Alex Le’s Blog

I was checking out at Dell and got very annoyed by the new XPS flash-based product teaser: Here is the screenshot

In case Dell’s people can’t read my comment, here it is again

To Dell’s Graphics Designer:

How do you expect people to read this text?

Dell should have all the money and time to test for usability before launching out an add for its products.  But with the tiny, uncool blurry text, this ads basically is just counter-productive.  I don’t care about how good the designer is him/herself but if I were Michael Dell, I’d personally fire that person and hire one guy from Apple instead.

After my last post on VMWare, I have looked through the VMWare Applicance Directory and I personally found so many good “appliances”, a.k.a. virtual machines. The beatiful thing is that most of them are preconfigured and ready to use with a VMWare player/ server/ workstation installation.

OpenSource software are sometimes famous for the lack or documentations and difficult installation process. With the appliance program from VMWare, suddenly there is a much better way to educate the users about a particular project by simply providing a simple, prebuilt virtual machine with everything they need to start the application. VMWare has suddenly transformed how OpenSource software is presented. Never before OpenSource projects can strongly advocate for their brainchilds by releasing a torrent file of the virtual machine image. Talking about almost zero bandwidth cost and wide distribution! Plus developers can compete for the best appliance and win the generous $200,000 prize from VMWare . What more can the community benefit from this?

I have found so many good packages such as SugarCRM, Subversion/Trac integrations (Buildix) for agile software development, or even a free DOS with popular games that is less than 15 Mb. Now testing out the new release of Fedora Core or Ubuntu is trivial with the images. Or I can even learn how to operate a cluster with the OSCAR appliance package, how awesome is that? Or I can setup a OpenLDAP server to test out the software in 5 minutes - learning networking and network administration cannot be any easier! Or there is one Multi-Browser appliance to test for browser compability

I cannot wait to see if someone would release a copy of Windows XP on an image via the torrent networks, that would be highly illegal but a great way to test out new software. Ah, I suddenly remember about my WindowsXP image file for Microsoft VirtualPC buried somewhere in my hard drives. Thanks to the utility that comes with the VMWare installation, I can convert the old image file into a fully working Windows XP for VMWare. But lets just hope that I won’t get any spyware onto it

VMWare, thank you! You deserve a great place on the OpenSource’s Hall of Fame list.

So I just realize that I am working on lots of CSS stuff right now. The toughest part is not writing the CSS itself as any capable web desinger can do it but how to make the CSS file working across the browsers spectrum: with IE takes 90% (and decreasing, if IE7 doesn’t get out soon), Firefox (some %, but highly standard-compliant), Safari (used by 3% of Mac-lovers), Opera (I have no idea about the adoption rate).

People somtimes say that the detail is the devil, so testing the CSS on such browsers on the same platform (specifically a PC) is quite a hassle. Safari is JUST for Mac and IE on Mac is the worst browser to remain till this day. Luckily, IE on Mac is dead and Safari is based on KHTML, the major HTML engine for Linux used by Konqueror. To test the webpage for compability with Safari is now equivalent to testing the page on a KHTML-browser. But KHTML hasn’t been ported to Windows completedly, it still remains only for Linux. The only project on sourceforge to port KHTML to windows has been quite dead for 2 years. Luckily we have VMWare on PC to emulate Linux.There is an brief tutorial to get VMWare with Suse 10.5 with KDE working on a PC here at Jedisthlm.com.
I’m giving it a try first to see if this method is effective or else I have to invest in a Mac sometimes later on like in 2, 3 years or sooner if I can get enough extra money from the freelance work I’m doing now. More to report later…

Update:

Since the last post, I have installed and tried the VMWare Player and VMWare Workstation 5.5.1. My take on VMWare: very, very impressive. My previous experience with virtual platform hasn’t been that impressive. I have previously used the Microsoft VirtualPC version 4 before to run FreeBSD for a class. With X running, the FreeBSD Virtual Machine works just fine but I didn’t feel right: the mouse tracking is kinda strange, the GUI is noticably slower, etc.. Technically speaking I’m not a *Nix guy at all so I’m just sayin from a “normal user” perspective.

With VMWare platform, on the other hand, the Suse10.5 with KDE works and feel just like a native Linux OS. I can drag a window and see its contents at the same time quite smoothly. And KDE 3.5 just makes me feel like I’m home at a Windows machine. To test the performance of the emulated machine, I installed a few software like Apache: the speed is not bad at all. For clarification, I’m using a Dell 420SC server with 1GB with ECC Ram, SATA drives, and ATI x300 graphics card. Compared this experiment to my last experience with VirtualPC 4, I can say VMWare 5.5 is much improved.

