An article in the LA Times mentioned the unhealthy air quality today. This is something I've been watching closely. I've not been outside since yesterday morning for a very short time. Where we leave is about 15 miles from the Ontario fires, and south west of the Arrowhead fires, so that smoke is going right through on it's way to the ocean. The article titled "Windblown soot, gas, and dust pose threat", says "Health officials urged the young, the elderly and those with breathing problems to stay indoors until further notice as Southern California's wildfires continued to pollute the air with smoke, gas and dust."

So even if you don't live in the immediate area of any of the fires, take precautions and stay safe. For those of you who do, please at least wear a mask, smoke inhalation even after the fire is out is extremely dangerous.

Stay Safe.

Update: Check out this map from flashearth. It shows the smoke really well.

The reports this morning is that more than 250,000 people have been evacuated from the San Diego area, and more than 1000 homes and business have been lost since Sunday. Here is a map of the fires and the evacuation centers.

Update:
Here is an updated sat image of the fires and the smoke billowing from southern california and the San Diego area.




Stay Safe.

Update: 10/24/2007 10:15am PDT: updated the link to the map, the previous version of the map had stopped being updated due to usage, the new map is from PBS.

Being asthmatic, I play a lot of attention to the weather and natural disasters. Well the fires that started yesterday completely fall into those categories. ABC7 has done a great job of keeping us update on where the fires are and where things are at with them. I was very impressed to see that they've added a mash-up map to let you know where the fires are at, check it out here.



The smoke is very very heavy today, I've stayed inside and close to my air filter. To see the path of the smoke driven by the wind, check out this sat image from NASA.

Stay safe.

Lately I've been thinking and spending quite a little bit of time reading about organization. You see currently at work I'm the only Developer. We lost a great Developer (Ed) to a company that offered him more money and the kind of work that he wanted to do (Could you blame him, I sure couldn't). Our remaining Developer who we affectionately call "Eggman", took a long flight across a big ocean to see his family(I couldn't blame him either). However these two events leave me with a lot of little things to get done that will come in  at rapid succession.

 

So I am changing a few things. First Email, well we all know that there is way to much of it. So a good system for sorting through it is required. With a little simple logic and some Outlook email rules this is fairly easy to accomplish but it does take a change in behavior. First thing I had to change, my Inbox is not my repository for email. Its more of my To-Do list. If thinks in the Inbox can't be accomplished quickly they are moved to the @Action folder. Everything in the action folder is something I am actively working on. If it something that needs read, but isn't as urgent as inbox or @Action folder, it goes in the @Review folder. I've also set up a rule that anything that is address to the company wide email group ( theentirecompany@mycompany.com ) is sent to the @Review folder. The Next folder is the @Snooze folder, items that go in here are in more of the back burner project area. I don't want to forget about them, but they aren't as urgent as the previous folders. I have two other folders that I am using that are new to me for managing my email. I have a @Waiting For folder, which are items in which I am waiting for a response before I can move on, and a @someday box, these are the emails which have good ideas that need a safe place to live until I get to them. I do have to say after several google searches, I of course landed on Scott Hanselman's blog, and these Ideas are from his article ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) and a new Outlook Rule.

So far this system has been working fairly well for me. I have added one more folder, that email tasks that have been finished and need put in to our tracking system are moved too. To make sure I have a put in a record for every completed task. So now not am I getting more things done, it looks like it to my supervisors as well.

Reading Lifehacker.com today I came across a post that peaked my interest. It's called "Discovering your learning style". I thought this was an interesting think to learn about myself. How exactly do I learn the best. So I did my best to be as truthful as I could answering the questions. The suggestions they gave actually surprised me quite a bit but really do seem useful. Anyhow here are my results. Let me know what yours were.

Happy Learning

Visual/Nonverbal 32 Visual/Verbal 28 Auditory 18 Kinesthetic 34

Your primary learning style is:

The Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learning Style

You learn best when physically engaged in a "hands on" activity. In the classroom, you benefit from a lab setting where you can manipulate materials to learn new information. You learn best when you can be physically active in the learning environment. You benefit from instructors who encourage in-class demonstrations, "hands on" student learning experiences, and field work outside the classroom.

