Stefan Hayden

how long will it be before Mac fanatics start say Macs are better cause they can dual boot Windows (edit: about 4 hours or so)? I’m counting the minutes before I read an article about that.

It’s not secrete I’m not a big Mac fan. What I really want is an easy way to dual boot OSX on my PC. When it comes down to I only want to do that for browser testing.

With the operating systems slowing coming closer and closer together how long before it’s easy to run windows, OSX, and linux all at the same time on any computer?

Update: Khoi Vinh, for the most part, agrees with me.

Update 2: Robert X. Cringely makes the most sense out of everyone:

Boot Camp makes no revenue for Apple and never will. IT IS BETA SOFTWARE. I doubt that its existence, especially as a beta product, is going to make some Fortune 500 company suddenly sanction the purchase of Macs because they can, with some effort and an extra $100, pretend to be Windows machines. While Boot Camp might help show prospective purchasers the superiority of Apple hardware, those purchasers would have to buy their Macs first and then convince themselves that they had done the right thing, which is totally backwards.

mac, windows, intel, dualboot, bootcamp, linux

Is it just me or are these martial arts fantasy movies looking more and more like Final Fantasy games? Or perhaps the other way around. Either way I love them both. The Promise looks awesome and I can’t wait for it to come out.

movie, trailer, thepromise, finalfantasy

With so many changes in store for the upcoming $100 it must be earlier in production then I thought. Here is a choice excerpt:

Negroponte said one meeting with an unnamed display manufacturer spotlighted the importance of high-volume manufacturing. "I said, 'We'd like to work with you on the display. We need a small display. It doesn't have perfect color uniformity, it can have pixel or two missing, it doesn't have to be that bright," Negroponte recounted. "The manufacturer said, 'Our strategic plan is to make big displays with perfect color uniformity, zero pixel defects and to make it very bright for the living room.'" "I said, 'That's too bad, because I need 100 million a year.' They said, 'Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.' That's the reason you need scale," Negroponte said.

Too funny.

laptop, Negroponte

If you change the HTML and the CSS of a page there is a decent chance that a user will get the new HTML but not the new CSS. This is especially true for sites with high usage and users that come back to the site several times a day.

If they only get the new HTML but not the new CSS then the site will break, the user will get confused, and you will look unprofessional. On the development site of this the problem is already solved. Having a Dev server as a place to test code is standard practice but how does this translate to CSS?

The problem is that the CSS is cashing on the client side and there isn’t an obvious way of telling the browser to un-cache it. Luckily the key word is obvious. Though it’s not in wide use there is a quick hack that will keep your CSS as fresh as your HTML.

The trick is to pass a variable on the end of the CSS file like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" xhref="http://www.stefanhayden.com/style.css?version=1" type="text/css" />

What does ?version=1 mean? This is what a URL looks like if it’s passing a GET variable from one page to the next. To the browser it means the page is dynamic and it needs to get a new version because code may have changed. The browser has no way of knowing if the CSS file is actually dynamic or not.The trick is to change the number each time you update the CSS file to make sure the browser always downloads the new code.

When a browser looks to see if it has anything cashed it compares file names. If you have “style.css” in your cashe then it’s not going to download it again. But if the browser compares “style.css?version=1” to what the new HTML is “style.css?version=2” then the browser thinks they are different files and needs to download the new CSS file.

The other reason this works is because you can add anything you want after the ? and the web page just ignores it unless it’s an actually variable on the page.

This seems to be a really good solution to version css and yet so few seem to use it. The only 2 sites I know of who do is Odeo and Sconex. Yet clearly we are in the middle of a big web boom with CSS being used every where. How are other people versioning their CSS so it doesn’t break the user experience?

In general I can’t see to many other solutions. You could make the CSS file parsed by the web server and pass headers with different cacheing info. I have not tried this but I’ll bet the browser would still cache the file as it does not know it is dynamic even if it is. You could rename the CSS file with .php but clearly no one is doing that and I’ll bet there is a browser out there that would not apply the styles because of that.

No every one gets to work on a large production site but with so many jumping in the area and quickly updating the service I’m surprised this subject has not been covered.

odeo, sconex, css, versioning, hack

Two years ago Google announced 2 projects. The lunar hosting and research center and an Email service that offered 1gb of storage space for free. We all laughed and then Gmail tuned out to be real. If only that could happen every year.

gmail, google, moon, aprilfools