Jonathan Weiß

The last four days just went by so fast, that I can hardly believe that today is the last night in Banja Luka. It was an interesting experience to get out of the company building and see a completely different part of Europe. I never have been to the eastern Europe before, so I was surprised how well developed and western-orientated Bosnia and Herzegovina, but especially Croatia are.

Florian and I took the plane from Stuttgart and arrived about an hour later in Zagreb from where we continued our journey with a rental car to Banja Luka. Tomorrow we will take the same way back, but take a new external co-worker with us.

I do not want to write a long travelogue about my time here, therefor I will concentrate on the important part: with each journey you take you will gather experiences and learn...

What I learned about IT

1. It is possible to work prolific with just a laptop and a desk.
2. Skype will replace calling cards.
3. I will never get excited about theoretical features and techniques until I know for sure that they actually work.
4. Outsourcing only applies to code monkeys. Hopefully! :-/
5. Camtasia Studio is a great tool.
6. I just can not talk about programming the whole day long. Especially not for four days...

What I learned about Bosnia and Herzegovina

1. Bosnian radio stations, which are cool, play the same songs as in Germany. And in every other western country I guess...
2. The people are really hearty and prove to be great hosts.
3. The food is very tasty here: so much meat! :-)
4. Traffic lights blink green before they switch.
5. A tip of 10% is usual.
6. All 30 Cyrillic letters can be mapped 1:1 to latin ones.
7. German cars are so favored here that you are not allowed to take a rental car of German brands into the country.

What I learned for life

1. Germans still have a good reputation. :)
2. There are geeks in every country.
3. My (spoken) English is much better than I tought.
4. Germany is not the only country in which cars are a status symbol.
5. There are actually Irish Pubs that do not offer Guinness or Cider!
6. Germans are driving and parking much better than they appear to. This is even true for people from Cologne!

For the next week I will be on my first business trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with my co-worker Florian. We will stay at this nice hotel "Firenza" from Monday until Friday in the second biggest city: Banja Luka.
As we will have WLAN we both will probably do some blogging. ;-)

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The Internet Explorer has the nice ability to detect specially formatted HTML comments and recognize them as programmable conditions. While all other browsers are treating them as regularly HTML comments, they will ignore the conditions and its branches completely.
Thus we have a great possibility to address Internet Explorer browsers in a valid, standard-compliant way without using a client or server side scripting language.

Generally conditions start with [if] and end with [endif]:

<!--[if exp]>
 HTML block <![endif]-->

The typically use of this technique to figure out which version of Internet Explorer the client is using. An expression can contain the string IE, the version number, comparison operators (lt, lte, gt, gte), boolean operators (&, |, !) and parentheses ((, )).
With this constituents it is possible to construct flexible version number detections.

<!--[if IE]>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles_ie.css" type="text/css">
<[endif]-->

It is even possible to nest comments.

<!--[if IE]>

  <![if gte IE 5]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles_ie5.css" type="text/css">
  <![endif]>
 
  <![if (gt IE 5)&(lt IE 7) ]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles_ie55_and6.css" type="text/css">
  <![endif]>
 
  <![if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles_ie7_hacks.css" type="text/css">
  <![endif]>
<![endif]-->

There are lots of changes in my life at this moment. First of all, I moved from Freiburg to Offenburg in order to live together with the most wonderful woman ever.
My new address is:

Jonathan Rass
Alte Straßburger Straße 3
77652 Offenburg

New phone number: +49 781 124 796 6

Not only my home changed, but also my workspace will change by the end of this month. I am leaving the business intelligence sector behind and will completely focus on web technologies. Stay tuned for updates, I will definitely write more about this.
It feels sad to leave such a great city as Freiburg and it feels even worse to abandon "my" project. I will also miss my co-workers badly because we had a fantastic time the last 27 months.

Nevertheless I am excited and curious about my new job: so much to learn, so many new techniques and methods to discover and so much stuff to blog about ;-) .

With slightly sentimental thoughts,
Jonathan

A few days ago Microsoft released an update for the Internet Explorer 7. There is no changelog, but a short list of new features from a post in the IEBlog:

• The menu bar is now visible by default.
• The Internet Explorer 7 online tour has updated how-to’s. Also, the “first-run” experience includes a new overview.
• We’ve included a new MSI installer that simplifies deployment for IT administrators in enterprises.

In addition,

[..] Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation [..]

This is really disappointing. Instead of fixing some of the known bugs, this update only offers minimal changes on which I would like to comment.

1. What is the point in hiding the menu bar in appliations? I can see this trend on new applications from Microsoft like Media Player or Messenger, but why should hiding the menu bar be an advantage? So, re-enabeling the menu bar is a good decision, but why is it placed below the icon bar? This is violating the user interface guidelines and may confuse the users.
2. The online tour is located on Microsoft's servers. This does technicly not effect the browser application.
3. The new MSI installer will make it easier to rollout the IE 7 in company installations. This is a good aspect to expand IE's marekt share in enterprise enviroments.
4. If the installation does not require Windows Genuine Advantage it is possible to run it on all versions of Windows XP — even if they are not original. This procedure seems to expand the market share in the consumer area.

The aim of this update is obvious: expanding the market share at all costs. Microsoft even accepts users with non-orignal copies of Windows installing Internet Explorer 7. Anyway, if this helps users switching to version 7, we web developers should be pleased.

Use object literals to initialize or set your object attributes.

Instead of

Initech.legalForm = 'corporation';
Initech.workEnvironment = 'cubeFarm';
Initech.coffee = 'lousy';

write

Initech = {
  legalForm : 'corporation',
  workEnvironment : 'cubeFarm',
  coffee : 'lousy'
};