Yesterday's news

When Google releases its Google Wave later this year they will face the adoption challenge. As you may know Wave heavily relies on a subset of HTML 5, which IE seems to happily ignore. It’s not just HTML5 though, according to the ACID3 test IE is known to be the least standard-compliant browser out there! Now, how does Google plan on getting the Wave to work in IE — still the most popular browser? I assume Microsoft won’t help Google push its Wave by fixing its browser!?

Once again, Google genii came up with a unique trick. No need to push IE users to switch to Chrome. No need to bitch about lack of standards support in IE.

When IE user comes to the Wave website, he’ll see a message saying something like “using Wave in IE requires Google Chrome plug-in”. Arguably that is much less scary than completely switching to another browser. Most users know what plugins are, after all everybody uses Flash. Moreover, this plugin is from Google, a solid respectable firm, well-known for non-intrusiveness and lightweightness of its solutions.

Once the plug-in is installed, it will look for the following tag on the page:

    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

If the tag is present, the page will be rendered by the Chrome plug-in with IE only providing the frame and the menus (which is what users are attached to). I can imagine other major and minor sites taking advantage of this, mostly for the sake of HTML5 support but also to take advantage of faster JavaScript and to save time ironing out IE-specific rendering glitches.

You can get the plug-in here: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ and technical details here: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html

At this point the plug-in still does not support printing nor downloads, something I’m sure Google can fix by Christmass.

CodingHorror bought this one (vs. OCZ Vertex that Hanselman bought)

The best HTML/CSS invention since sliced bread, a simple coordinate system for web pages that elegantly solves the dreaded positioning problem:

Position and width of each div is specified using CSS classes defined in 960.css:

<div class="container_12">
    <div class="grid_7 prefix_1">
        <div class="grid_2 alpha">
            ...
        </div>
        <div class="grid_3">
            ...
        </div>
        <div class="grid_2 omega">
            ...
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="grid_3 suffix_1">
        ...
    </div>
</div>

Links:

http://960.gs/demo.html

http://960.gs

http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs – a derivative that elastically expands to the available width

Easiest way to check if your website works in most browsers: http://browsershots.org/
Given the URL it automatically goes to your site in all the browsers and returns screenshots.

Here is Yahoo’s list of A-grade browsers, from http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/#gbschart

Hey I’m back from vacation and just to get things going here’s a basic post on the stuff I’m working on today. I feel so lazy on my first day after vacation that there’s no way I will manually create 20+ queues. Instead, I will use Powershell to extract the queue names from one server and write a script to automate the creation.

First of all, Powershell does not come with any MSMQ commands out of the box, so go and get PowerShell Community Extensions v1.2 (that’s where the new MSMQ comandlets were added). I assume you have Powershell 1.0 installed and script execution enabled (set-executionpolicy unrestricted). If you run into issues installing the profile, just reinstall w/o the profile, and import profile manually before executing the new comandlets:

& “C:\Program Files\PowerShell Community Extensions\Profile\Profile.ps1″

Then run the following command to extract the list of queues:

Get-MSMQueue -Private | Format-Table -property QueueName

Now that we have the queue names, transform that (manually) to a list of creation commands:

New-MSMQueue -QueueName loadreversalsmodulequeue -Private

That’s it for now!