Web Development and Technology Blog

Well, I don’t know how many readers there are, but sorry for the drought then deluge mode of my blog posts. Apparently, Sunday night is my night to catch up. I long ago read if I blogged to do it daily, well I haven’t quite been able to keep up with that.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.

I started this post a month ago, so it isn’t exactly news, but nevertheless. (BTW, I said I would veer away from politics, but I guess outside of my family and technology, there isn’t much else I spend as much time reading and cogitating over.)

At he end of June, former US Senator Fred Thompson appeared to be on the verge of officially announcing that his flirtation with running was more than that, that he would be a candidate for the GOP nomination.

Personally, I was pleased. I found him to be an intriguing figure (I met him in 1998 at the Biloxi SRLC) and certainly as truly conservative, at least for the things I want, as any of the other candidates. (I won’t go on about my predilections, but suffice it to say if you want to see flip-flopping as high art, search for Mitt Romney on Youtube; and I was never a fan of McCain, since he appears to be totally opposed to our Senator McConnell on one of the more important issues – free speech; but I digress.)

But from the tech side what I found interesting is how he was able to build his team up and get a web site that was pretty nice looking in only a week. I realize he probably was laying the ground work for a bit longer. However, only 4 years ago, the web site would have been an afterthought and certainly wouldn’t have been so high on the agenda. Moreover, I was impressed with the quality of the site in the time frame it appeared from germination to execution of his nascent campaign.

I hope, at least from the techy side, he continues to use this forethought to his advantage. The GOP seemed to have been the first movers on the Internet, as a way to gain an advantage over the mainstream leftist media, but since Dean in 2004, we seem to have lost our way and our current presidential candidates and the national committee may be throwing money at it, but certainly aren’t making all the right moves that the Dem candidates are (see Clinton ad, Obama MySpace).

Ever since I was a small kid, I was a Richard Nixon fan. In fact, I used to tell people I was born 25 hours after his resignation on August 9, 1974 (my birthday is coming up, please feel free to send gifts, LOL) and that I probably came out crying because I was born during the Ford administration. I don’t even think my dad knew why it was such a fan, although he never discouraged my pro-Nixon views, he looked at everything in terms of economics, so the economy was better under Nixon than it was under Ford or Carter, so that was probably why he liked him.

Anyway, I was reading a recent e-mail from the Nixon Library about the controversy that still swirls around his presidency and legacy. In the letter, they are discussing the attempt to ensure all the records from the presidency are preserved and archived, and a big part of this is that the library is now a part of the National Archives. Up until now it had been an all private foundation supporting and running it, lest that evil Nixon use the US Treasury anymore by spewing his propaganda, so his opponents said. As the letter rightly points out, most two-term presidents since Eisenhower have some ignominious distinction in their eight-years and they haven’t exactly been totally neutral in their presentation even though they are taxpayer funded libraries.

Honestly, I haven’t been to any library but Nixon’s, although I would love to go to LBJ’s, Clinton’s and Reagan’s; but, it is a fascinating insight into the continuing academic consternation over what to do with our only president who ever resigned.