Is IE gonna die....?

I was reading an article about the upcoming promised IE 9: http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/microsoft-to-double-down-on-html5-with-internet-explorer-9/

As it is clear, Microsoft is running behind the facts and not setting the standards anymore (regarding browser technology). If Microsoft will not keep up with the technology, IE will die, because people will drop it in favor of faster and better browsers.

Currently I think more and more people are using a non IE browser at their personal hardware, due to different reasons. The one and only place where IE still rules is the corporate/business hardware. Personally this is one the reasons why IE has still a big market share. As mentioned in my previous posts, business software eventually follows what people use at home (matter of being used to....). Loosing market share on personal/home computers will hurt IE very hard...eventually, as it will take some time, but it will happen.
Maybe it will happen even faster, as more and more web developers in corporate operations, are actually using Chrome and Firefox during development. Users/testers will be aware of this and they would like to have the same speed and functionality as the developers. As more business solutions are converted/created as web applications this can have a big impact and would be able to speed up the process of killing IE in the business environment.

To conclude, if Microsoft does not take real action and just tries to keep up with the developments, their browser will die. (It even feels like this time Microsoft is the WordPerfect/Lotus123 they have killed years ago)

EU funding

See article at fsteurope.com. Nothing surprising actually: Germany and France are the biggest payers int the EU for the EU. Actually there is something surprising, the Netherlands. As suspected and now confirmed, the dutch people are the biggest contributors for the EU (followed by Denmark I think).

Maybe I should move to Luxembourg..

Sharepoint Filter List from url

Sometime you need to a have a link to filtered list in Sharepoint. Luckily Sharepoint has the ability to do this. You need to use the following parameters after the list url:

......allitems.aspx?Filtername=<name of field>&FilterMultiValue=<filter text>


<name of the field> is the field name in your list, you wish to filter on (eg. Name etc)
<filter text> is the filter criteria. You can use * as an wildcard. You can add multiple filter text values by separating them with semi colons.

For example:


......allitems.aspx?Filtername=Name&FilterMultiValue=A*;B*

will show all items starting where the Name starts with A or B.

I like this method because it allows you to have multiple values and wildcards. You could also use the FilterField1 and FilterValue1 parameters. (see for more info: Using URL to sort or filter a list).

Firebug 1.5 not expanding elements on inspect

Just installed Firebug 1.5 (after using 1.4.5 for a long time) and first thing I noticed was that the inspect element did not work correctly. After hovering on an element, the html tab did not show (or expand to) the element. Then I noticed that even manually expanding an element (by clicking on the + symbol) also did not work after 3 or 4 level deep.

After some googling, I finally out it was due to FireQuery. I was using version 0.3 and after updating to 0.5, all issues fixed.

I would also like to use the opportunity to thank the Firebug team and ofcourse FireQuery for their great tools!

Windows 7 - Change theme font properties

Just a quick tip: If you want to change your desktop/theme font, you are looking for the old windows properties tab. You can easily get this on the screen by opening a Run dialog box (Windows + R keys) and then type Control Color and hit enter to directly open Window Color and Appearance box.

Terminating XMBC remotely on Ubuntu

Last few weeks I have been testing XMBC 9.11 Alpha/Beta on my Ubuntu Media system. Personally I think it is the best Media manager/player ever :).. But due to the fact it is still a beta release, the application sometimes does not respond or hangs and completely blocks the system.

The easies way to kill it and free your system without a reboot, is just open putty.exe and login remotely to your ubuntu system and issue the following command:

killall -9 xbmc.bin

This will terminate XBMC and will free your system. In my case I just restart XBMC :)

Merging items with same title in gantt view in Sharepoint

Today, got a challenge with Sharepoint where a user wanted to see multiple entries in a gannt view in Sharepoint. Below is the jquery magic you can use in a CEWP.

function docready() {

var row = [];
var ix=0;



$('tr.ms-ganttTaskRow th').each(
  function() {
    row[ix] = $(this).parent();
    ix++;
  }
);


ix=0;
for(ix=1; ix< row.length; ix++){
   var $prevrow = row[ix].prev();
   var prevtxt = $prevrow.find('th').text();
   var curtxt  = row[ix].find('th').text();
   if (prevtxt == curtxt) {
     var colix =0;
     row[ix].find('td').each(
       function() {
         var ht = $(this).html();
         if (ht.length > 0){
           $prevrow.find('td:eq('+colix+')').html(ht);
         }
         colix++;
       }
     );
     row[ix].remove();
   }
}

}

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("docready");

Explanation of the code:

1. Trigger the docready on load
2. Store all the rows in an jquery array for easy processing
3. Walk through the rows array starting from second item and match the row header with previous row, if so, copy the contents of the columns to the row above and remove after processed.
   

There is only one catch, the gantt view needs to be sorted on the row header column.