Strategies for the Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learner:

To help you stay focused on class lecture, sit near the front of the room and take notes throughout the class period. Don't worry about correct spelling or writing in complete sentences. Jot down key words and draw pictures or make charts to help you remember the information you are hearing.

When studying, walk back and forth with textbook, notes, or flashcards in hand and read the information out loud.

Think of ways to make your learning tangible, i.e. something you can put your hands on. For example, make a model that illustrates a key concept. Spend extra time in a lab setting to learn an important procedure. Spend time in the field (e.g. a museum, historical site, or job site) to gain first-hand experience of your subject matter.

To learn a sequence of steps, make 3'x 5' flashcards for each step. Arrange the cards on a table top to represent the correct sequence. Put words, symbols, or pictures on your flashcards -- anything that helps you remember the information. Use highlighter pens in contrasting colors to emphasize important points. Limit the amount of information per card to aid recall. Practice putting the cards in order until the sequence becomes automatic.

When reviewing new information, copy key points onto a chalkboard, easel board, or other large writing surface.

Make use of the computer to reinforce learning through the sense of touch. Using word processing software, copy essential information from your notes and textbook. Use graphics, tables, and spreadsheets to further organize material that must be learned.

Listen to audio tapes on a Walkman tape player while exercising. Make your own tapes containing important course information.

What is a Web Browser: Simply put, it's a software application used to locate and display web pages. Okay that's simple enough. What is HTML?

HTML is the the standard method used for the creation of Web Pages. HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. All browsers understand HTML is it is a web standard. The W3C says that "HTML is the publishing language of the World Wide Web. Who is the W3C ? Well in their own words, "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential."

The current version of HTML is HTML 4.01 which was approved and recommended by the W3C on December 24, of 1999. However there is a reformulation of HTTML 4.0 that is a combination of HTML 4.01 and XML 1.0 called XHTML 1.0. Most modern browsers are XHTML 1.0 compliant as well.

So why do we care about this stuff. Well if HTML is the publishing language of the web, that means that all of our website use html. Even though Online Banking is a very complicated application, in the end HTML is sent to the members browser. Okay, so now we know that all the websites send HTML to the members browser, but there is a standard so all browser should render it the same way right. Well, no they don't you see different companies interrupted the standards different from others, and other companies (Microsoft) deviated completely.

How bad can it be? The Web Standard Project created the Acid Test II It is an HTML document that is written that uses HTML,CSS and PNG written to the current W3C standards. Its amazing how differently it looks in the different browsers. (If you'd like to learn more about the Acid Test, check out this article .) Heres a quick example of how the Acid Test looks in some of the common browsers.

Firefox 2.0.0.x:

Internet Explorer 6.0:

Opera 9.2:

Safari 3.0 Windows:

As you can see the difference range from very slight to no where near the mark. Now we see the importance of knowing the each browser will render the same page differently. So what a can we do if troubleshooting and figure this out....Well this one you get to blame on the Developer. 

Getting Started

To get started first we will need to learn how browsers get web pages. Then we will need to set up our test machine (virtual machine) and load several different browsers in it. Let’s start with how browsers get a web page by learning its protocols.

HTTP Protocol

What’s HTTP

Before trying to start troubleshooting browser issues we should take a quick look at the HTTP. HTTP is an acronym for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is the basic protocol that all browsers use to sent request and receive responds to display web pages. This request/response happens between a client (the web browser) and the web server. The client, sends a request to the web server in the form of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), for example http://www.mydigitalsplendor.com. The web server takes that request and response by giving the browser that page (see figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means that once the Request and Response is done, the server has no idea what is on the clients browser and the browser has no idea the server exist, till the next request.

HTTP Cookies

HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are small blocks of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

Allowing users to log in to a website is another use of cookies. Users typically log in by inserting their credentials into a login page; cookies allow the server to know that the user is already authenticated, and therefore is allowed to access services or perform operations that are restricted to logged-in users.

