- Coffee Shops in Moose Jaw
-
Coffee
Encounters
My favorite coffee shop in Moose Jaw and my home away from
home.
- Maurice Richard Libby aka
-
Whiteboy
Slim
Good friend, fellow artist and blues musician
extraordinaire
- Geoff Howe
-
GEOFF HOWE photography
Good friend, excellent photographer.Freelance photographer based in Saskatoon, Sask.
- The Bahá'í Faith
-
The purpose of learning should be the promotion of the welfare
of the people, and this can be achieved through crafts. It hath
been revealed and is now repeated that the true worth of artists
and craftsmen should be appreciated, for they advance the
affairs of mankind. Just as the foundations of religion are made
firm through the Law of God, the means of livelihood depend upon
those who are engaged in arts and crafts. True learning is that
which is conducive to the well-being of the world, not to pride
and self-conceit, or to tyranny, violence and pillage.
(Bahá'u'lláh)
I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in
this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest
to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal
could be greater than this, that one's art should be even as the
act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers
grasp the paintbrush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the
Temple. ('Abdu'l-Bahá)
- For information on the Bahá'í Faith
-
The
Bahá'ís
The International Web Site of the Bahá'í Faith
The Bahá'í Community of
Canada
Information on the Bahá'í Community of Canada and the Bahá'í Faith
The Bahá'í Community of
Moose Jaw
Information on the Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan Bahá'í Community
The
Bahá'ís Magazine
A Profile of the Bahá'í Faith and its Worldwide Community
- Recommended Office Suite
-
OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office
productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications,
such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and
drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar
to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible,
OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file
formats, including those of Microsoft Office.
Available in over 45 supported languages with more being
constantly added by the community, OpenOffice.org runs stably
and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), Windows,
Mac OS X (X11), and numerous other platforms.
- OpenDocument!
-
What is OpenDocument?
OpenDocument (short for OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is:
- An open, XML-based file format.
- An open standard from the OASIS standards group.
- The default file format for OpenOffice.org 2.0, KOffice 1.4, StarOffice 8, IBM Workplace and other applications.
- The required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts.
- A format that fulfills the European Union's criteria on open standards.
Please sign the petition to ask Microsoft to support the OpenDocument format in MS Office.
Microsoft has said that they will support the OpenDocument format if there is customer demand. The purpose of the petition is to demonstrate that customer demand.
- Recommended Browsers
-
-
I do not recommend Internet Explorer.
It has a history of severe security problems and does not
provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level
2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard. Some features on my
site (which is W3C complient) do not work in it. Please use an
alternate browser. Read the following articles for
details.
-
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
CSS Support Could Be Internet Explorer's Weakest Link
By Mary Jo Foley and Ryan Naraine, eWEEK
Microsoft will be doing a lot to make developers and customers
happy with its pending Internet Explorer release, if partner
sources with inside information on the IE 7.0 browser are
right.
But there's one area where Microsoft won't be winning a lot of
applause.
The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to
provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level
2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners
say.
Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said
the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new
standalone browser.
But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0
fully CSS2 compliant, sources said.
IE 7.0 is expected to go to beta testers this summer.
Microsoft has declined to provide a final ship-date target for
the release, which will be designed for machines running Windows
XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Professional x64 and Windows
Server 2003 Service Pack 1.
But some sources hear that Microsoft is planning to ship the
final IE 7.0 release this fall.
IE developers and users have been clamoring for full CSS2
support for years.
CSS2 is a style-sheet language that allows developers to attach
font, spacing, speech and other information to structured HTML
documents and XML applications.
CSS2 separates the presentation style of documents from document
content with the goal of simplifying Web authoring and site
maintenance.
One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed"
standard and that the company is waiting for a later point
release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete
support behind it.
When asked about its plans for supporting CSS2 in IE 7.0, a
Microsoft spokeswoman said, "Unfortunately we can't disclose
anything about IE 7 right now, so we won't be able to comment on
standards and CSS2."
The spokeswoman instead pointed to Microsoft's IE Weblog, where
company officials are highlighting Microsoft's partial CSS2
compliance in IE 6.0, the most recent version of Microsoft's Web
browser.
Some demand full compliance
A number of Web developers and customers have maintained that
partial CSS2 compliance doesn't provide cross-platform
interoperability and other benefits that full compliance
does.
"Now that sites like Google Maps have shown how much Web
designers can do with CSS and DHTML [dynamic HTML], it would be
a shame for Microsoft to ignore CSS2 in IE 7.0," said James
Thiele, a Seattle-based consultant and trainer.
Robert McLaws, president of Interscape Technologies, is among
those who say they are disappointed at the initial word that
full CSS2 support won't be coming with the browser
refresh.
"Full CSS2 support is the one thing that every developer has
been asking for. CSS2 is a great standard and, at some point,
Microsoft will probably support it fully. But, the longer they
take to do it, the more they alienate developers," McLaws
said.
McLaws, a .Net developer and consultant, said full CSS2 support
would give Web developers more control over how pages are
rendered. Right now, IE's lack of support for fixed positioning
is one of the biggest headaches for developers.
"You have to write code for IE and then you have to write code
for all the other browsers. No sane developer can ignore IE,
because it is the dominant browser, but because of the way
Microsoft deals with the standards, you have lots of sites that
are not standards-compliant," McLaws added.
