![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cheeseputers.
May. 29th, 2007 09:29 amI set up a Boot Camp partition on the lappie last night, and then put Windows XP on it. I named the partition Limburger, to go with the lappie's existing name of Brie and the desktop's Stilton. So now when I start up my laptop I'm asked, without any other context, to choose between Brie and Limburger, and that cracks my shit up.
I then grabbed the public beta of VMWare Fusion and had it bless the partition. So now I can either boot into it and literally have a Windows machine, or emulate it inside a little window while Mac OS X is running. It's really nifty; the two Windows morphologies are effectively two different machines with different hardware setups that happen to share the same hard drive. Apple installs a passel of drivers on the real one, and VMWare dumps stuff all over the emulated one, and it all just works. I am impressed.
The reason I did this - besides wanting to start feeling like I'm getting my money's worth out of this new Mac - was to get access to Internet Explorer running on Windows (what the technowonks call MSIE). Like a lot of modern web developers, my hacking environment is Firefox with the Firebug plug-in, so that's the initial target of everything I build. Then I see how well it works in Safari, the browser I use for ordinary web surfing. Sadly, even if the software works flawlessly on both browsers, you still haven't really tested it until you sigh, empty your mind, ponder the beauty of a tree, and then turn to ask MSIE what it thinks. Which is usually met with a roar and the flinging of your application against the nursery wall.
But what is there to do? Behind its idiot grin, MSIE still has the most market share. We have to do what MSIE wants, never mind that it remains the most utterly insane and noncompliant of all browsers, forcing you to add all these special MSIE-only exceptions and privileges in your code in order to mollify his royal highness.
So it was with dismay but not surprise that even before I was able to replicate an error someone else found with the new Testbench port, I saw that the entire volity.net website was broken under MSIE, and lord knows how long it's been like that. No doubt since one of the minor structural tweaks we made to the site this year, which nobody ever thought to test in MSIE. Who knows how many Windows users have visited the site in the last month or three and never known about our user accounts or blogs or forums? Bah.
Well, I have a Windows machine now, so I was able to fix it and put up a sheepish blog entry. It won't happen any more.
I then grabbed the public beta of VMWare Fusion and had it bless the partition. So now I can either boot into it and literally have a Windows machine, or emulate it inside a little window while Mac OS X is running. It's really nifty; the two Windows morphologies are effectively two different machines with different hardware setups that happen to share the same hard drive. Apple installs a passel of drivers on the real one, and VMWare dumps stuff all over the emulated one, and it all just works. I am impressed.
The reason I did this - besides wanting to start feeling like I'm getting my money's worth out of this new Mac - was to get access to Internet Explorer running on Windows (what the technowonks call MSIE). Like a lot of modern web developers, my hacking environment is Firefox with the Firebug plug-in, so that's the initial target of everything I build. Then I see how well it works in Safari, the browser I use for ordinary web surfing. Sadly, even if the software works flawlessly on both browsers, you still haven't really tested it until you sigh, empty your mind, ponder the beauty of a tree, and then turn to ask MSIE what it thinks. Which is usually met with a roar and the flinging of your application against the nursery wall.
But what is there to do? Behind its idiot grin, MSIE still has the most market share. We have to do what MSIE wants, never mind that it remains the most utterly insane and noncompliant of all browsers, forcing you to add all these special MSIE-only exceptions and privileges in your code in order to mollify his royal highness.
So it was with dismay but not surprise that even before I was able to replicate an error someone else found with the new Testbench port, I saw that the entire volity.net website was broken under MSIE, and lord knows how long it's been like that. No doubt since one of the minor structural tweaks we made to the site this year, which nobody ever thought to test in MSIE. Who knows how many Windows users have visited the site in the last month or three and never known about our user accounts or blogs or forums? Bah.
Well, I have a Windows machine now, so I was able to fix it and put up a sheepish blog entry. It won't happen any more.
