{ StevenHaddox.com }

I don’t even know where to begin besides quickly _hoping_ that my job as a web developer will be considerably easier in another 2 to 5 years (once everyone finally gets around to upgrading). Of course this depends upon what Microsoft considers “Super Standards.” For all we know they could still be in “standards mode” but still mess up spacing in padding and margins enough that we’ll still be coding hacks for IE8 just as much as we did for IE7 (which is exponentially less than IE6 was coded/hacked for).

Anyway, I’ll encourage ANYONE who still uses IE to go ahead and try out IE 8 beta 1. Although, if you’re trying a new browser, I’d still recommend Firefox 3 beta 3 before IE 8 any day ;)

Here’s to hoping for an all-major-browsers compliant with standards society!

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I just had a friend tell me the other day that my blog would spit out an error when they tried to load it and die. Well I’ve had no problems on my system, or any other system I’ve been on. So I know it works in Firefox, Opera, and Safari. I also know it works on IE7 (sort of, some of the CSS / special effects aren’t quite right). But the functionality is there. This left one main culprit - you guessed it - IE6.

I booted up the dedicated VM (Virtual Machine) just for checking IE 6 and tried to load the page…. some weird error popup and death. WOOT! Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that Windows can be a _slow_ operating system to run. Especially if you have kids who love to download music, files, videos, and possibly stuff you as a parent may not even want to know about. Well sometimes you find out in other ways.

One way you discover you have a problem is that Windows has become sluggish in comparison to how it used to run. it takes twice as lomg to run something than it used to and you have no idea why. Or perhaps random popups have taken over your system. These kinds of symptoms often point to one to three things: Viruses, Malware, or Spyware. All of these things are intruders on your computer looking to violate your privacy. So how do you get rid of them? Read the rest of this entry »

So I have an HP a1610n I purchased a while back that entitled me to a free upgrade to Vista Home Premium. I only got it for the purpose of holding me over until I could get my Mac Pro and I until I could test out Parallels to ensure that ALL my Windows only software ran properly (MS Money, MS Word, MS Excel, Rhapsody, etc). I won’t even bother you with a review of Vista because I feel it merely attempts to emulate OS X Tiger and just doesn’t even come close. Not only that, but the system takes forever to load (with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor - just insane). My Mac Mini with 2 GB of RAM and a much slower dual-core processor is a billion times faster in response times, load-up, graphical effects, etc. And my biggest gripe of all about Windows Vista (Home Premium): My internet access is _INSANELY_ slow!!!!! It’s not like I have a rare wireless card that shouldn’t be supported either, it’s an Atheros 5005 chipset with a/b/g support.

Preparing Vista to dual-boot Ubuntu:
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