Kian Ryan (.NET, Android, Geekery)

Our industry is passioned and opinionated. This is a statement of fact. Be it Emacs vs Vi, Linux vs Windows, iPod vs … errr^[1], people often fall in love with tools, philosophies and companies. And this is fine. Within the industry we call them “holy wars”, since the genuine fundamentalists have gone long past the tenets of logic and rationale (at least to the naked eye).

And like all good religions, their virtuous leaders are exalted^{[2]. Ballmer, Jobs and Stallman, each seen as personifications of the ideals they represent. Ballmer identifies with the corporate world, where big commercial software dominates. A big man with a bald head and a known temperament, he’s a figure people associate with boardrooms and big money. Jobs appears as a slight of a man, usually seen at keynotes with a trademark roll-neck and jeans he’s become the representative of design and cool, embraced by the younger generation. Stallman is another large guy, but rather than corporate groomed appears in t-shirts with long ragged hair and beard to match. A visual throwback to the hippy days, he comes with the embodiment of “free”, leading the free software revolution.}

As any good personification of an ideal, their attitudes and ideas tally with their images. Ballmer has spoken repeatedly about the values of the corporate workplace and denounced free software as evil, Jobs speaks regularly on the functions of design and Stallman denounces any software or standards not truly free as evil.

And this is fine.

Because these contrasting attitudes set up a triangle of views with these figureheads and beliefs as cornerstones. There are those that will naturally gravitate towards these polarising opinions and those that will middle around the centre, or leaning between two points of view, subscribing to different tenants of each.

Some people will insist on using nothing but free software. Some people will insist on using nothing but beautiful, design driven products. Some people are driven by the business world and purely by suits and management. Some people may be primarily driven by business, but enjoy rollneck sweaters and iPods at the weekend. Some people may use free software on top of their proprietary systems. Some people may use free software on top of their business OS to talk to their design driven MP3 player^[3].

And this is also fine.

The strength of a community is based upon the mix of people within it. Even within domain-specific communities, there will be a range of philosophies and beliefs which everyone will not subscribe to. And although we may occasionally decry these firm believers, and believe them to be as much a fundamentalist as their own religious leader we should respect (even if we disagree) their position because they provide the cornerstones of diversity for the community. The more diverse a community, the larger the range of interests and the higher the liklihood of intelligent (if sometimes a little crazy) discourse. The better the quality (not necessarily quantity) of debate, the more life exists within a community, and the higher the longer the community is likely to last. I would like to see those communities I take part in last for a very long time.

Humanist vs Belief
Free vs Commercial
Pragmatic vs Puritan
Emacs vs Vi

So I say welcome to the fundamentalists.
I say welcome to the middlers.
All communities need both.

[1] I’m kidding, there’s plenty of alternatives. I use a Sansa Clip myself. [2] For the sake of simplicity, I’m restricting the set to three. I realise that in reality the triangle is more like a multi-sided polygon, but it creates a more dramatic image this way.
[3] Did I get all the combinations there?

Internet Explorer can be a right PITA when it wants to be. I’m using Thickbox to render on page dialogues in one of my projects. Thickbox relies on testing $jquery.browser.version for determining the version number of Internet Explorer.

!(jQuery.browser.msie && jQuery.browser.version < 7

Apart from the fact that it doesn’t always work. Below is what you would expect to be presented as a user agent string for IE8:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; SLCC2; 
.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; 
.NET CLR 4.0.20506; InfoPath.2)

So far today, I’ve seen three customers with the following string

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; 
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; 
.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 
3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Somewhere, somehow, the user agent string has become corrupted (and hence the MSIE 6.0). There’s some information on this available on Microsoft communities.

The way around this is to do some explicit regular expression checking on the useragent string. For those that didn’t know about this previously, it’s demonstrated by Jamie Thompson. He introduces a new property called $.browser.msie6 which is used to check for the presence of the IE6 string without the IE7 string.

$.browser.msie6 =
    $.browser.msie
    && /MSIE 6.0/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent)
    && !/MSIE 7.0/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent);

You then adapt thickbox.js to test for this new property.

if ( !(jQuery.browser.msie6)) { // take away IE6
    $("#TB_window").css({marginTop: '-' + parseInt((TB_HEIGHT / 2),10) + 'px'});
}

Which works great for IE6, great for IE7, fine for vanilla IE8 (which doesn’t suffer from the above bug), but falls down on corrupted IE8. Not to panic, simply adjust $.browser.msie6 to look for this additional string.

$.browser.msie6 =
    $.browser.msie
    && /MSIE 6.0/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent)
    && !/MSIE 7.0/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent)
    && !/MSIE 8.0/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent);

The downside to this fix is that if and when Microsoft comes out with Internet Explorer 9, then you’ll need to adjust this script again to take this into account. I therefore propose a slight departure, using regular expressions to test for values above 6:

$.browser.versionOver6 = function() {
    var re = /MSIE (\d+)/ig;
    var match;
    while (match = re.exec(window.navigator.userAgent)) {
        if (match[1] > 6) {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}</p>

<p>$.browser.msie6 =
    $.browser.msie &amp;&amp;
    $.browser.versionOver6();

This modified version should work on all future versions of IE. Browsers which report a MSIE 6.0 as well as a MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0, MSIE 9.0, etc will now also report as not IE6, which should make filtering off IE6 fixes a little easier.

Enjoy.