”Updates are ready for your computer.  Click here to download these updates. ” But don’t expect Windows XP to actually know how to install them.  I’m stunned by yet another sloppy piece of work by Microsoft.  This almost smacks of an intentional ploy on their part to say “well if you just go to Vista this wont be a problem.”

So, to sum up; Windows XP Service Pack 3, wont install unless you hack your into your registry.   That’s the short of it.

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So I have been pretty busy of late. Work has been on endless “crunch” period which promises to continue in this vein for the time being. It’s not fun. In fact, I’m a little burned out — No big deal though.. these things tend to cure themselves after a time..

It’s just that some of the stuff I’m working on has the “too little, too late” feel to it that I can’t really explain. Plus I’m worried that it’s something that doesn’t bring value to the customer — which believe it or not, and despite what my manager thinks.. I actually care about.

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Update:  It works in all browsers now.. Yaaaayy!!   Though IE does this strange ass selection thing that I need to figure out how to stop..  Next; I make it save your preferences then on to implementation!

So its been several more days and I have spent quite a bit of my spare time working on this theme conversion.. I can almost say its complete, but not quite yet.

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

My colorChooser system is about 90% done in Firefox and Safari, and about 70% done in Opera and IE. I’m not at all surprised that it’s not working correctly in IE, but the fact that Opera has the same error was a little shocking. Usually Safari and Opera work in parallel when it comes to javascript. Meaning if it works in one, it works in the other and vice versa.. I’ve managed to break that paradigm with this bit of code.. hehe.. It will be interesting to see what the issue is.. Read More

So I find I have been playing quite a few web based games of late. And just about all of them has brought to the fore of my mind the glaring fact that there is nothing they have done that I can’t do. Seriously. More over, I think I can do it better in just about every way.

One of the games I find myself playing is a space game which, to be fair, isn’t very good — in fact it’s bad. It’s just not a very good game, yet for some reason I find myself continuing to play it — as does a lot of other folks. It’s strangely popular. While playing at just about every turn I see things that could not only be done a little better, but done WAY better. Not just game play wise, but technically as well. Their HTML is bad, they clearly don’t understand CSS and their PHP is poorly written (from what I can tell.) So, this of course always lead me to the line of thinking that, why shouldn’t I try to make my own?

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Well as some of you know I have been working on a joint Wordpress MU and Invision Power Board theme based on the joomla theme Chromatophore.. I thought I would give an update — It’s going well all things considered, but its taking me a little longer than I had for seen to get the color chooser logic working correctly.

You can see my progress here:

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

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Code obfuscators will strip out the unnecessary characters like white space, tabs, newlines and comments. The modern flock of javascript obfuscators will also go through and replace every command and variable in the file with some random key that points to an array which then gets eval’d back out at run time. Generally speaking the code you see in an obfuscated javascript file looks like completely gobbledygook which is sorta the point.

My stance on it is simple; Don’t do it — If you ever catch me encoding or obfuscating my javascript, come kick me square in the jimmy.. I simply cannot abide by people who think they need be secretive with javascript.. And lets be completely honest here, that’s what it’s about. Read More