Another use for cookies is to maintain a session state with the web browser. But wait a minute, you just said that HTTP was stateless, so what is this session state stuff. You see web application Frameworks like ASP.NET (what Online Banking uses) or PHP use mechanisms for storing information session information, and give that information a unique id or session state id as a method for working around the fact that HTTP is stateless.

So what does a cookie look like:

Set-Cookie: SessionId=732423sdfs73242; expires=Fri, 13-Jul-2007 23:59:59 GMT; path=/; domain=mydigitalsplendor.com;

HTTP Headers

HTTP headers are how HTTP handles the request/response nature of the protocols. Both web browsers and web servers use Headers to communicate what they want and what they are giving each other. For example a request from a web browser will look like the following:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mydigitalsplendor.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Accept: application/x-shockwave-flash,text/xml,application/xml,application/
xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

 

Okay, great, that’s what it looks like but what does it mean. Well let’s go through each field and talk about what they mean and do.

GET / HTTP/ 1.1 : Hey web server, I want something and this is what protocol I’m using to communicate with you. host: www.mydigitalsplendor.com: This is where I want the page from. The server is set to serve up a specific page when just the domain is given as in this example, but we could ask for www.mydigitalsplendor.com/blog/default.aspx and get the same thing. Now the rest of the Header is telling the server what the client it and what it can do.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4: this is simply the type of browser you are using and what operation system you are on. So from this User-Agent information, we can see that the user is on Windows XP, they are using an US version of windows, and they are Using Firefox 2.0.0.4 with a version that is using the Gecko html rendering engine.

Accept: application/x-shockwave-flash,text/xml,application/xml,app-lication/xhtml+xml,
text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 This is all the things the browser is capable of doing. For example, this one says it can handle, flash, xml, xhtml, html, plain text and images.

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Is just what you think it is, it tells the server what a language the browser is set to use. So from this line we can see that the language being used here is English, however it also tells us the country as well, so not only is it English, but it is English spoken in the US. This is helpful to the server to allow it to server correct content. A good example of this is currency. If the server sees this field and its EG-US, it uses the US Dollars as the currency to calculate, however if its EG-GB (Great Britain) it will use the British Pound for the currency.

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7: This is what character set the browser is using. This one is especial helpful when you see a square box or question mark instead of the letter "A". IS0-8859 is character set known as western. UTF-8 is the Unicode 8 bit character set. So this browser is telling us it can handle both of them. Keep-Alive: 300: This one simply says, this is how long I will keep the connection open waiting for you to give me a response to my request.

Connection: keep-alive: This means that the browser will keep the connection alive waiting for the response to the request.

Now that we've sent our request, the server responds with this HTTP Header which looks like the follow:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:58:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Let's go over the response like we did the request. It's full of HTTP goodness. so let's check it out.

HTTP/1.x 200 OK : This is the server saying, hey, we're using the same protocol and everything is A-OK with your request. The code 200 is what tells us that.
Cache-Control: private : This tells us that the server wants the cache to be controlled by the browser and not let some proxy service getin the way.
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:58:43 GMT: This is the date and time that the page was served up and sent to the browser.
Content-Type: text/html : Here we have the content type of what is being served. So its giving the browser an HTML page,
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0: This is the kind of server that is giving us the date. Microsoft, is the software creator, and IIS/6.0 is the web server products name and version number.
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET : This field tells us what framework the server is using, which in this Server happens to be ASP.NET,
which is what you'd expect from a IIS server.Content-Encoding: gzip: Content-Encoding is telling us that content coming from the server has been compressed using HTTP-Compression and that the browser is going to have to uncompress the content to be able to read it.
Vary: Accept-Encoding: This field is saying that it can Accept-Encoding in a Variety of ways and it "Varys" depending on the browser.
Transfer-Encoding: chunked : This field means the message body is send to the client as chunks that are stamped with the
size of the chunks. With chunked transfer encoding, the client can make sure that it has received all of the data that the server sends.
In Part II we'll go over Browsers....The good, the bad and the ugly.