Tales from the Evil Empire

I've said some time ago that I personally would have preferred if IE8 was in standard mode by default, that it made more sense in the long run at the price of moderate suffering in the short term.

Apologies if you're not. Let me explain.

Ever since it came out, it seems like Wii Play has been somewhere on top of sales charts and even managed to be the #2 top-seller of 2007 in the US. Let's be clear about this: even if it looks like a good deal, being only $10 above the price of a standalone Wiimote, it really isn't. It would be a good deal *if* Wii Play itself was worth $10, which it isn't by a very large margin (i.e. at least $10). As a matter of facts, if you gave me $10 to play this thing (which I refuse to call a game), I would decline. And I want the fifteen minutes I spent trying to play it back.

For some reason, there is no standard API to get the pixel coordinates of a DOM element relative to the upper-left corner of the document. APIs only exist to get coordinates relative to the offset parent. Problem is, it's very important to get those coordinates for applications such as drag and drop, or whenever you need to compare coordinates of elements that may be in completely different parts of the document.

This will affect all Web developers, which is precisely why the debate is very heated. Anyway, here's a honest recap of the issue. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion although that is obvisouly not the position of Microsoft...

Mike Volodarsky wrote a fantastic article in the January 2008 issue of MSDN magazine in which he explains how you can take an existing PHP application (he uses QDig, a popular image gallery) and improve it without touching a line of its code. This is a great demonstration of the power of IIS 7's modular and pluggable architecture. Mike was able to add the following features to this PHP application using only managed code modules and configuration:

Well, at least a Dot Net Slacker...

My wife was trying to explain Martin Luther King day to my four year old daughter today. It's pretty difficult to explain seeing all the cultural ramifications and references that we take for granted but that she doesn't have, so my wife starts by explaining how she (my daughter) might have noticed how people have different skin pigmentations. Guess what she answered to that...