Heal Your Church WebSite

Month: August 2002

  • Disabling the Right Click

    Please open your copy of ‘The Book‘ to pages 264 and 265. There you will see me disparaging those persons who break my browser by using Javascript to disable my right key click. You may also notice a link to a web service I wrote for Vincent’s site that gets around this stupidity.

    Any web servant who has taken the time to read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility should understand the evils of breaking your user’s browsers by disabling various functions they expect. For example, I expect to be able to right click so I can open a new window. Yet there are those web servants out there who’s ego and/or paranoia are such that they just assume everyone who right clicks is out to steal. Well thank you very much for bearing a false testimony against your brother!

    What I personally find ironic is that most, if not all such sites are so poorly coded, it’s not even worth looking at the source or right-clicking the links using the SamSpade Safe Browser. Nor is it worth a second trip back to the site.

    About the only thing worse than this are those right-click nazis who also use the target= argument for their hyperlinks to throw open a new window – which inadvertently breaks the functionality of the back button.

    Not convinced? Perhaps an article entitled ‘Don’t Disable Right Click!‘ by Rosemarie Wise will change your mind.

  • Linux != Desktop != Failure

    This is old news to anyone who frequents Dave Winer’s or Doc Searl‘s weblogs … but Doc makes such a good point, that like a good batch of hummus, it bears repeating:
    The Doc Searls Weblog : Deconstructing desktops : Saturday, August 10, 2002.

    Basically the good Doc takes issues with people who claim Linux has failed as a desktop. His reasoning, simply because Linux isn’t a desktop. KDE and Gnome are desktops, but not Linux.

    He also astutely asserts that we’re comparing apples and oranges here. That one can no more write-off Linux as failure in the same way one shouldn’t classify tractor-trailers a bust because they’re not as popular as passenger cars.

    Doc’s article goes into much gorier detail, and is a good read for anyone considering moving their church/charity office platform to Linux who is being bamboozl’d by the frequent FUD surrounding this topic.

  • OpenOffice.org 1.01

    The church administrator’s job is a hard, and often thankless one. Often the task is assigned to someone who’s already working in a full-time function at the church, such as the youth pastor. Worse, yet, they have the unenviable task of being having to provide caviar service on a beans-n-franks budget. So the last thing they want to hear is that Microsoft Corp. is doing all sorts of fun things with their pricing and licensing structure for their Office product. Stuff that makes your already tight budget go OUCH!

    Well help may be on the way in a product known as the OpenOffice.org
    suite of software. Both an Open Sores product and a project, OpenOffice.org
    runs on multiple platforms. It includes the essential desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program (hmmm … no email or calendar program?). It also sports an interface that should be familiar to “similar” office suites. Of course, the real acid test is their claims of transparently working with with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office. They say the magic number is 90% … I for one hope so!

    Now mind you, I’m not some anti-Microsoft hating zealot like those found over at /. In fact, I’ve got some very nice things to say about .NET in the near future. However, the $400+ price tag and anti-piracy measures associated MS Office, along with the expense of an operating system and hardware to support it, makes the MS approach an exorbitantly expensive solution for a church needing to support 2 or 4 workstations. It may even make dealing with any OpenOffice.org incombatibilities or anomolies worthwhle. If not for a church, at least for the seminary student or missionary.

    So I’ve got this old Pentium II/266mmx. I’m about to make it my Linux development machine. I think though on one partition I’m going to install Lycoris and OpenOffice.org and see if I can’t make my church administrator’s day by walking into their office and suggestiong a solution that may save them as much as 1000 bucks per PC. And if not that, I’ve always had this dream of a study center for the teens – this indeed would be a way around Microsoft’s spin regarding the use of donated machines (e.g. naked PCs). We’ll see …

    In the meantime, here’s a bit more press on the topic, ironically via MSNBC.