Internet Explorer 6 Ballad
One of the major problem that I face when I develop an interface is the cross browser compatibility. Especially on IE 6! Something always ends up messed up. It just happened last week when I stumbled across an IE 6 bug called “Peekaboo Bug”. We just did a release of new version of HouseMovie when suddenly the client phoned us and told us that She can’t see all the text on the Banner manager page. I asked her, what kind of browser that She is using and Surprise…Surprise!! It is IE 6!
The so called “Peekaboo Bug” is one of the nastiest bug on IE 6 that I’ve found so far beside doubled margin on floated-divs. You can read more about the “Peekaboo Bug” in here. To fix this bug is actually simple, just set position:relative; in the div that are missing the text inside, and it should work.
I do personally believe that as a web developer, we shouldn’t fix this. We shouldn’t pampered the IE 6 user by trying to make everything work in IE 6. Because as long as we fix this bug, they never update their browser to a much more decent browser say IE 7 or Mozilla Firefox. So Mr. Architect, I feel you!
Upgrade to Vista Ultimate
After using Windows XP for quite a while for my development PC, I decided to update it to Vista Ultimate yesterday. This decision was also triggered with the release of Service Pack 1 by Microsoft to fix the problems with the first release of Windows Vista. The upgrade itself was quite good I must say, it took me more less 2 hours to complete the whole update and I have to spent another hour to install the Service Pack 1. After the upgrade, all my files are still in the right place, even my applications are still there!. Adobe Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3, Firefox 3, etc still runs perfectly. Looks like Microsoft has done their homework.
The decisions to update to Windows Vista is simply because I had quite a nice specs on my PC and until when are we going to use XP?, we have to move forward people, I know that the specs to runs Windows Vista at a decent speed is high, but if you think about it, its a brand new OS, and every release of Windows need a higher specs also. I remembered the release of Windows XP several years ago, people also bashing it as it was really prone to security attacks, really high specs requirement also.. but after couple of years, 72.6% of operating systems in this world are using Windows XP.
Finally, Bachelor of Engineering
After couple of weeks of waiting, I received my diploma finally. Special thanks to God Almighty, Allah S.W.T who always been there for me through my whole journey in The Netherlands; My family (Bapak, Ibuk, Nanda & Adit) for their unconditional love and supports; My girlfriend, Farrah who always believe in me (Love u babe); My bestfriends (Yudhi, Rio & Angga) and My housemates (Bacum, Chaky, Kemal + Kelzo) for all of the support.
I would like also to say thanks to all of my friends in The Netherlands or in Indonesia which I haven’t mentioned for all of the support and wishes.
Securing your templates folder.
Kafeinfo Bookmarking Sosial application is heavily based on the model-view-controller design pattern. To implement the MVC design, I use PHP Smarty templating engine for the presentation layer. One of the drawback is you can just view the templates by typing the templates address on your browser, ex. www.yourdomain.com/templates/index.tpl.
By looking and examine the template content, one can view what variables that are passed along to the template, the loop structure and that just doesn’t seems nice is it? That’s why to prevent a direct access to the template, I used a .htaccess file. Just create a file called .htaccess on your texteditor and type this:
deny from all
And just upload this file in your templates folder.
Kafeinfo, Bookmarking Sosial Anda.
Kafeinfo adalah salah satu aplikasi dari konsep sosial bookmarking yang lagi marak beredar di internet saat ini. Ide ini bisa dibilang berawal dari kemalasan saya untuk melihat berita di internet satu persatu, saya lebih suka berkunjung ke situs dimana semua berita sudah terkumpul disitu seperti digg.com atau mixx.com. Beda dengan news / feed aggregator, situs seperti digg.com dan mixx.com lebih mengandalkan user untuk memposting berita dan menentukan mana berita yang menurut mereka penting, tidak penting dan mana yang akurat atau tidak.
