Wednesday, June 11th, 2008


Well, not mine, exactly.

Flinders Learning Online doesn’t render properly in Safari 4 (Developer Preview). It doesn’t display the sidebar, which has quick access to topic information.

It basically makes it unusable.

I think the system is the Blackboard Learning System, or something similar.

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Okay, I’ve deleted the Safari 4 Preview.

It just breaks too many things.

Firstly, it makes my Online Learning system not display properly.

Secondly, it makes ecto not work very well. It causes it to not post, and in fact not even retrieve posts from the sever very well. And it makes data just magically vanish.

Finally, it kills the ability to edit posts in WordPress Admin area. That’s right, it breaks TEXTAREA tags.

How the hell can you do that?

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Ugh. Ecto just stole my post. Oh well, time to start again.

I pride myself on being almost 100% Microsoft free. I don’t use Windows on a day-to-day basis. I have to test a Windows program against a server I write, but that is it. I used to have to use Windows to run AutoDesk Inventor and a custom MS Access Database, but that was in my prior life as a teacher.

Lately, I’ve been using Pages for all of my Word Processing needs, and I think it works better than MS Word. It is snappier, performs more reliably (doesn’t make stuff jump around randomly), and has all of the features I need and use.

I’ve also been using Numbers as a Spreadsheet. It, unfortunately, doesn’t hold up to the competition, Excel, nearly as well. Firstly, it doesn’t have Pivot Tables, which are a great invention that I just could not live without if I was doing any sort of collation of data. Like the custom Excel Spreadsheet I built for my partner’s expenses and tax purposes. However, she is likely to shift over to MYOB anyway.

My problems with Numbers are mainly to do with Charting. I had to collate data that had run times of various algorithms, as they were implemented using different techniques across different programming languages and paradigms. Most of the data was easy to compare, but as I went to present all of the tests I found an issue.

There is no way to do an X-Y, or Scatter Plot in Numbers.

Your data will be okay if you have the same values for all of your X values for every column, but, if you have the situation I came across where I had some data sets that were increasing by an order of magnitude, and some data sets that were doubling (and, one data set that was incrementing).

Thus, I wasn’t able to obtain the following plot, and had to use Excel.

200806111038.jpg

Pleased to say I used Apple Remote Desktop and a machine that already had it on it, rather than install in on my laptop!

Oh, and before anyone says anything, I tried Tables (which I bought a license to before Apple brought out Numbers), and OpenOffice.

Now, don’t get me started on OpenOffice. I think I’d rather use Microsoft Office. I mean, all they have done is clone it, and haven’t really gotten everything to work. At least there is a Cocoa/Aqua version, but it is clunkier and slower than Excel.

I might actually try Excel 2008 and see how that goes if I need to do some more number crunching.

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I can’t post this in ecto - I think the Safari 4 DP is fucking with that too.

Anyway, if I log into the BLS using any application that uses WebKit as its renderer, I see the following:
FLO wrong render

If I resize the window, it fixes itself:

FLO wrong render

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