Outlook Web Access stuck in 2002???

So, I dig Outlook Web Access (OWA) when I use it in IE. It is slick and I could probably just use that without ever touching Outlook. Lots of AJAX (shit the XMLHttpRequest object was MADE for OWA) and a slick interface. But when you use other browsers you are handed the shit version (oh yea they call it the light version). Which works you can read the information but the interface is not as useful. This could have been gotten away with in 2002 but not now when the XMLHttpRequest is implemented by all major browsers and all browsers have less bugs than IE. Sigh... I don't get it. It can't be that hard to implement it into other browsers. Maybe I should take a weekend and do it and give it to MS so, all browsers will be useful instead of being locked into IE if you want a decent webmail client.

Vista + UAC == Security by Annoyance

I have been using Vista for the past few months and I have not been very happy with it. It is annoying, slow and gets in my way more than any other OS I have used. A great example of this is something I ran into the other day. Here is the filesystem setup.

* Inetpub
  * logs
    * w3svc1

So, that is nothing special. The IIS logs have been moved to Inetpub so what, right? Well you get a UAC prompt when you go to access Inetpub you click okay fine. Then navigate down to w3svc1, guess what? You get another UAC prompt at w3svc1, wtf. If I just elevated my privs for the parent folder why do you f'ing ask me again. I can understand it from the security person's perspective. The user might not have any qualms going into a folder but the folder down below they might not have access or it might be something they shouldn't be accessing. But, if you do have access and it has been within a certain time period (say 1 minute) let me through without prompting me! I remember when I first got Vista and I was playing with it I counted the prompts for making a folder and renaming it, it was 6 prompts kind of sad. Granted it wasn't in a folder you don't normally do it (Program Files) but it should still not prompted me that much. I then came up with a phrase "Security through annoyance" which is exactly what the Mac ads are targetting. Rather sad to see this, I wish I could talk to the people who wrote UAC and see what they were thinking.

Recursive Acronyms

Today I am writing a paper and I thought it would be funny if there was a recursive acronym. Of course this has already been around for a long time :(. Anyways it is a pretty funny read to distract you for the day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym. It is almost as fun as trying to talk multi-threaded :).

A nice little IE6 css quirk

I recently ran into an issue with a clients site on IE6. The top navigation had a nice line at the bottom for no reason that I could see. All padding, margins and borders where removed from all elements and removing all elements besides some images and the main div did not fix the issue. Needless to say this led to lots of cussing, drinking of coffee, issuing death threats to IE and head banging against the desk (thankfully I didn't break my desk!).

I finally found the problem though! The issue was that all of the main elements were set to a position of absolute except for one image. Apparently in IE6 if you don't have all of your sub-elements as position absolute weird shit like this happens. I don't know if this is documented anywhere I didn't check but it sucked nonetheless.

Thankfully IE7 worked "correctly" although there are still a few small issues, but what browser doesn't have them?

Off for some more coffee and working on other boring crap.

Pet Peeve #2349123

Now, I know guys and especially geeks have a stereo type of not having style. But guys give me a fucking break if you are going to wear nice clothes (i.e. slacks and a dress shirt) wear some shoes that match! I don't care if you are wearing $3,000 slacks if you show up and have mud-caked doc marten knock-offs it just doesn't look right!

Alright back to security shit.

Top 10 Signs you are a Computer Geek

1) You get two or more caffeine headaches in a day (one in the morning, one in the afternoon)
2) You would prefer to read technical books instead of an alternative
3) You know all of the free wifi hot spots within a 5 mile radius of your house
4) You often make jokes in crowds that get blank responses because people don't know what the fuck you are talking about
5) At your local bookstore the employees ask you to find books in the technical section
6) You can look at program's user interfaces and tell the language or framework it is built in
7) You often look at programs and mentally figure out how they built something
8) You try and port computer ideas into normal day tasks, for instance multi-threaded conversations.
9) You are multi-lingual but none of them are spoken languages
10) You can speak a whole sentence in acronyms