My wife brought up a question she was asked about the dotted-line box that shows up around a link when you use the back button to return to a page, like the picture at the right. Is it possible to remove the box? Yes it is, but there are a few things to consider before doing that.
Our group switched from Deskmail to UW Exchange last week. I won’t address the politics of the switch, but I thought it would be good to write a bit on how things are going for me.
First of all, many of us technically didn’t “switch to Exchange”, rather “Exchange was enabled”. In other words, mail which is sent from within Exchange goes to the Exchange inbox, but all other mail goes to the Deskmail inbox. Why keep two inboxes? I’ll try to explain why I’m keeping both, but first a description of how I’m got my mail client set up. I won’t touch on calendaring, since I’m still trying to work that out.
I listen to several podcasts and I’ll mention a few of the tech-based ones on this blog, while non-tech ones will show up on my personal blog. The one podcast that makes it to the top of my playlist every day is Ken Ray’s Apple news podcast, Mac OS Ken.
I looked at several CMS-type applications before settling on WordPress for this blog.
We have other projects using Plone, but that one was crossed off the list pretty early because it requires a separate process to run Zope. That doesn’t really fit in the UA web server environment, nor would it work for my personal blog.
Next up was Typo3, which I still really like. It’s extremely flexible, very configurable, and gives an editor a lot of control over content. I like its template system (I used TemplaVoila) and the fact that pages can be built up from multiple content blocks, each which has separate version control. You can also easily reuse blocks in multiple pages. The major downside is it’s pretty complex to get going, especially if you don’t want the default look; TypoScript is very flexible and powerful, requiring a lot of experimentation. Less of a factor to me but still an issue is there’s a big rewrite underway which will mean changing extensions. For what it’s worth, when it’s released, 5.0 looks like it will be even better than 4.x.
I then started looking at Drupal, which seems to have a lot of momentum right now. It works well on the UA web servers, but for some reason I had a bit of trouble getting my mind around how things went together. I’m guessing it was the fact that I had spent so much time with Typo3, as well as helping people with Plone. Overall, I still liked Typo3 better.
That brings us up to WordPress. While it seems to be focused on blogging, it has enough CMS features to keep me happy. It does page hierarchy better out-of-the-box than Drupal, which I wanted for my personal site. The themes seem very simple to work on, even though I’m starting out with downloaded themes (although I’ve made some small tweaks). Workflow is pretty good, and I like how easy it was to integrate external authentication (either Pubcookie or OpenID).
With many web applications becoming more dependent on JavaScript, much work is being put into improving JavaScript performance. Even though Google’s Chrome uses WebKit (the same engine as Safari), they’re using a different JavaScript engine named V8. Mozilla will be using TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1, and Safari will be using SquirrelFish Extreme.
All these engines compile down to native code. How much does this affect performance? Taking WebKit as an example, the original SquirrelFish is about 50% faster than Safari 3.1’s JavaScript engine (already 3x the speed of Safari 3.0). Adding native code compilation, as well as other speedups (including a regular expression just-in-time compiler) makes SquirrelFish Extreme more than twice as fast as SquirrelFish.
The engines are playing leap frog, and all seem to be in very active development, so I find it very interesting to follow. I’ve found that SquirrelFish (Moderate, haven’t tried Extreme) works quite well, and I’ve played a few minutes with Chrome and found that to work well, too.
Exciting times in the JavaScript world.
I’ve decided it’s time to start writing about stuff I’m doing. I’ll be writing about things I’m doing at work, in addition to tech items which interest me, but I expect this blog will evolve over time. Please let me know if there are things you’d like me to write about!