Testing Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3

After working the bugs out of a new XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant version of my company's hompage using XHTML and CSS, I decided I should probably test it in the new version of Explorer 7, which will soon be the defacto standard for web browsers. Well, not only does it break layouts which previously worked with IE6, but the IE7 installer also takes the liberty of completely disabling and/or overwriting your existing IE6 installation. After a bit of hair-pulling and uninstalling IE7 to revert back to IE6, I did a search and found a great little package to let you run a standalone version of IE7 without removing IE6. Perhaps it will be of use to you too. It consists of a set of batch files that will extract the IE7 files from the latest installer and then makes some registry changes to let you run the browser in standalone mode. It also installs a "hotfix" that is required for tabbed browsing, but the hotfix does not affect IE6 functionality in any way. Someone else created another IE7 standalone installer that will do all this transparently, but I like the batch file method a bit better because it's fast, easily reversible and you can look at the files to see what it's doing.

Fuck Quickbooks and Fuck Intuit!

I used to recommend Intuit Quickbooks to people running small businesses. It has most features anyone might ever need and can integrate (albeit very sloppily) with UPS shipping tools. Yesterday I was suddenly and rudely made aware of a limitation that was coded into Quickbooks Pro 2006 and apparently all other non-enterprise versions that is proof that Intuit is run by a bunch of fucking crooks. It turns out that Quickbooks Pro 2006 has a limit of 14,000 items that can be entered before it stops accepting new transactions and tells you to upgrade. The cost to upgrade? A mere $4500 for a 10 user license plus monthly fees for an upgrade to the "Enterprise" version which has yet another totally arbitrary limit of 29,000 items. I would like to say for the record that this is a totally underhanded and mean-spirited tactic. Businesses spend many thousands of dollars implementing an accounting system, integrating it with their shipping tools, and training users on a Quickbooks-based system. Then, after they've been using it and grown their businesses around Quickbooks, they are shafted with arbitrary limits for which there is no technological basis whatsoever. And just to shut you Intuit apologists up, the limitation is NOT clearly stated in any marketing materials, in fact, most people who by the product have no clue that this limit exists. Here's the Quickbooks Pro 2006 details page for anyone that doubts. Whatever marketing fucktard at Intuit that came up with the idea of adding this utterly unforgivable limitation to the software is a cocksucker who should be severely beaten and then fired. Even worse, they should have their name and address published on slashdot. So anyway, because of this issue, I will never again use ANY Intuit product if I have a choice. Nor will I waste any time writing applications that interface with this shit product via their shit SDK. I will no longer recommend any Intuit products to anyone for any reason. Fuck you Intuit! You have no idea how much you just cost yourselves, but I suspect that by the time my career has run its course I will personally have disuaded dozens of people from using your products and with any luck others will follow suit...and maybe even file a few too.