McLaws, who runs the Longhornblogs network, said a lot of "extra
time and resources" had to be expended to make the site render
the same way on all Web browsers.
"What is Microsoft's job? If their job is to make it dirt easy
for developers to create great Web sites, and they don't support
the same standards that other browsers support, they're making
my job more difficult."
Sean Mitchell, a Web developer and IT consultant based in
Ontario, Canada, echoed those gripes.
"I can build a Web site that works fine in a dozen flavors of
Mozilla-based browsers, across countless different versions of
several different operating systems, but the same page renders
differently on different instances of Internet Explorer. That's
always an issue.
"Typically, about 20 percent of my time goes into coding a site
to spec, that works in standards-based browsers, and then 80
percent to make it look right in IE," Mitchell said.
"It seems to me that if Microsoft is going to bring out IE 7.0,
then it should be up to all the latest standards," said another
user, who requested anonymity.
"For now, anyway, it looks like all they are going to do is
bring out another slightly updated version of IE that will still
need constant updating and patches to fix all the 'holes' just
like the current version, instead of giving people what they
really want and need—a secure browser," the user added.
A possible focus on security issues.
Michael Cherry, senior analyst at Directions on Microsoft, said
he believes the software giant's biggest focus will be on
security issues with features and standards support taking a
back seat.
"There really is not a groundswell of experts or analysts saying
that customers should abandon IE because it doesn't support
tabbed browsing or comply fully with CSS specifications.
"There may be frustration over these points, but it does not
seem that Microsoft has to address them before Longhorn, or risk
losing market share to any competitive browser," Cherry told
eWEEK.com.
"It also seems that CSS support may be more important for client
side work, and full or complete CSS support makes a thin client
more attractive. This would seem to be counter to Microsoft's
push for 'rich' clients. So you might not expect them to rush to
fix any issues in this area," Cherry added.
"I am not sure customers should be looking for an IE 7.0 release
before Longhorn to address anything more than security, unless
there are other issues that are potentially giving competitive
browsers, such as Firefox, an advantage over IE such that users
would make a change to get. Any thing other than security can
probably wait for Longhorn, or longer," he added.
From a developer's standpoint, Mitchell disagrees.
"IE is missing some very useful things, like max-width. You have
to hack your way around it, and then you run the risk that the
page will break when Microsoft improves IE's standards support.
Even now, I expect many, many sites out there will break badly
when IE 7 hits the street."
"The same developers who chose to cut corners will now have to
put a lot of work into fixing their sites," Mitchell
added.
However, not everyone is clamoring for full CSS2 support.
"CSS 2.0 has a few nice features, but realistically, I don't
think it being in there makes much difference either way," said
a Windows developer, who requested anonymity.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,,1776935,00.asp
- June 29, 2004
US-CERT: Beware of IE
By Ryan Naraine
The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is
warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)
browser.
On the heels of last week's sophisticated malware attack that
targeted a known IE flaw, US-CERT updated an earlier advisory to
recommend the use of alternative browsers because of "significant
vulnerabilities" in technologies embedded in IE.
"There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies
relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object
model, MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce
exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser,
especially when browsing untrusted sites," US-CERT noted in a
vulnerability note.
The latest US-CERT position comes at a crucial time for Microsoft ,
which has invested heavily to add secure browsing technologies in the
coming Windows XP Service Pack 2. The software giant has spent the
last few months talking up the coming IE security improvements but
the slow response to patching well-known -- and sometimes "critical"
-- browser holes isn't sitting well with security experts.
On discussion lists and message boards, security researchers have
spent a lot of time beating the "Dump IE" drum, and the US-CERT
notice is sure to lend credibility to the movement away from the
world's most popular browser.
US-CERT is a non-profit partnership between the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and the public and private sectors. It was
established in September 2003 to improve computer security
preparedness and response to cyber attacks in the United
States.
It has been more than two weeks since Microsoft confirmed the
existence on an "extremely critical" IE bug, which was being used to
load adware/spyware and malware on PCs without user intervention but,
even though the company hinted it would go outside its monthly
security update cycle to issue a fix, the flaw remains
unpatched.
US-CERT researchers say the IE browser does not adequately validate
the security context of a frame that has been redirected by a Web
server. It opens the door for an attacker to exploit the flaw by
executing script in different security domains.
"By causing script to be evaluated in the Local Machine Zone, the
attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user
running IE," according to the advisory.
"Functional exploit code is publicly available, and there are reports
of incidents involving this vulnerability."
To protect against the flaw, IE users are urged to disable Active
scripting and ActiveX controls in the Internet Zone (or any zone used
by an attacker). Other temporary workarounds include the application
of the Outlook e-mail security update; the use of plain-text e-mails
and the use of anti-virus software.
Surfers must also get into the habit of not clicking on unsolicited
URLs from e-mail, instant messages, Web forums or internet relay chat
(IRC) sessions.
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3374931
This web-site copyright © 2005 Larry I
Gusaas
All images on this web site are copyright Larry I Gusaas.
Please respect all copyright laws and do not download or copy anything
contained within without prior written consent.
Thank you,
Larry I Gusaas