Also Flash plugins works amazingly very well in this case. I installed Firefox 1.5.0.4 and the Flash 7.0 plugins (via the command-line) and surfed to a few sites. Even flash streaming video works! The video is displayed as smooth and crisp as it is on my host Windows XP.

Final remarks

So now I can have this VMWare little baby under my belt for web-compability testing and development. Testing for Safari is now equivalent to open up the VMware machine and run with Konqueror. The process takes about 1 minute if not less. Also there is a host of other applications that can be used on the VMWare platform such as the enterprise-level SourceForge project management, the Buildix platform, etc… Or a beowulf cluster can be built virtually with the VMWorkstation. The potential is endless.

I was working with some transparent PNGs and CSS for a round-corner irregular-shape box and got stuck. The IE7 library by this guy Dean Edwards didn’t work out very well for me. Don’t get me wrong, the js hack lib is actually able to fix PNG transparency issues of IE, both PNG used in img tag and background: url(), however, applying it on IE causes my layout to break mysteriously. Gaps are displayed between my carefully placed divs so gone is my design. And I’m using the YUI grid CSS libraries, so you know Y!’s stuff is of pretty high standard. There’s no reason why my layout just suddenly breaks like that. Anyway, weird things happen in IE.

I dug into the new Yahoo! Mail and see what they would do to solve the PNG problem, and Y! dev team were quite nice in their CSS by having comments and opinions too! Check this out…

The Y! Dev Team calls this PNG transparency crap “the [Microsoft’s] insanity.” I second this! Anyway, I was able to fix my box with the M$’s insanity but the absolute URL issue is a small hassle for this paticular template.  The CSS @import works so much better because everything is relative to the CSS file, making the CSS really portable and easy to switch.

Until then, the world still have to be stuck with M$’s insanity a.k.a the higly-overly-complicated-proprietary piece of crappy techonology to solve for PNG transparency for the world most inferior browser.

I’m pretty surprised at the current news about Ebay’s strategy to ban Google Checkout on their site. Ebay have been buying a lot of keywords from Google AdSense, millions, as the related Mercury News article cited. But since Google is putting out both indirect and direct competitive services, I suspect the relationship now is merely because Ebay want to leverage Google’s popularity to help drive more customers to its auctions. This strategic relationship will sooner or later be aroded. Make it now as Ebay ban Google Checkout.
There are reasons why Ebay ban Google Checkout, a Paypal alternative. Google has planned to take losses to launch its Checkout service to attract more users. Checkout charges a lower percentage and a lower transaction fee than Paypal does. Ebay Power Sellers with thousands of items listed everyday in turn can save lots of money by offering G-Checkout side by side with Paypal. Hence Ebay can potentially lose lots of money. By banning G-Checkout, Ebay want to slow down the acceptance rate of Checkout and prevent this competitive service from reaching a critical mass that Paypal currently has attained. The question is how long this strategy can work and in turn, how it will affect the Ebay-Google relationship.

Recall not too long ago when Google launched Base, there were rumours about it launching Checkout. Now with Base and Checkout, whose rate is cheaper and leveraged by the Google technology and powerful, people-trusted brand, Ebay is facing a cirtical threat. Investors have seen this coming and translated the incoming threats into the plummet of Ebay’ stock. In January, the stock was valued at a peak of $46.77. At the current time of writing, Ebay stock is $26.97 a pop. That is a 42% decline! On the other hand, the GOOG stock has done very well for this year. GOOG attacked the $400 region, fluctuated a little bit down to $350 but has since headed up north. At this time, GOOG is $426.05.

Ebay should be criticized on its strategies. While competitors such as Google and Amazon constantly innovate with the releasing of new services, Ebay remains pretty static and slow in terms of innovation. When was the last time Ebay launched a new service? - exactly! Ebay’s business model has changed very little for, well, the last 4 years. Yes Ebay did try to expand its business to VoIP with the purchase of Skype for a whopping $2 billion something but little did change on Ebay auction pages. Skype still remains only a little banner at the footer of Ebay pages as a separate business entity. Skype is awesome on its own and Ebay is missing out big time in capitalize the potential of Skype for its auction business. Or is Ebay so busy with squashing out phishing that it has forgotten to innovate?

To sum up, with the heating-up competition from the giant Google, Ebay will have to do more than just the traditional auction service. Ebay has to expand its auction business either by adding more creative business ideas, diversifying itself technologically, or forming more powerful partnerships. Until something happens, Ebay stock will be very likely to suffer.