Windows Vista Testdrive: "feedback is not defined" and "open is not a function"

I was just scavenging the web for a decent picture of the Microsoft Windows logo when my eye caught the site www.windowsvistatestdrive.com. I am currently a happy (K)Ubuntu GNU/Linux user, but I decided to give it a spin anyway.

(I know some people have some strong opinions on Linux vs Windows, especially Windows Vista, but to me, the computer and its operating system are just tools to get my work done. I am not a religous person, and god forbid I become religious over something as trivial as the right flavour of computing environment)

Well, the result of my test drive is shown below:



As you can see, I got what looked like a web rendering of Windows Vista...except that opening the page gave me one error immediately:

feedback is not defined

which is kind of a bummer for a site that is designed to sollicit feedback.

I clicked the "start" button anyway, and this gave me the following pearl:

open is not a function

I doubt irony was ever so appropriate ;)

Why webdevelopers should use Linux

Recently, I revamped my old Organization Chart javascript widget to a new version. Since I released this code some time ago I received quite a good deal of email requests from people that are actually using it for their company's intranet site.

On the one hand, it makes me very happy to see people are actually using it for professional purposes. On the other hand, at the time I slapped it together in a few hours total, building on some old experience. As it turned out, users were/are having quite some issues to properly customize their organization charts. I even received some code contributions to improve the functionality.

Now, a few days ago, I finally found some time to address the major issues. But something grave changed in the mean while. When I first created and released the widget, I was a windows user, and used to create stuff that would work on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then modify it to work on Mozilla/Firefox. Now, it has been about a year since I replaced Microsoft Windows for (K)Ubuntu Linux. Meaning, I am without Internet Explorer....or am I ;)

Enter IEs4Linux:



The IE4sLinux project offers the real, genuine Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer as a Wine emulation:



One of the compelling things about the IE4Linux project is that it allows you to run several versions of MS Internet Explorer on the same machine - something I never got to work on my native windows machine.

Obviously, web developers that need to test their pages on several browsers and browser versions are better off on Linux + Wine than native Windows, as Linux + Wine + IEs4Linux allows them to test their pages on several versions of Internet Explorer.

Thanks to the people from IEs4Linux and Wine!

Window WTF: This Device Driver Software is Not Digital

I'm currently enjoying a 10Mbps glassfibre internet connection from the Dutch Internet Service Provider XMS.

They have a contract with the company from which we rent our house in Leiden. Basically, the deal is that we can try this internet service free of charge (! YEP) for 6 months. After that we can decide to subscribe to a package deal that includes television, radio, phone and internet and costs 50 euro/month (which is way cheaper than the sum of all the separate services we are paying for now BTW).

The only downside from switching is that I have had to move my wireless router near the modem, and that I had to go out and buy some hardware for the family desktop to enable wireless internet. I settled for a Sweex USB wireless adapter, because the distances are so small that I don't need to worry much about the USB stick not having an antenna, and I figured an USB stick is more flexible.

To my surprise, the Windows XP desktop desperately wanted me to install the drivers myself. So, I'm not scared of that...or only a little....Anyway, installing the drivers led to new complaints as you can see:



See, that's why I had to install the drivers manually. The encircled text reads "This device driver software is not digital". So, that's why I had to install htem myself. You see, somehow, windows does make sense after all ;)