Turning on a cell’s borders on mouseover should be easy, right? You should be able to give the cell a class, like “selected” and in your CSS specify that td.selected has borders. Then on mouseover, you can add the selected class to the cell.

Except that everything jiggles around. No one wants that – but wait, just give all the other cells a 1px border of “none”, right? Or “transparent” color? Sorry, no luck. IE won’t let it work (to be fair, I’m not sure if FF will either). So you’re resigned to setting the other cells borders to the background-color. It feels dirty, but at least it works.

Actually, it doesn’t. You see, the browser can’t read your mind, it doesn’t know which borders take priority. Enter the border conflict resolution spec, a beautiful piece by the W3C. Just give the background-colored borders a lower-priority style (dashed or dotted) and the solid borders will override them!

Except in IE. Because IE hasn’t bothered to finish implementing the border conflict resolution spec. No, I’m not talking about IE6 – this is broken in IE7. And it appears to still be broken in IE8. So I had to resort to a browser-specific javascript hack that adds a new “prevSelected” class to the cell before the selected cell – just to make IE happy.

And no, “border-collapse: separate” didn’t work as a work-around because the corner pixels showed through.

</rant>

Well said Anonymous, +5 insightful.

Windows Server 2008 shows this little dialog when you click on the time. The DST info is a nice touch.

Is Microsoft sending mixed signals by showing Office 2007(2008) on (what I assume) is a MacBook on Office.Microsoft.com? There is just so many things wrong with that, I’m not sure where to start.

Some possible messages from this:

• Macs are better for students.
• Office 2008 is prettier on a Mac.
• Current PC laptops are ugly.
• We really do care about Apple and the Apple user base!
• …add your own (possibly conflicting) message in the comments.

Not that there is anything wrong with these conclusions individually. Taken together though, from Microsoft, just seems strange.

Hat tip to Scott Hanselman for the find

This PC also happens to be the first one I’ve ever had to replace the CMOS battery on. Let me be the first to tell you what kind of crazy errors a system gets when it thinks it is the year 22098. iTunes and Firefox both crash hard.

I am running Windows XP Pro SP2 as a host environment. I wanted to be able to run IE7 as we are going to need to support it soon, while still having access to IE6. Other environments like Ubuntu were needed also. I stumbled upon VirtualBox from innotek. Using version 1.5.4 (released 27 December 2007) I was able to quickly get Windows XP Pro up and running. I used a fixed size virtual HDD (10GB) and dedicated 256MB of my system RAM to the environment. Installation from CD was straight forward, but mounting an ISO to boot from never worked for me. I’m still not sure if I was doing something wrong or if their is a bug.

Once I had XP up and running, I took a shot at Ubuntu 7.10. Again, booting from an ISO didn’t work. I put the CD in and ran the Live CD features in the virtual environment. When it came time to install, an error was generated during both the automatic partitioning and manual partitioning. The ext3 root was created quickly, but the swap refused to mount. After reading through the Ubuntu forums, I couldn’t find a solution on the VirtualBox site, I found that I had to use a dynamic sized virtual HDD, not a fixed size. Once that change was made, I got back into the live CD environment and had no problems getting the system installed. When I left work tonight, I was updating the 185 packages as prompted by the built-in updater.

Installing the “Guest Additions” software in both the XP and Ubuntu virtuals made the host user experience just that much better. I could easily move my mouse between windows without hitting the right control button first, mesh all of the desktops together, use windows remote desktop connections, etc. The additions ISO is included in the download and can be easily mounted to run from the command line or terminal as appropriate.

The benefits to my employer could be significant if we move to a virtualized environment. We have several desktops acting as single purpose servers that could easily be consolidated onto one server acting as a virtuals host. VirtualBox made the whole experience pleasant, fun, and exciting to see that many operating systems going at once.

My hardware consists of a Core 2 Duo E6660, 2GB 800Mhz RAM, dual 160GB WD hard drives, and a 256MB 7600GS PCI-E graphics card pumping bytes to a 20in Acer Widescreen LCD monitor. Having the host OS and the two virtuals running wasn’t a problem in any of the environments. Everything was smooth, I didn’t have any problems.

Time will tell if VirtualBox is ready for the enterprise primetime. I’ll need to look closer at the license options, stability over time, and ease of use.

For now, I’m just having fun running virtually.

The conference

Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.

I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
</rave>

<rant>

The hotel

The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!

Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.

</rant>

I don’t like Vista. That system has been a headache for me since day one. I normally build my own systems, but a local reseller had a really good deal on a system that came with Vista. I thought I’d give it a shot. I’m going to have to learn it eventually, right? Two weeks later I went back to XP.

Top Ten reasons Vista can be thrown over a cliff…

1. I needed to triple boot 2000/XP/Vista. 2000 for dev, xp for games, and Vista for learning. It took me nearly a week to get them all working together. What a nightmare. Normally Ubuntu would also make its way into that list, but with all the difficulty I had getting those 3 to work together, it just wasn’t going to happen.

2. I am (was) a PC gamer. It took me three hours of manual updates/installing/uninstalling/google searches to get a recent game to work. Once it did work, my framerates dropped and there were bugs galore. Several of the big anti-cheating systems dislike working with Vista. I finally got rid of the $2,000+ black hole that was my gaming rig and went back to consoles because of where Vista and games are headed. Now is not a good time to be a PC gamer. DX10 is a joke.

2a. Being a gamer, my system components changed very frequently. WGA never liked me. Ever.

3. Legacy support. “Turn off UAC, run in XP compatibility mode and as an admin” they say! Yeah right.

4. There is still some unanswered questions about strange connections Vista makes back to MS, etc. <puts on tinfoil hat>

5. DRM/HDCP/TPM/HD/Blu-Ray DVDs. Information just wants to be free. It wants a plane at the airport with pilots/fuel to a non-extradition country and nobody gets hurt.

6. Upgrade because it’s pretty. During my show and tell at Mesa you’ll see a very minimalist desktop. I don’t like icons*, animations,* rounded corners*, or constantly moving desktops*. Ubuntu with icewm is my happy place. *But you’ll see most of that in my web apps. I’m such a hypocrite. <s>

7. They increased the price for XP above Vista. Grrr…

8. Office 2007. LOL.

9. You’re an administrator, but not really. Just kidding. Ha Ha.

10. Vista feels like a serial killer child nanny to me. When using Vista… I’m six years old, need my hand held from room to room, get my hand slapped when doing anything naughty, and don’t wake up after being put to sleep (hibernate).

10a. My wife didn’t like it. ’nuff said. <bg>

Going home to pack for Mesa…

The survey took forever to load, but once it did, I filled it out to my satisfaction and clicked ’submit’.

Well that figures. Works about as well as Vista huh? Nice…

It should be clear then, that neither UAC elevations nor Protected Mode IE define new Windows security boundaries. -Mark Russinovich on his blog.

I grew immune to the UAC prompt after only a few hours. I didn’t even care anymore. I have a great respect for Mark. Before he was a “Technical Fellow” at Microsoft, he developed the very cool (albeit useful) SysInternals tools. Yet I get tired of the MS chant of “UAC uber alles” and posts like his.