austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

I'm getting funny dreams again and again

Little stray bit from the presentation and lunch, too. The person from the next town over and with the Mac --- with the laptop in the room, in fact --- was having trouble with one of the company's web sites. Not mine, mind you, but the one that the other programmer developed. (It's also the company's main web site.) The trouble is, it doesn't work on Safari. Well, most of it works, but there's particular parts regarding gathering data which just throw up an ASP error. It didn't always used to do this; somewhere around the change between Safari 4 and Safari 5 it broke, at least on Safari for Windows. (I should mention, Safari 5.1 for Windows is a lemon. It's not quite SimCity 3000 For Mac levels of undiluted hatred, but, it hasn't got the forward/back buttons working right, for crying out loud.)

Anyway, since the other programmer was there, presenting with me, I pulled him over to insist he talk with an actual client and tell one of the people who, theoretically, pays us for services why his site doesn't work. He just insisted it doesn't work because it needs some Visual Basic stuff and there's no Visual Basic on the Mac. I didn't mention how it used to work, or my belief that if I could look at his code I'd probably be able to figure it out, based on the error messages. And he went on to point out how Apple People think their computers are so great when they're assembled by Chinese slave labor and they don't even know that, which is indeed quite relevant to choosing not to make a web site display for Webkit-based browsers.

Eventually, though, he did figure a workaround which allowed the customer to see the web site being paid for, albeit by a really screwed up hack which looks to me like a complicated runaround for pulling the site up in Mozilla. I should've checked whether the thing worked in Firefox to start with anyway.

Trivia: The Domesday Book lists rentals for mills ranging from as low as 3 pence to as high as £3. Source: A History Of Mechanical Invention, Abbott Payson Usher.

Currently Reading: Those Gentle Voices, George Alec Effinger. The first interstellar expedition finds primitive humanoids there, starts meddling; within seven years the locals are on the brink of the Singularity, although since the book was written in the 70s it's not understood as such. I'm thinking the book is meant to be comical since if it's not then it's quite bad. The book has got a modestly pompous subtitle (``A Promethean Romance of the Spaceways'') so that weighs in on the ``comical'' side.

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