If Microsoft Insist On Making It Nigh-on Impossible For Us To Test IE Effectively Then Why Do They Think We Should Bother Supporting It?

But I decided that was a bit too long, so I took inspiration from the soup kitchen chef instead, it’s more to the point.

Anyway the reason I’m back writing about adventures in IE testing land is I have a week of some horrid IE browser testing of my current, JavaScript heavy, project coming up if the first quick check through all versions of IE is anything to go by. Yes I know I should have been testing as I went along, but having to refresh 9 browsers with every change really kills my buzz (especially when 3 of those are IE).

So I did some initial browser testing last week and got zero issues in 6 browsers, but each version of IE threw up massive amounts of JavaScript errors — absolutely all over the place — and we all know how annoying debugging JS is in IE. This combined with my aging (and decidedly creaky) Windows XP Virtual Machine (running in Parallels on a Mac Pro with more than enough grunt to run multiple VM’s all at once) meant that tonight I decided to look for new alternatives (as multiple versions of IE on a single VM have never been great anyway).

So single VM images (as light and quick as possible) was my plan and I started to do some research, and found the following:

• Microsoft handily supply a bevvy of Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image’s exactly for this situation. Score 1 Microsoft!
• These are Virtual PC images, which is only available for Windows… but I found these instructions for converting them to run with either VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox. Score 1 Mac and the sweet, sweet people on the Internet

So I’m all set right? The steps aren’t that difficult and I choose to try VirtualBox as

1. I’ve tried VMWare Fusion before and wasn’t that keen.
2. I know that VMWare won’t run at the same time as parallels. A big minus there.
3. I’ve wanted to try VirtualBox for a while.

I do a few downloads, the conversion stuff and within the hour I have VirtualBox booting the image. It boots quickly and it’s nippy, I assume they’ve stripped Windows down to the bare bones with just enough to run IE properly - which is what I was going to try and do anyway. Windows says something about having to re-activate so I try, that fails but says I have 3 days so I figure that has to be due to the last step I haven’t completed, which I then do and reboot. Only to get the following:

1. WGA prompt
2. Follow instructions
3. Fail
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 a couple more times
5. Search Google and find out that they’ve gone and restricted it to running in Virtual PC only. Microsoft FAIL. It’s in the EULA so I should have noticed it… Like I’m going to read every EULA put in front of my face.

Peter L who is the “Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division” has the following month and a half old update:

I’ve spent some time investigating this issue, and now understand that the VPC images used to work on other hosting environments, but with the latest release, don’t any more. We have a better understanding of the issue now, and while we’re looking for a solution, we don’t have one right now. If you’re using the VPC’s, and they don’t work any more, I encourage you to email me, with your name, how you’re using them and the hosting environment that you’re using.

I’ll drop him an email but I don’t expect to get a resolution any time soon.

So a couple of hours of work and I’m back to square one, the only positive thing I can take from this is VirtualBox seems quite fast and neither it nor Parallels have complained about the other. So I might try converting my Dev VM’s and setting up a new Multi-IE Windows VM on there.

But the big thing I take from this is that Microsoft don’t want you to play with them if you don’t own a Microsoft football. I quite honestly would be quite happy to do that, to never have to open IE again would suit me fine.

Unfortunately that would also mean commercial suicide for a web developer who works on public facing sites.

However it is still going strong and a couple of things prompted me to release this update to bring it to v1.2.1.

The first thing was Tom Hirashima (sorry Tom, wasn’t sure if you have a site you want me to link to) sent me an email last week with an update to the code to allow it to work with the latest versions of Prototype & script.aculo.us out of the box (1.6.1.0 & 1.8.2 respectively). Although the last time I tried the cropper with the latest versions of them both it worked fine, you just had to change the bundles that script.aculo.us included, Tom has made some further changes. This is a good thing as for the past couple of years I’ve pretty much been out of the prototype & script.aculo.us loop having moved to MooTools and now jQuery (which I hated at first, but that’s another story).

The second thing was that the cropper was mentioned (and my how old does this site design look to me now) in the latest (and as usual excellent) Railscast, Cropping Images.

As a part of integrating Tom’s changes I decided to tackle a load of bugs from the bug list to try and reduce the list so I can keep on top of it better going forward (a long list of open bugs is never conducive to getting any of them fixed).

