually implement the various
'standards' correctly? That goes quadruplicate if you're still using MSIE6!
> As per most sites. I get very used to pressing, e.g.
> 222222<tab>D<tab>etc for 25th Dec.
^^^^^^ ^^
Huh? :-)
>> The big danger with the date format as it LOOKS on your screenshot (too
>> tiny to see properly),
> It's full size, maybe your browser is squeezing it to fit it into your
> page width or height?
Don't be too literal, I'm not _that_ stupid!
It says "Birthd [18/12]". Because the browser is squeezing the left
column (while the right one appears huge).
> thankfully there aren't that many professional sites that use
> all-numeric dates any more, preferring "12 January"..
I notice Wikipedia is using 'full' dates. I could have sworn it used
numerical ones way-back-when.
> I didn't get that far, and it's fixed now, but there are several
> websites that have done that to me!
My b.log code did that. Luckily I actually tested for odd characters
before it went 'live' so I had a chance to recode it. And add \n and \p
for whitespace. And support Japanese (rather than have & blindly
converted so non-Latin text ends up like a bunch of numbered glyphs!).
> Another sign of a badly written website ... "MS-SQL: Error near ' in
> search query" or words to that effect ...
...or ANY site that goes tits-in-the-air with a page full of php errors
- when a site goes live, you ought to do error_reporting(0) because Joe
Sixpack isn't going to actually CARE what the problem is. Indeed, in
some cases it might be better that nothing happen than a dump of gibberish.
> And as for websites that totally disallow an ' in the name ... argh!
Ah, airline booking because cretin Americans use something even simpler
than Viewdata ever was (what, a five bit character set or something?). I
guess those people never heard of Irish names? O'Hanrahanrahanrahan? Or
even the publisher O'Reilly? That said, this "War on Terror" (bleurk!)
is making everybody lose their common sense. The problem obviously
existed way-back-when but people were smart enough to realise it might
possibly be a limitation of the system rather than _you_ evil miscreant
being given a name with "funny" punctuation in it (as in being born with
such a name is totally your fault - god help them with Scandinavian
names - what d'you think would be made of the slashed O and the thorn?).
> I had support at one, once, say "we only allow ASCII characters in
> our names, not foreign characters. they soon got short shrift on that
> one... and they fixed it ...
Hehe, that's about as stupid as websites that ask you to enter what your
country is, and THEN insist upon a valid US zip code. And don't cheat
and enter 90210 like I did, as 90210 as nowhere in France is Santa
Monica Boulevard... <sigh>
Best wishes,
Rick.
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...
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