IE 6 not refreshing

Just stumbled upon yet another funky IE6 "bug" (if I may say so...

When you want to automatically refresh to another page, you send a header that looks something like:

Refresh:0;url=http://blah.blah.blah

The funky thing is that if that header exceeds the maximum size of 263 characters, IE won't do the refresh!

Okay there's got to be a limit, but why so low? And why "263" ??

No need to say, auto refreshes work fine in Firebird with headers much longer than that.

I guess this is why you still need to put some dirty message underneath like 'if nothing happens, please click here! :/

PS: Please don't tell me to use a Location: instead. This would make it impossible to set cookies.

Successful Regular Expressions

Via John Lim: Tony Stubblebine has a nice article teaching Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions [dead links]:

What? You can put comments into regexps? Why hasn't anybody said so before? :?: Worse: why isn't anybody actually doing it???

Hum... and these extremely useful lazy quantifiers... how could they have slipped out of my mind?

Microsoft killing the browser: scary movie...

Sometimes I fear that Microsoft stopping the development of IE 6 is a lot worse than we think...

It looks more and more like they have a master plan beyond terminating the free browser program... (we don't care, we have open source browsers, right?)... Actually, it looks like they plan to terminate the browser concept itself.

With their .NET client technology, they actually intend to promote applications that directly and transparently connect to web-services. You don't "see" the internet any more. What you see, is the funky XP GUI interface of a native Windows application!

Once most online services will work only with their dedicated Windows client (yeah the providers don't care, that's 95% of their market anyway), what's the use of a free open source browser going to be? Oh yeah... it will let you browse the old, poorly maintained, "compatible" w-e-b-site (which already only works well in IE! :/)

Wow! Waking up... I just had a terrible nightmare! Luckily something like this could never happen... right?   right?

2015 update: something like this is actually happening with phone apps... Ironic? ... or did someone take a page out of Microsoft's early century book?

Focus on the First Derivative

In his latest post about Career Calculus, Eric Sink explains how you should constantly monitor your personal learning curve by focusing on the first derivative instead of the curve itself.

Very interesting post. Wise advice.

I actually believe this is not only applicable to career calculus, but there are a lot of things in life which value you should only evaluate by its first derivative over time!

Internationalizing web applications using gettext in PHP

As I have said before, gettext is a very interesting framework for i18n and i10n.

Now the question is, how do I apply this to web applications? Actually, I'm going to restrict my discussion here to PHP since this is what I'm working with right now... but you should expect similar behaviour when using other web development tools that integrate gettext.

First of all, the good news: PHP fully supports gettext since version 3.0.7. So it's been used for a long time and you can even find tutorials on the net.

PHP/Gettext in action

Read more »