Here’s a full list of the changes:

• Added support for latest versions of Prototype & script.aculo.us (1.6.1.0 & 1.8.2 respectively). Changes provided by Tom Hirashima.
• No-longer package prototype & script.aculo.us with the release
• Changed tests to use google ajax libraries API to load prototype & script.aculo.us
• Added option to not auto include the cropper CSS file
• #00008 - Fixed bug: Dynamic include of cropper CSS expected cropper.js and failed when using cropper.uncompressed.js
• #00028 - Fixed bug: Doesn’t work with latest script.aculo.us - Fix by Tom Hirashima
• #00030 - Fixed bug: Doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5 (CSS include issue)
• #00007 - Fixed bug: onEndCrop isn’t called when moving with keys
• #00011 - Fixed bug: The image that is to be cropped does not show in IE6.0 — included CSS fix
• Tidied up source code & fixed issues that jslint found so it will compress better

Finally as usual, please use the bug reporting link or discussion list mentioned on JavaScript Image Cropper UI code page rather than leaving comments to report bugs.

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So I’m going to give it a whirl, it might be rubbish - but lets hope not.

However instead of posting on this site under an F1 category I decided to start a new site entirely dedicated to my F1 musings, to keep it separate from all the techy stuff I write here, so behold F1heat.com.

The elevator pitch for Where to Start With goes like this:

Where to Start With helps you when you’re trying out new bands and artists by providing community-powered recommendations written by die hard fans.

If that new band you want to try has 10 CD’s out, then Where to Start With will give you… well, where to start with them!

The whole idea behind this site came from a need me and my friend found ourselves having; many times we would hear a song or read about a band that sounded interesting but then when we did go to try that band we would find they had a handful of releases out already. Where is the best place to start with them? Traditionally unless you got a specific recommendation for an album you would just try the lucky dip approach and hope you found a winner. If you got lucky you might have just found your new favourite band, however if you picked a rotten egg you may dismiss your potential new favourite band based on your opinion of one of their poorer releases.

A personal example was when I was recommended to listen to Porcupine Tree and given one song to try. That song was awesome, however Porcupine Tree have a massive back-catalogue (9 albums, 6 live/compilation albums and 4 EPs) and from trying a few releases out I found that they are very diverse and I still haven’t managed to get into them, although from that initial song I really wish I could. What I really needed was a guide to tell me where to actually start with Porcupine Tree, for example something that said "for starting out with Porcupine Tree what you really need to buy first is their album X".

This is how Where to Start With was born and also basically how it works — each band or artist will have an article about them which gives a short history/description of the band and each of their main releases (e.g. Albums & E.P.’s) with a little description. Any user can add these articles and each article is in the wiki-style, e.g. anyone can edit the descriptions to add new information and fix mistakes etc.

The real core of the site comes into play when people start adding their opinions on artists, once again anyone can do this, but it is better for people who are currently fans of the artist to add their opinion. Each opinion includes a rating, a recommendation (more on those later) and a personal comment on each of the albums for the artist. We then take these opinions and produce an article that gives you recommendations on where to start with the artist, what to try after that and even sometimes what to avoid.

What makes this different to other sites?

Well, whereas other sites, software and services may give you reviews, the most popular or most listened to albums those may not necessarily be the best releases to start off with a new artist.

For instance Reefs debut album "Replenish" is absolutely amazing and one of my all time favourite albums, however pretty much anyone interested in starting with Reef would be best advised to start with their second album "Glow", which is much more accessible in general. Another clear example would be Nirvana, I personally hardly ever listen to Nirvana’s "Nevermind" album any more (as I know all of Nirvana’s albums inside and out, every cough and guitar string noise included) and I would rate "In Utero" as my favourite album however "Nevermind" obviously would be the album I would recommend anyone new to Nirvana should start out with.

But going further than that after you have tried the "essential" release Where to Start With helps you with which release to follow the essential release with, a wildcard album and even sometimes what to avoid - these can be really difficult to determine from the other methods.

About the recommendations.

Each Where to Start With article can have the following recommendations for each release to help guide you:

• Essential: The the first release to try, the best introduction to the artist.
• Follow with: The next release to try after the essential release.
• Also recommended: Another good release to try.
• Wildcard: A release that may not be "the norm" for the artist but still could be interesting. If you try the essential release and weren’t so keen this should be different enough to be worth a try.
• Avoid: Yes, some users will also tell you what to avoid.

The votes of each person on each release are added up to ensure that each article has one of each of the above recommendations (where applicable) and the more opinions that are added the better the recommendations become. You also have access to personal comments of each person who gave their opinion to give you a better insight into why they voted how they voted. And finally, just in case there is a close call between releases you can also see the breakdown of the votes for each release.

Sounds great, how do I get started?