Berawal dari hobby saya mengunjungi situs situs semacam ini, saya keluar dengan ide untuk mengembangkan aplikasi situs semacam ini, dimana user bisa submit berita yang mereka anggap penting atau menarik dan dengan menggunakan sistim voting atau un-vote, user lain bisa memberikan pendapatnya tentang berita tersebut. Setelah brainstorming ngobrol dengan Farrah dan Bacum tentang ide saya ini, mereka langsung tertarik untuk ikut serta dalam mengembangkan situs ini sebagai tim kreatif dan promosi. Beda dengan situs situs semacam ini yang beredar diluar sana, konsep Kafeinfo Bookmarking Sosial ini lebih memfokuskan untuk berita berita di tanah air.
Konsep dasar Kafeinfo adalah kemudahan untuk membaca berita berita terkini. Interface aplikasi ini pun didesain sedemikian rupa untuk memudahkan user mencari berita kesukaan mereka yang dikelompokkan dalam topic tertentu.
Development aplikasi ini sebenarnya sudah memasuki tahap beta, tinggal beberapa fungsi aplikasi yang harus saya terapkan sebelum bisa di launch. Untuk sneak-peak aplikasi Kafeinfo Bookmarking Sosial, bisa dilihat disini . Tentu saja, aplikasi ini masih jauh sekali dari sempurna, oleh karena itu saya mohon sekali masukannya yang berhubungan dengan interactivity dan interface aplikasi ini. Terima Kasih.
Ubuntu update
Since the release of Ubuntu 7.10 (codename Gutsy Gibbon), I’ve always want to try it and update my current ubuntu distribution (edgy eft). Fortunately, I have the time this morning for updating my ubuntu. The update was pretty straight-forward, I just need to launch the update manager from system > administration and have it running. The update took less than an hour, and after rebooting my computer the newest ubuntu relase is installed (thumbs up!).
The first thing that I noticed after rebooting, is that I lost my sharp resolution :(. It can only showed me 1024×768 top!, but Envy is here to rescue me. Envy is an application for ubuntu that will automated the installation of both ATI and NVidia driver on your computers. After installing envy and let envy download the necessary driver, I have my sharp native resolution (1440×900).
The next thing that I notice on this new ubuntu release is the desktop effect (another two thumbs up!). The windows transition, transparent effect, desktop as a cubes (exacly like leopard spaces) just works out of the box. Another cool application that you can download using synaptic is avant window navigator which mimic the apple docks.
Design Resources
I just want to share couple of design sites for inspirations an tutorials for all of my fellow designers out there
- http://www.sawse.com/
- http://www.smashingmagazine.com
- http://www.webdesign.org
- http://www.cssdrive.com
- http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com
- http://www.webdesignerwall.com
More templates
Since I have quite some time now, I decided to update my template page. The first update is the JAW template , just a simple brown-looking page and I am currently working on another template called Cloudish which stands for “Cloud and Childish”. I will update the template page again after I finished with the Cloudish. Mean time, have a great weekend everybody!
(interaction) Designer
Since several weeks ago. my position at work has been shifted from a software engineer to an (interaction) designer. My new role at the company is to create an interactivity of the softwares that my company develop, beside designing the website and the application. It’s quite weird actually, because first I dont have any design background or whatsoever, second… I learnt everything autodidactly (it’s that even a word??). Thanks to this guy who thought me loads about xhtml and css.
I started to become an interaction design at my company when I have to develop a software, at that time all of the designers are busy with other stuff, and I can’t ask them to create another design at that time. So I brave my self to came up with my own design for the software. Since then, several guys at the office has asked me to built an interfaces for different project. Started with Levende Herinneringen website and CMS interfaces. Sooner, I get more design stuff rather than to develop a software, and that’s how I ended up with this position.
One thing I’ve learnt from this is that it doesnt matter where you came from or what you did before, as long as you keep studying and want to learn new things, you can be anything you want in life.
Tv-links.co.uk
If you are a tv-links user, and been wondering why you can’t open the site for the last couple of days.. well.. get ready for this….. IT HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN! and the owner (26 yo man) was arrested. It’s a BUMMER!!! Eventhough the site was only providing links to these great videos, but he was apparently being charge for “facillitation” of copyright infringement. For more complete news, you can find it here.