This is where I get to put my penneth-worth in on various issues, and ramble on about stuff which may or may not interest you. You may agree or disagree with what I say; this is just my view.
This is something I used to ask myself a lot; other people don't ask me this. "Why the Web?" What led to my spiralling downfall that ended with my work, and much of my recreation, tying in with the World Wide Web?
My first introduction to the Web was around 1993/94 or so. Someone hassled me to install Mosaic on the UNIX machines. Everyone was saying this Netscape was the greatest thing since sliced bread! Well, I wasn't impressed. It could do text, even some big bold headings, and you could put GIFs in your pages, which took ages to download.
And then someone convinced me that for their studies they needed a web server, and I was the lackey who had to install it. So it came to pass that I installed NCSA's HTTP Daemon in the Lab.
1995 was Final Year Project year. The course I was enrolled in (Bachelor of Applied Science - Computer Technology) was part-hardware, part-software, and so most of the available projects consisted of hardware-related tasks. One project, though, was to create a Database using the WWW as an interface. "Ha!", I thought, "Web! Databases! What use are they?", but it was the only project that was all programming, and so I took it. (Hardware wasn't my strength).
I wrote my project in C, good Ol' C. Several people suggested Perl, but I thought it'd be pushing it to try and learn a new language AND complete my project. In retrospect, it would've been quicker to take some time to learn Perl, then write it in Perl. Yes, I'm a Perl convert, and I use it for most of my programming now. I've even converted a few others to the dark side, errr, I mean, to programming in Perl. And it's nice being able to take a Perl script written on a UNIX platform, and run it under Windows 95 using Perl for Win32.
Nowadays, whenever someone suggests an application that would be handy, my first thought is usually something along the lines of "We could put a web interface on it, and I wonder what sort of Database we should store the data in?".
*sigh*
So, I was sort of thrown in against my will, but now, there is no escape for me, and, I'm happy!
Everyone has Pet Peeves. Well, if there's someone that doesn't, then I better add that to this list: "People who don't have Pet Peeves". Those small, annoying things, that, logically, aren't too much of a worry, but they may really GET YOUR GOAT! But, we usually do some of our own pet peeves ourselves sometimes...
So, it's my turn to have a general bitch and apply gross stereotypes to chunks of the worlds population. Warning! Some of this may offend. It's not my intent, though.
Here we go:
ie; Grammar, and how people use their apostrophes and other words that sound the same but are spelt differently. So often do I see people use the wrong one! I have a good sense of grammar, so when I read something that's wrong, it clashes with me. I think my heightened awareness of these sorts of words is a result of spending many lunchtimes outside the Headmasters office, writing out my 100 Demons (you know, them words) over and over as punishment for one thing or another.
For example:
"There are some people over there. There doing something with there egg beater."
This should actually be:
"There are some people over there. They're doing something with their egg beater."
Apostrophes, or lack thereof, are a common error (and I even do it myself sometimes). Apostrophes when abbreviating are easy enough to pick; just expand the abbreviation out and see if the sentence still sounds correct:
No check: "That dog had its leg broken. I hope its ok."
Expand: "That dog had it is leg broken. I hope it is ok."
Correct: "That dog had its leg broken. I hope it's ok."
Enough with the Grammar lessons though, before I peeve too many people off.
(Or should I just make this "Women"? *ducks for cover*)
Women have this bad tendency to get angry. Ok, guys get angry too, but if a guy is angry, he'll usually make it clear what is up. Women, when they are angry, don't TELL you they're angry, they don't tell you WHY they are angry. It's the part of the bloke to know through divine enlightenment, psychic powers, or luck, why a woman is angry. And if the guy, who is expected to just know, doesn't know, then said woman gets angrier!
Hellooooo!! We are just males! So give us a break, and if we've done something wrong, then jolly well tell us so we can fix it, OK?
And in particular, young teenage girls who smoke. I mean, WHY?? I can sympathise a little with people who've smoked for years, for it's an addiction, but I get SO sick of seeing a beautiful teenager pull out a cigarette and puff away! You think it looks cool? Well, it doesn't! If you want a good first impression from people, then put the damn thing out.
People who smoke around others annoy me too, especially around children. Passive smoking may or may not be as deadly as they say, but why should you inflict it upon someone, anyway?
Netscape is my browser of choice. It has powerful features, gives great control for getting document info, viewing source, now has great bookmark handling, and so on. It's even free for Educational and Non-profit usage. But Netscape has some serious problems with some of its advanced features, but these problems seem too small and unimportant for them to fix, let alone get right in the first place!
Here's some of the things Netscape messes up:
From this list, you can see that if you want something to work in Netscape correctly, then you should be fine if you don't use Frames, or Cascading Style Sheets. Yes, well ...
Why oh why can't someone make a DECENT browser, that does what it's documented to do? Well, Internet Explorer 4 seems to do that. It displays all my pages how I tell it to, has no problems with frames padding, and printed out my pages which used Style Sheets perfectly, but, well ...
For a start, it's Microsoft, who are blatantly trying to take over the whole world! Isn't $50billion a year enough, Bill Gates? Marketing their browser as free, it's obvious IE is trying to knock out all competition. Thank goodness for Netscape! If IE had no competition, then you can bet they WOULD charge for it.
Problem is, Microsoft DO make some good products! They're usually bloat-ware and bug-riddled, but have features and power that others do not. If there was a good Wordprocessor for Linux, then maybe I could pursue my dream of dumping Windows 95 for Linux.
Internet Explorer 4.0 prerelease, apart from being their next browser, did some nifty things to your old Windows Explorer, and gave it a good much-needed revamp. Unfortunately, it seems that most Microsoft products are better when you change all the default settings, which are typically annoying, and dig deep to find the useful stuff.
And so I downloaded IE4.0 when it was released, mainly for the enhanced Windows Explorer, hoping they'd ironed out the bugs. And it wasn't included!! Eventually I found an option to download an extra whole 700k, which changed my desktop. But, they'd only fixed half the bugs (probably why it wasn't installed by default), and it still has some performance problems. Ah well. Back to old Explorer.
