Was the entire application broken, or did it have something to do with Firefox? I opened the page in IE7 and was presented with the application as intended; the wonderful folks at Olive Software made a number of mistakes:

• They did not take into account that tech-savvy readers might not be using IE7. Since there was no specific message that only IE7 was supported, it appears they didn’t even do testing on alternate browsers. Bad developers, bad QA.
• They allowed a cryptic error message to be displayed to the user, which provides no further information or guidance to correct the error. They even managed to misspell arcive(sic).
• The page includes a reload-on-resize script for Netscape 4!?! With what kind of antiquated code base are they developing web applications?

It’s disappointing to see poor implementations of technology such as this targeted at a general audience. Shame on you Olive Software; enterprise software should be better than this. As a user, since I had such a poor experience with the free demonstration of the technology, is it any wonder I didn’t choose to pay for the full version?

Further Reading

• Error Message Guidelines, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for June 24, 2001.
• Local News Sites Suck, a rant on the state of online newspapers in general.
• Online or Not, Newspapers Suck, an old article from Wired that still has relevance.

1. Have a look at the demo to see what’s involved and grab the JavaScript source which is embedded into the page.
2. Visit Benjamin Joffe’s Canvas Font Generator to generate other fonts, if you wish. A few notes on this process:
   • Make sure ClearType is disabled before you do a screen grab, especially for smaller font sizes which should not be anti-aliased.
   • As a nice touch, before you save the PNG from your favorite image editor, make the background transparent so you can place your text on backgrounds other than white. It also allows you to place rows of text near each other without background pixels obscuring your text.
   • You may also consider saving PNGs for colors other than black; I exported both black and white images to lay over light and dark backgrounds, respectively.
3. Use Mike Scalora’s URI image encoder to encode the PNG you created in the previous step and replace the appropriate string assignment in your JavaScript.

See a demo of what I was able to achieve in a short time and to grab the source for Tahoma 8pt in black or white, with a transparent background. You may also be interested in a vector implementation by Jim Studt.

Here’s a handy tip to disable the update reminder, by stopping the service responsible for the update. Just run sc stop wuauserv at a command prompt and prompts will be disabled until the next restart.

The solution/hack involved a customization to the Upload module, replacing the theme_upload_attachments() function with the customized version below. The idea was to have the content manager add a prefix to the filenames that would identify the category, and the software would take care of the rest.

Some notes:

• [+] It can’t get much easier than adding a prefix to a file before you upload it to the web site.
• [+] FTP file listings are now sorted by category in the Drupal files/uploads folder.
• [-] If the content manager makes a mistake in naming a file, she has to remove the upload, rename the file on her file system, and re-upload.

Here’s the modified function for Drupal 4.7, use at your own risk. At some time before we launch the site I’ll upgrade to Drupal 5.1, and post a modified version of the function for 5.1.

/**
* Displays file attachments in table
*/
function theme_upload_attachments($files) {
  $header = array(t('Name'), t('Size'));
  $spec_rows = array();
  $dsgn_rows = array();
  $inst_rows = array();
  $case_rows = array();
  $rows = array();
  $str = array();

  foreach ($files as $file) {
    if ($file->list) {
      $href = $file->fid ? file_create_url($file->filepath) : url(file_create_filename($file->filename, file_create_path()));
      $text = $file->description ? $file->description : $file->filename;

      if (strpos($file->filepath,'spec_') != false) {
        $spec_rows[] = array(l($text, $href), format_size($file->filesize));
      } elseif (strpos($file->filepath,'dsgn_') != false) {
        $dsgn_rows[] = array(l($text, $href), format_size($file->filesize));
      } elseif (strpos($file->filepath,'inst_') != false) {
        $inst_rows[] = array(l($text, $href), format_size($file->filesize));
      } elseif (strpos($file->filepath,'case_') != false) {
        $case_rows[] = array(l($text, $href), format_size($file->filesize));
      } else {
        $rows[] = array(l($text, $href), format_size($file->filesize));
      }
    }
  }

  if (count($spec_rows)) {
    $str[] = '<h2>Product Specifications</h2>';
    $str[] = theme('table', $header, $spec_rows, array('id' => 'attachments'));
  }
  if (count($dsgn_rows)) {
    $str[] = '<h2>Design Information</h2>';
    $str[] = theme('table', $header, $dsgn_rows, array('id' => 'attachments'));
  }
  if (count($inst_rows)) {
    $str[] = '<h2>Installation Guides</h2>';
    $str[] = theme('table', $header, $inst_rows, array('id' => 'attachments'));
  }
  if (count($case_rows)) {
    $str[] = '<h2>Case Studies</h2>';
    $str[] = theme('table', $header, $case_rows, array('id' => 'attachments'));
  }
  if (count($rows)) {
    $str[] = '<h2>Other Downloads</h2>';
    $str[] = theme('table', $header, $rows, array('id' => 'attachments'));
  }
  return implode('',$str);
}

A few reasons:

• For the most part, Firefox 1.5 just worked.
• Every plugin I liked was compatible with 1.5.
• I heard a lot of grumbling about speed and other issues in early betas and releases of Firefox 2.0.
• Bookmark Synchronizer, one of my favorite Firefox extensions needs some tweaks to allow installation on Firefox 2.0.

Why did I finally take the plunge?

• Mozilla announced that Firefox 1.5.12 would be the last release in the 1.5 series, so no more security updates.
• I wanted to install Search Marker, a new plugin that requires Firefox 2.0.

Some obligatory tweaks to Firefox 2.0 to make it seem more like Firefox 1.5, accessible from the about:config URI. I found a lot of them over at Lifehacker:

• Changed browser.tabs.tabMinWidth from 100 to 25. I like to open many tabs at a time, from an average of 8 to a reasonable maximum of 30. I recognize the favicons for most of my favorite web sites, so it’s not a problem to identify them by icon alone.
• Changed browser.tabs.closeButtons from 1 to 3. Again, since I have so many tabs open, the default of an [X] close button on each tab is just distracting. I’ll use the Ctrl-W keyboard combination a lot more than any clicking to close a window.
• Changed network.prefetch-next from true to false. I know where I’m surfing and don’t need you to crawl the web for me, thank you very much.
• Changed browser.cache.memory.capacity from 22000 to 15000. This reduces the typical memory footprint of Firefox to be something more reasonable.
• Changed browser.search.openintab from false to true. This makes searches from the toolbar open in a new tab instead of the current one.

I’ll update this list as I think of it. In the meantime, visit the MozillaZine Wiki for a complete description of all configuration parameters.

My thoughts so far:

• It only works with Firefox 2.0 or higher; up until today I still used Firefox 1.5 at work.
• This feature only works when “Highlight all” is checked from the find pane. It would be nice to have this as a configurable option.
• I’ve always been used to clicking on search markers to navigate to the line in the text where the search term occurs. Would be a nice improvement.

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• A complete data migration strategy and transformation from a legacy MySQL database.
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• Course payment and credit card processing with Authorize.net.