My SVG Wish Test

Here is a little svg file that I created for what I would hope browsers would be able to render.
The rendering to the left points to the linked svg file source.
It uses some rather simple shapes, an interesting texture, and lots of transparency.
It is a texture test for a little personal pet project I have been refining and would like it to look right across all major browsers. I created it in Inkscape then edited it down to size by hand.
There is one thing about it though. Most browsers crop it at it’s canvas edges and I can see how that would be useful, but I would prefer it to not be cropped in this instance, so I’m wondering how to do that without changing the canvas size. I want the shadow to spread past the edge of the canvas and onto the page its on.
Hmm. [Update: The image now direct links to the svg file.]

IE UA String Fun

So, after reading the IE blog post about the new UA string to be used in IE9 and the general rejection by many in the web development community I thought I would have a little fun trying out a version of the string to see who uses browser sniffing.

First, the default UA string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1)

For comparison, the new one one from the blog post:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)

And the one I thought would be fun to try:

Trident/5.0 (MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64;)

I thought I would try it on the following few websites:

	Default UA	IE9 UA	Trident UA
google.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
bing.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
wolframalpha.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
yahoo.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
msn.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
microsoft.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
apple.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
gmail.com	Looks good	Looks broken	Looks broken
ymail.com	Looks good	Not supported, won’t load.	Not supported, won’t load.
hotmail.com	Looks good	Looks good, but can’t read emails.	Looks good, but can’t read emails.
linkedin.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
facebook.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good. no chat though.
youtube.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
reader.goolge.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
maps.bing.com	Looks good	Warning page only	Warning page only
maps.google.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
maps.yahoo.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
mint.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good
shkyrockett.blogspot.com	Looks good	Looks good	Looks good

 

First I created three instances of IE8 and set the UA strings for each using UAPick to change the string and the website http://www.enhanceie.com/ua.aspx so I could tell if the string had been changed.

I then duplicated the tabs in each browser instance to see if the tabs would keep the same UA string which they did. I kept the first tabs open for reference to which string was being used, then visited the different web sites in turn to see the results.

I’m curious what other sites break with these UA strings. But the fun one would be:

Trident/5.0 (MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; SLCC2; Made You Look!)

Virtual Boot?

I set up my Laptop to dual boot 32 bit Windows and 64bit Windows. I find I'm spending more time in the 64bit version where everything just seems to run smoother. But I have software installed on the 32bit partition that I don't have on the 64bit partition which I either don't want to install there or it won't work in a 64bit environment (KQ7 anyone?).

Dual booting has been working okay, but it is becoming a pain to switch between partitions when all I want to do is use one piece of software installed there. Especially when all of my settings and bookmarks are on the 64bit partition. I'm starting to wish there was something like Boot Camp for Windows so I could just run the 64bit system and then virtual boot the 32bit when I want to use that software. A Dosbox VPC hybrid interface might even work.

Sure I could set up a virtual machine, but I already have everything set up and working right on the other partition. Sure I could possibly convert the other partition into a vhd but that would just be over duplicating what is already there.

Maybe if someone working on Windows 8 could get the same idea here and throw in iso support too…

Not supposed to be there?

I keep wondering what might have happened to cause facebook to send http headers which say "Server: MochiWeb/1.0 (I'm not even supposed to be here today.)".