Kim Siever’s Blog

Dean, the guy responsible for IE7, announced yesterday that Windows Vista (and concurrently IE7) Beta 1 has been released.

After reading the IE7 Technology Overview, I am please to see some of the new features that will be available in the new version of IE.

• tabbed browsing
• better user interface
• proactive security notifications (for phishing, non-secure sites, etc)
• alpha channel PNG support
• better CSS support
• RSS feed detection, subscription and viewing
• built-in, customisable search tool
• and so on

I won’t be switching from Firefox when it comes out, but it is good to know that IE is being brought to the same level as other browsers now. Hopefully, I’ll finally be able to design a website and not have to worry about testing it in different browsers.

The Beta 1 has been released to only MSDN subscribers and a small group of pre-selected testers. Beta 2, according to the documentation Dean provided in his post, will be available publicly.

A lot of commentators on Dean’s post are whining about the decision for Microsoft to go with a private testing for the first beta, but they’re all blowing smoke. They didn’t even read the information Dean posted, and got up in arms about something which is really irrelevant. They’re just a bunch of selfish children.

UPDATE: If you don’t want to take me seriously, at least listen to what Molly has to say.

Google recently implemented a new feature on their maps page that allows users to overlay roads on satellite images. Just click on the “Hybrid” button next to the “Satellite” button on the maps. It seems to be more accurate than swtichign between the two old views.

I am always interested in cool logos, and the logo for the London 2012 olympic games is one that I really like. It prompted me to take a look at the logos for the other four candidate cities (Madrid, Moscow, New York and Paris).

What I like about the London logo is how it represents the River Thames, a popular waterway that runs through and is an integral part of London. In the same way, the ribbon representing the Thames runs through and is an integral part of the logo. The five colours of the olympic rings represents all the countries of the world, and thus all the different races, ethnicities and peoples. London is a very multicultural city that represents peoples from all over the world, so the ribbon in the logo represents how these different cultures are not only integral to the olympics but to London itself.

Madrid’s logo is pretty simple. I like the warm colours chosen for the flame and the words “Madrid 2012″. To me, they represent the warmth of the people there, as well as the warm weather of the Mediterranean. In addition, the colours seem to have an old world feel to them, suggesting Madrid as a well established and secure place. I also like how the logo itself seems to represent both a bird’s-eye view of a flag and the olympic torch; a subtle but interesting design.

This logo was interesting in the fact that it incorporated the idea of the Red Square and the Kremlin—two areas central to Moscow—in its design. Beyond that, however, I was not overly impressed. It seemed a bit too trendy and reeked too much of communism for my taste. In addition, the treatment of “Moscow 2012″ made it appear too small to read comfortably when the image was reduced to that above. Overall, I think the design would be more appropriate for a postage stamp than an olympic stadium.

The New York logo was very lively and vibrant. The use of merging the Statue of Liberty with an athlete was also clever. However, it seems like a very American logo. It gives off the impression that Americans are winners, which may be a good idea to promote given the Word Trade Centre attacks. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem to encapsulate the international nature of the Olympics. To me, as well, the use of the olympic colours in the words is a bit overused. That being said, where’s the black in the word “NYC2012″ and where’d the light blue come from?

Of all the logos, I disliked this one the most. It seemed very childish and immature. Sure, it was kind of ingenious to include a heart in “Paris 2012″, but why make the heart green? Besides, a heart seems to be a very obvious symbol and perhaps somewhat cheesy. At least they used black in the text. As well, it was the only logo not to include a symbol of some sort, unless you count the heart.

Though I listed the logos in alphabetical order, it seems I have also ordered them in order of my preference for them.

Translations: Russian

I thought it was time to add some new people to my sidebar. Hugh Roper and Julian Rickards comment more on here than probably anyone else. As a result, I added links to their blogs in the sidebars. Thanks for your continued visits.

AJAX seems to be all the rage recently, what with all the hype behind GMail, Google Maps, flickr, and the like. I’ve been wanting to dabble in it to test out the waters before I implemented anything major.

Cameron Adams recently published an AJAX article over at SitePoint, and it sold me on giving it a shot. I also stumbled across Bill Bercik’s Guide to Using XMLHttpRequest (with Baby Steps), which gave me the idea that I may be able to combine AJAX and ColdFusion (he used PHP).

The basic idea behind my basic AJAX project was sending a request to a ColdFusion page, using the request to query an SQL database, returning the single record, and popping it up in an alert box.

The ColdFusion code

<cfquery datasource="xxx" name="qBio">
SELECT * FROM Bios
WHERE Username = '#URL.name#'
</cfquery>

<cfoutput>Name,#qBio.cn#</cfoutput>

As I said, this is a really simple query. ColdFusion queries the Bios table from the database (I renamed the database for security reasons) based on a ‘name’ variable in the URL, and then outputs the ‘cn’ cell based on the value of the ‘name’ variable. For example, if the value of the ‘name’ variable was ‘kim.siever’, the output would be ‘Name,Kim Siever’.

The web page

The web page was simply a default page that displayed some information about me and the URL was test.cfm?name=kim.siever.

The JavaScript code

First things first. I wrote some code to check if the browser can handle AJAX.

try {
var http = new XMLHttpRequest(); // non-IE
}

catch (error){
try {
var http = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); // IE
}
catch (error) {
return false;
}
}


IE and everyone else handle XMLHttp requests differently, so this code checks to see which browser the user is running.

Next comes the code to get the name from the current URL to be passed to our ColdFusion page.

var u = document.location.href;
var i = u.indexOf('name=');
var n = u.substring(i+5,u.length);

If you’re just testing this out, you could simplify it further and just have the following:

var n = 'kim.siever';

Then comes the query.

var q = 'query.cfm?name=';
http.open("GET", q + n, true);
http.onreadystatechange = handleHttpResponse;
http.send(null);


Basically this queries query.cfm?name=kim.siever and then calls the handleHttpResponse function, which is below:

function handleHttpResponse() {
if (http.readyState == 4) {
var results = http.responseText.split(',');
alert(results[1]);
}
}

The response, which is Name,Kim Siever, is treated as an array with two elements: ‘Name’ and ‘Kim Siever’. The alert returns the second element in the array (the first element would be 0). And voilà, the alert returns Kim Siever.

Easy as pie.

Google now offers currency conversion among its calculator features. For example, the current exchange from one Canadian dollar to US dollars is 81.07 cents.