Alex's Journal

Well, I am back in the US, which means I am no longer studying abroad in Germany. I’m going to miss it though as I really enjoyed my time there and really liked Europe. I think I will go back soon.

I’ve been working on another story now for the past couple of weeks and I really like the way it’s turning out. So far it’s shaping up to be the best story I have ever written I think (pardon my self-gloating).

My favorite part about writing stories is that, even as the author, most of the time you don’t really know which direction it’s going to take next. Of course I have a final goal and I have stages that the characters pass through to finally achieve that goal, but it’s how the characters go through those stages is what is most interesting and often times sporadic. The story can sometimes sidetrack from the main path to the goal only to take a different path to the same goal.

For me, it seems, that writing a story is generally about as good as reading one. While reading is of course much more passive than writing, the images that come flowing through my head as I’m writing are just as vivid and interesting as those I get when reading a story.

Anyway, the new story is called An Amalgamation of People and I guess could be considered to be a horror story, although I don’t really think it’s particularly scary. I will post it here when I finish. Check back then!

I read an interesting article online that talks about the latest studies finding Firefox to be the safest browser available.

“Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox’s single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said.

The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users — 47.6 percent — were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.”

The other day I was in the library at the university here in Germany and I used one of the university computers. I haven’t really used the computers at the university all that much, but when I have, I’ve always used Firefox since they have it installed on all of their computers and I prefer Firefox. Since I use a PowerPC-based Mac, I don’t have access to any version of Internet Explorer except for the woefully outdated version for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. I therefore thought that while I was at the university, it would be a good time to check compatibility in Internet Explorer for several of my websites. I clicked on the dreadful little blue e in the quick launch bar and to my surprise, Internet Explorer opened and then immediately closed. I was quite confused for a second and decided to try again. I tried again and got the same result. That was certainly strange I thought, so I logged out and tried at a different computer — same result.

I was able to guess that the university had probably blocked the use of Internet Explorer on its computers, but I suppose I couldn’t really believe it. After all, it is a Microsoft product (there is supposed to be a hint of sarcasm there). So, I went and asked the guy working at the tech desk in the library if they had actually blocked it and to my pleasant surprise, he said they indeed had blocked it for safety purposes.

At my university in the United States, I don’t think this would happen — or at least I have never seen it happen. American universities seem to have a fixation for Microsoft products, whether it be Internet Explorer, Office or Outlook. The on-campus computers at my American university do not even have Firefox installed, much less block access to Internet Explorer.

Something else I have noticed about the computers at my German university is that they also use OpenOffice.org as their default office suite. While they do also have Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word is not the default application to open when you open a .doc file; Microsoft Excel is not the first to open when you click on a .xls; and Microsoft PowerPoint is not the first to open when you click on a .ppt file. Instead, they always open in OpenOffice.org by default. I find this to be quite comforting.

Using open source software seems to be an overall trend that is incredibly common here in Europe. In lectures, for example, you see students with their laptops and more often than not, they are browsing the web with Firefox and taking notes with OpenOffice.org. That applies to both Windows and Mac users. I have also noticed a lot more Linux users here than back home in the United States. A lot of the Linux users I have seen and talked to are not even the geeky, computer-whiz type (such as I) that Linux is generally associated with. They are just average users who might not even be able to distinguish the operating system from an application.

The popularity of open source software is a trend I hope will eventually carry over to the United States, although, realistically, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unlike Europe, everything is far more commercialized in the United States and with that commercialization comes proprietary software that consumers will be willing to buy versus download their free, open source counterparts.

As I said in my last post, Wide Open Art is finally open. I am using the domain for a personal online portfolio to show off my photography, digital art, writing, web and graphic design, etc. The design process has been long and quite tedious, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed it.

I started with the idea of kind of a wooden background with Polaroid-style photos adorning the sides of the page, but when trying to find a decent wood texture for the background, I ran into the old paper textures and decided to use those for the background of the main part of the page. From there I decided maybe I would do kind of a book on a wooden background kind of style. I really like the way it turned out.

My biggest concerns about the design, however, are the loading speed and its compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. Because the site uses large images as the background, it loads dreadfully slow in my opinion. I’m not exactly sure how I can speed that up and keep the same design. Although I suppose it might not be that big of a deal because I don’t expect the site to really be a high traffic site. The issue with compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 is transparent PNGs. According to Microsoft, in Internet Explorer 7, they fixed the issue with the Alpha channel in PNGs allowing PNG images to have transparency. The problem is that not a lot of Internet Explorer users have upgraded to version 7 and the design uses a lot of transparent PNGs.

I know there are workarounds for the problem in Internet Explorer 6, but I decided not to implement them because first of all, I can’t test them since I don’t have access to Windows, and secondly because it’s time for Internet Explorer uses to update to version 7 anyway.

After a long design process, Wide Open Art is now open as my online portfolio. There I am showcasing some of my photography, digital art, stories, web and graphic design, etc.

Make sure and click on “News” and “About” as well as at least one image in the Gallery. I did it in a way that has become quite common on the internet with the in-page pop-up and the background fading. It’s my first time to use the method.

Let me know what you think.

Oh yeah, and if you’re using Internet Explorer, let me know how it looks because I don’t know what the current status is on support for transparent PNG files. I know earlier versions of Internet Explorer didn’t support transparency for PNG files. Here are a couple of reference images of what it should look like:

Home:

Gallery:

You can find the website here: http://www.wideopenart.com.