My hatred of Microsoft and Adobe as a GNU/Linux user and a web developer
I had used Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and other Adobe products long before Adobe acquired Macromedia. At that time, I didn’t know the existence of GNU/Linux and open source communities. I didn’t even decide on my career as a web developer yet. Thanks to Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Vista, I decided to look for other Operating Systems beyond Windows that are able to run on the older hardware eternally (by the way, I didn’t know other OSes besides Windows back then), meaning that the future version of OS will still be able to work on old hardware. I found GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu.
After one year of switching back and forth between GNU/Linux and Windows, I finally made the decision to stick to GNU/Linux. However, I still would test the browser compatibility in IE through VirtualBox. And here comes my hatred of MSIE. During the course of my web development, I’ve read numerous articles about how Microsoft doesn’t follow the W3C standards for their Internet Explorer to make web developers suffer from browser incompatibility issue. I had enough struggle for the Internet Explorer, I decided to use some jQuery to encourage those who view my website to ditch their Internet Explorer.
I have become to hate Adobe since the day I switched to the Eclipse and NetBeans IDE to develop my projects. After Adobe announced that Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder are based on the Eclipse, I was excited to know that Adobe finally makes their development tools available on all of the major OSes. It disappointed me when I went to download the beta version of these two builders, it only offers Windows and Mac versions, no GNU/Linux version anywhere. Since Eclipse uses its own EPL license instead of GPL license to govern the use of Eclipse, Adobe can make modification to its code and sell it as their own products. This doesn’t mean that Adobe can discriminate against GNU/Linux users from using their products since Adobe uses Linux on their Adobe.com website.
As an opposite effect, these hatreds actually make me become more involved with open source technologies, such as HTML 5 and Ogg theora. I use open source ColdFusion engine Railo to develop ColdFusion websites as well. I think that ActionScript will be replaced by jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks and FLV will be replaced by either H264 or Ogg Theora depending on which side will win the online video wars.
The ColdFusion website is now fully data-driven
I learned a way to write code for the menus by using database instead of using cfswich. Now the course website is completely database-driven. I used the CMS approach to redesign the links in each menu. Here is the entire code for the content page that corresponce to the menu items:
<cfquery name=”qGetURL” datasource=”DSN0111″>
SELECT *
FROM tblMenu
WHERE 0=0 AND
<cfif isDefined(“URL.projectid”)>
menuID = #URL.projectid#;
<cfelseif isDefined(“URL.pageid”)>
menuID = #URL.pageid#;
<cfelse>
menuID = 18;
</cfif>
</cfquery><cfoutput>
<cfset filePath = ExpandPath(“#qGetURL.linkLoc#”)>
<cfif fileExists(filePath)>
<cfinclude template=”../#qGetURL.linkLoc#”>
<cfelse>
<div id=”noVal”>Not Found</div>
<cfinclude template=”index.cfm”>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>
As you can see from the above code, the file location and the file names are stored in the database instead of the page content. This way, I can create web pages inside site directories and then include it to the website through database without change the above code.
I also plan to create a ColdFusion web application that can directly update the database without launch MS Access. Right now I’m using CFEclipse to write the ColdFusion code on my Fedora system and virtualized Windows XP through VirtualBox to modify and viewing the database. My goal for this web application is to allow me to modify or view the database with less or no MS Access usage.
For those who don’t know, my ColdFusion course is Microsoft Access based, not MySQL based. I successfully installed ColdFusion 9 on my Fedora system, but I failed to install MS Access driver onto the system. That’s why I plan to create this application in the next few weeks.
First Time experiencing with GNU/Linux
I just came across an interesting article that talks about Fedora vs. Ubuntu. It makes me remember the first time I was experiencing with different GNU/Linux distros.
Back in the summer of 2009, I was frustrated with the slowness of Windows Vista. I was searching for the solution on how to fix this. Unintentionally, I watched a film from Discovery that talked about the history of the Internet. From the film, I learned that Bill Gates illegally avoided the competition between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and other illegal activities that Bill Gates did to avoid competition, as well as to avoid being sued. I thought that it’s time to switch the operating system.
Initially I was planning to switch to Mac. Because of the high price of the Macbook and Mac OS X only woks on the Apple products (I tried the Hackintosh hack and my laptop doesn’t support it), I downloaded two of the main GNU/Linux dstros, burned them to CDs, and tried them out. First I tried Ubuntu. I booted the OS with live CD many times and it kept go into the terminal. I looked for the problem online and found out that it’s the ISO problem. At that time, I didn’t have enough connection speed to re-download the ISO, so I continued to try Fedora live CD. It booted successfully. After playing around inside the live CD, I decided to install it. The installation process was very easy,. I chose to use the whole hard drive and removed Vista. The installation took about 10 minutes. After the installation, I could easily install my preferred web development tools right from its repositories, Netbeans, Apache, and PHP & MySQL. Later I upgraded to Fedora 12 when it came out.
During my later usage of GNU/Linux, I involved with Open Source movement to promote software freedom and fight against proprietary software. It enabled me to learn more about the bad side of proprietary software, especially Microsoft.
The layout of the website updated again
The layout of my main website has updated once again. Here are the changes:
- Rewrote page layout CSS to accommodate Internet Explorer
- Horizontal menu now only contains this semester’s courses to accommodate 800×600 screen
As you can see, I also changed background color for each element. I plan to change background images on EACH page in the near future, too.
Microsoft Gazelle – a new browser OS based on Internet Explorer
Microsoft announced Gazelle secure web browser Operating System concept back in 2009. When I first came across an article that talks about it on buntfu.com, I realized that Microsoft might borrow some code from Internet Explorer to build the OS. Whether MS does borrow the code or not, Internet hackers as well as online criminals will find a way to discover many security flaws just as IE since it’s a Microsoft product. As Ronnie Whisler stated in the article, “Internet Explorer is a virus, adware, spyware, and malware delivery device [as well as Windows]“. Now Microsoft is planning to kill Google Chrome OS through this new OS just as Internet Explorer did to Netscape in the past. We will see how this new OS concept is going as IE’s reputation continues to decrease.
IE doesn’t Follow Web Standards and Make Web Developers and Customers Suffer (Updated)
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) discovered a big security flaw by the Chinese a few weeks ago. They used this security flaw to hack to the Google’s main server. Meanwhile, Researchers has discovered more security flaws in IE that could let an attacker to take control of targeted computer, according to an article from Mashable “More Security Flaws Found in Internet Explorer“.
UPDATE: Similar article found on daniweb.com. It also mentioned about Firefox and Chrome. I like the first sentence of this article, “Another day, another IE flaw!” It means that the Internet Explorer patches that Microsoft offered are useless.
I read lots of complains about IE not follow web standard, thus web developers are frustrated about cross-browser compatibility for their websites. As a web developer and a GNU/Linux user, I test my website in Windows XP through VirtualBox from time to time. However, I do not test the cross-browser compatibility in IE. I test the functionality of my warning box in IE. If Internet Explorer is presented, the site stops loading and displays an error message in the warning box to encourage users to switch to other browsers in order to block the IE users.