Regarding web browsers and User Interfaces

March 28, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net, Linux, Windows 

I had a discussion this morning with my wife regarding her new computer (Toshiba laptop). A few days back, I was contemplating the possibility to try and get rid of the Windows 7 license it came with the EULA disagreement argument and get my money back, but after much consideration and realizing that her school (Chalmers University) pretty much requires her to run Windows 7 and Office 2007 (all applications used are windows based with Unix/Linux alternatives only irregularly, and her lab professors more or less frowns on OpenOffice.org vs MS Office formatting problems), we decided to keep it. This is another story, how Chalmers went from being a very open University to a complete clusterfuck of a Microsoft bootcamp and something I’d love to write more about at some point, but not now.

The computer has arrived finally, and my wife had a little time to play around with Windows 7. I’ve personally not used Windows since Win XP and refuse to lay hands on it unless “forced” to at work. Her main gripes came with Internet Explorer 8, and I couldn’t help but laugh very loudly at her assessment of it. It incessantly keeps asking questions and giving hints and ideas like “How do you like this?”, “Did you know that IE plugin blah …?”, “We can help you do …?”, “Do you have herpes?” to the point where the only sane comparison she could make is a very horny and needy drunk boy at a club. It took her less than one battery charge to switch back over to Firefox. My guess is that they simply made the user interface a bit … too helpful, and tried to be too reactive to “possible needs in this context”.

So, on this topic, I thought it could be slightly interesting to see this months statistics and split between different operating systems and web browsers.

Operating systems

I can’t really say that this site is representative of the world in general, but I think it is interesting to see the level of windows users. I’m guessing this is a sign that many of the people visiting are reading about iptables and using linux for servers and firewalls, but aren’t using it as a desktop system (yet?).

Windows 59.1 %
Linux 31.3 %
Macintosh 6.4 %
Unknown 2.7 %

Web browser

Personally, I find this part the most astounding. That IE has gone so low is simply not something I had expected, and how big market share firefox has… incredible.

Firefox 60.7 %
MS Internet Explorer 16.4 %
Safari 11.4 %
Mozilla 4.5 %
Opera 4.1 %
Unknown 1.2 %

I will try to do some more work on this in the future, could be interesting to see this change over time. I know the reliability of my own source isn’t excellent and the error margin is probablythrough the roof, but it should be rather fun to dig in to.

Site update finally here!

October 15, 2009 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Frozentux.net, General 

I finally got around to finishing up a new site. As some of you may remember, I started over a year ago with rewriting the entire site from scratch after a year of pretty much not having time to fix the final touches. On top of this I realized that the site would still require a lot of time to update and maintain, which I realize was not in my main interest. So I decided to try out a few “pre-built” solutions and got hooked on wordpress. This is the final setup i’m going with. I will update the site more and more, but to get the site rolling, I decided to get it published as soon as possible.

To begin with, there isn’t much new material on the site, but this will change with some time. I have several papers and smaller projects I’d like to publish, and that I will have the ability/time to publish with the new site framework. Until then, I sincerely hope you will enjoy the new site. Any comments, please let me know!

Site updates cont.

September 22, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

I thought I’d make an status update available, to let people know. The updates are still ongoing, and I am working on them. The new site is POSH, lots of CSS and div’s, and… well, to be honest, it scares the hell out of me. From the looks of it, microsoft has never even heard of W3C, as badly as internet explorer is behaving. Yes, I’m actually trying to make the site follow standards, and work even on Internet Explorer. Ok, I admit it, Explorer 6.0 is most likely screwed. Anyways, for those that wish to see the new design, take a look at this screenshot. Design is pretty much done. Will start working on the simple bits this week, databases and so forth.

Tired of Javascript/CSS

August 27, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development 

CSS is not my strong side, actually web development isn’t at all, yet I have this bad habit of wanting to learn things I don’t know since before. That being said, not sure if i got this right. Putting an absolute object (div for example) inside a relative object makes for an unhappy combination. Problem is that the outer container does not resize for the absolute object (depending on how you interpret the standards, I guess this is correct behaviour).

Take the following rather long example:

<html>
<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
.hump
{
position: static;
width: 400px;
}

.lala
{
position:relative;
background-color:blue;
width: 400px;
}
.hoho
{
position:absolute;
background-color:red;
left:0px;
top:0px;
width:50%;
}

.rofl
{
position:absolute;
background-color:blue;
left:0px;
top:20px;
}

</style>
</head>

<body>
<div class=hump>
<div class=”lala”>ewrio
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
</div>

<div class=”lala”>
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
<div class=rofl>hejhopp</div>
</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>

You have two options.

1. Add height attribute to lala (making it static height).
2. Write a javascript to dynamically change height of the area depending on how large content is. I’m currently working on this as I really want this solution.

There is probably a much better solution to this, so if you know of a better way, please let me know!

Site update

August 26, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

I’m currently working on updating this site. It’s going web1.9.9, it’s almost like web2.0. I got a ton of things I want to add as well, so I’m taking the opportunity to remake this whole site, hopefully in a logic way so that it will be easier to add small projects and texts in the future. For the time being, I’ve started a blog at http://frozentux.blogspot.com for those that wants to keep up, and twitter.com. I’m trying out pretty much every web2.0 buzzword or site I’ve heard about. I’m hoping to have a beta out within a week or so… hah!

Easy stuff

August 24, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net, General 

Ok, I started recoding frozentux.net today finally. It’s rather ugly and messy code, so i’m starting by cleaning it up a bit. It’s kinda nice getting a goal again, I’ve lacked a bit of it. Also, I must say, this feels soooo easy. PHP code is a breeze, and way to forgiving, especially without 10+ guys looking over your shoulder once in a while to make sure your code is good enough *cough* .

That said, I’m not planning to use too much cross site stuff or any other heavy stuff, so it will be easy to get it to a working state again. Basically, I’m going for a simpler design, with larger flexibility as I want to add a lot of small code samples and projects to the website in the future (I kinda locked myself down there last time).

Also cleaned the fan over the stove, built more on the model (wow, you can almost see that it’s an airplane body right now 😛 ). I got a lousy glue (so sorry mac and heather, it was an awkward glue you gave me :)), need a new one, and I also need some sandpaper. Taken a walk, looked at an episode of systm. A cool show about mythbuntu tbh.

Workweek ahead. See if i manage to get into a habit of writing here or not?;)

Updated backend on frozentux.net

February 20, 2003 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

Yes, I am still alive. The backend on frozentux.net was updated to simplify adding news, etcetera in the future. To all of those still waiting for a reply to their mail, sorry about that, but I am still trying to catch up to mail from christmas. For several personal reasons, I have been and will be unable to maintain the different documents on this site at a much slower pace than previously. If you find any problems in any documents, etc, on this site, you are more than welcome to send patches. It would be most apreciated, since you will otherwise have to wait for quite some time before your bugreport/problem is solved.

Minor layout updates

November 21, 2002 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

Some minor layout updates has been fixed. Mainly some image links, etcetera, is now conditionally removed depending on what client is used. This was added since the images created some problems for the people mirroring the iptables-tutorial. The iptables-tutorial should also soon be available in a new version with other fixes for the mirroring problems.

New layout

November 8, 2002 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

This is the new design for the frozentux.net site. As you can see, it is fairly close to the end, and it should actually work partially. Next step will be working a little bit on the backend of things.