techblog 

I upgraded my Intellistation A Pro (AMD64) from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 and to my horror my copy of JBuilder X would not install. When I tried to run the installer I just got a segmentation fault. I tried this on another identical machine and got the same result.

As I develop java GUI’s this is a very important tool due to it’s built in GUI builder and so I searched the web for quite some time looking for an answer. I drew a blank and realised there seemed to be no solution as yet. I therefore downloaded the 30 day trial of JBuilder 2006 thinking that this must work. Alas no. This time the installer ran and then returned silently without actually doing anything. There is however a fix for this one.

Firstly temporarily rename /usr/bin/strings to /usr/bin/strings.bak and then run the installer with the command

LAX_DEBUG=true PATH_TO_INSTALL_FILES/Disk1/InstData/Linux/VM/install.bin

and all works fine.

Remember to rename /usr/bin/strings.bak back to /usr/bin/strings afterwards.

To get this working in FreeBSD you need to edit /boot/loader.conf and add the following lines

hifn_load="YES"
crypto_load="YES"
cryptodev_load="YES"

Reboot to make this take effect. (You may be able to use kldload to load the modules without rebooting)

Next add the utilities to test the card

cd /usr/src/tools/tools/crypto/
sudo make
sudo make install

Running hifnstats looks like this

hifnstats
input 6917304 bytes 9124 packets
output 6917304 bytes 9124 packets
invalid 0 nomem 0 abort 0
noirq 0 unaligned 0
totbatch 0 maxbatch 0
nomem: map 0 load 0 mbuf 0 mcl 0 cr 0 sd 0

You should see the card being used to accelerate ssh connections.

The ‘cruel joke’ in the title came from one of the IE7 beta feedback entries, in which the contributor summed up the beta release perfectly. Despite being factual and informative, the post was removed by the IE7 blog moderators.

What it’s not

Microsoft are currently trialling their beta release of the next version of Internet Explorer, IE7. For developers and users of CSS, this was meant to be something of a watershed - we all expected something special (if not simply plain useful). IE7 however, is somewhat of a cruel joke for many reasons - CSS issues being just one them.

IE7 was meant to be standards compatible, at least compared to IE6 (not hard) and at least in the eyes of developers. Astonishingly, however, the IE7 beta simply corrects the
basic bugs and mistakes that existed in the product first time round. Most other browsers fixed these problems as they went along, years ago, and are now reasonably up-to-date with W3C standards. For a list of these bugs. errors, and broken implementations of standards in Internet Explorer, see http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx or http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html.

So instead of any *new* levels of CSS support (bug fixes that should have been patched years ago not withstanding), you now get….nothing!

That’s right, zero *new* levels of CSS support. Not even support for min-width/max width
min-height/max-height which other browsers have been supporting for years and years and
years. The min/max css rules are especially important. Since the advent of ‘table-less’ design
(just a tad important), the ability to control a layout by use of CSS has been absolutely essential - content layouts have needed to cater for increasingly dynamic content, in fact the entire structure of a site’s layout has needed to become very flexible indeed, and not simply for accessibility reasons.

This is achieved at the moment via CSS 2.0/2.1 with a reasonable amount of trouble (let’s face it, quite a bit), by use of the min/max rules amongst others - allowing areas to be controlled
dynamically. Internet Explorer however simply throws a spanner in the works by not supporting the min/max rules whatsoever. Designers have been crying out for this to be supported in future releases of IE for years and years, being extremly vocal - so you would think that a major new release of the browser would take this into account. In fact, there are so many other non-implementations of standards in IE7 that it is impossible to list them all here.

More bugs and incompatibilities…

So why haven’t Microsoft at least implemented the min/max rules (something that FireFox did from the beginning) in the beta release? Originally I read that it was “too difficult, would require too much code re-working at this late stage”. Which of course beggars belief. Over a year in to the beta release they are however now stating that they “are working on it” - however I’ll believe that when I see it.

Another dissapointment - IE7 beta introduces more bugs that IE6 does not have - and these are *new* bugs, not issues caused by hacked IE6 styles not working in the ‘now fixed’ version of IE7. For a list of these new issues see the beta feedback entries at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/520817.aspx.

A far more serious issue than the above is the fact that all the websites out there that use hacked or bespoke CSS to correct IE6’s failings will now no longer work in IE7 - as the IE7 team have deliberately fixed the support issues in a certain way - ironically in order to ‘minimise disruption’.

nb. A useful quote from Microsoft: “We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support.” Stated only this year.

Microsoft’s IE7 Blog site

MSDN’s random blog site for IE7 (nb. impossible to navigate or get anything like a homepage with logical links)

• http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/520883.aspx#522483.

Further reading on Microsoft and IE7’s “CSS support” (ha ha ha ha!) :

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ietechcol/cols/dnexpie/ie7_css_compat.asp
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/02/523679.aspx