Well we’re currently in private beta and have been running with a small handful of users for the past couple of weeks but are accepting applications to the beta and adding new users on a daily basis. The reason we’re currently in private beta is to ensure that the platform is solid and discover any issues, we’re not sure how long this will take but we obviously want to be out of beta as soon as possible. We also have setup a dedicated blog for Where to Start With which you can follow if you want to be kept up to date with progress of the beta and other new things (as we’re not finished adding features yet).

It’s working for me already!

Even with the small handful of users in the initial phase of the private beta I’ve already found one new band who I would have probably a) never heard of and b) not known where to start with without the site. There is more on this in the post It’s working for us on our blog.

So give it a whirl, and do get in touch to give us your thoughts etc.

Hulu is a (US only) website which allows you to stream TV shows (in pretty good quality) to your computer via Flash, it has deals with some of the major US TV companies and has shows added very shortly after they are originally aired and seem to stay available online for a long time (e.g. much more than the 7 days you get with the iPlayer). You get very few advert interruptions, roughly 4 or 5 for a program that would run an hour on TV, and the adverts generally only last around 15 seconds or so, aiming to take the amount of time that you would normally spend fast forwarding through 3+ minutes worth of adverts if you recorded a program on your PVR.

It really is a top-notch user experience and it is the kind of thing that could really take off big, and from what I’ve seen of other services is the closest thing in to my In an ideal world thoughts when I wrote about the BBC iPlayer over a year ago.

boxee is a wonderful-looking piece of media centre software (which by the way is going to be running on my next media centre when I get round to doing that) that not only allows you to play media on your machine or from DVD’s etc. but also connects to some popular TV streaming websites — such as the BBC iPlayer, Hulu and more.

The "situation" is that Hulu has been forced by the content providers to not support boxee any more, their blog post on the situation and on the boxee blog for a start).

I personally don’t understand it, I assume that the TV companies don’t pay Hulu to support their distribution costs - so it probably costs them next to nothing — but will probably be currently providing them less revenue than traditional broadcasting. However why they see a difference between using a piece of software to make getting TV programs onto your TV a little bit easier than using a browser on the same machine really makes no sense.

This is the kind of thing that leads people to fall back to other almost-as-frictionless means of getting the same content we currently have available, which of course currently means torrents. And that is what the rebuttal on lifehacker basically says and shows you what to do if you were so inclined.

My guess is this whole situtation thing is because the media companies are currently doing deals with set-top box companies to make hardware to do the same thing as the boxee/hulu combination, but obviously with more control, more revenue for them and probably more adverts, more restrictions and a less polished user experience.

While that is working perfectly adequately for my current setup it does have one downside, when I setup a new server I will have to setup the crontab file too. With this method when I deploy my app my scheduled tasks would get deployed and be running out of the box. Nice.

I had been referred to a dentist that specialises in doing root canals, so this was my first visit to this dentist and he did a few things that showed he really empathised with his customer.

When I arrived one of the first things that the receptionist asked me to do was to pick a music CD from a list of 100, which seemed a little strange but I didn’t ask any questions.

What the dentist did when I entered his room really showed me that he empathised with people who had to undergo this (hour long) treatment. It included the following:

1. He spent about 5 minutes explaining the procedure in detail with me, explaining what each step would entail and what the goals of each step were and answered any questions clearly.
2. When he was giving me the injection to numb my mouth he gave me extra just to make sure - as my tooth had been causing me some pain before hand.
3. And here’s the big one. As I couldn’t do anything for the hour I was there, except sit still, the music "CD" I’d chosen from the list turned out to actually be a music DVD which he played on a plasma screen on the ceiling directly above me.

How considerate is that? Now I couldn’t hear it all the time, but most of the time I could, and in any case it gave me something to help pass the time and to think about/concentrate on during the hour I couldn’t do or say anything. If I’d know that’s what the choice of music was for I’d have spent a little longer looking at the list.

I don’t know if other dentists do this, as I have been with my dentist my entire life, or if this one came up with it all by himself, but either way it shows that he empathised with the customer and their situation by doing a few small things that made the process easier for me (and in turn probably easier on him too).

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I also tried on different browsers and get the same issues - is anyone else getting this? Either way it’s a little disconcerting that a bug like this can find its way into Google, but also in its own way a little reassuring that everyone has bugs.

Update: Yep it appears to be everywhere, this TechCrunch story covers it.

Update: The BBC have a bit more detail, seems an import of data from Stopbadware.org flagged everything as dangerous - do you think someone updated the query recently and missed out the WHERE id = [id] part, I know I’ve done that on in dev more than once. :)