Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Microsoft’s IE team announced last December 19th that Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test:
I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.
The Acid2 test was developed by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) to help browser vendors evaluate their product’s support of features web designers would like to use.
In a not-so-scientific test of my own, I tried the three browswers I use to see how well they fared with Acid2. Opera 9.25 passed, Firefox 2.0.0.11 and IE 7.0.5730.11 didn’t do as well.
Here are the totals (as of 4:45 PM) for help requests on the first day of the semester:
- Phone calls: 78
- Emails: 90
and counting …
The final drafts for the standards and implementation guidelines have been posted on the Illinois Department of Human Services web site. You can review them at:
http://www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=33503
Comments, questions and suggestions can be emailed to dhs.accessibility@illinois.gov.
Google has made available the 2007 version of their annual Year-End Zeitgeist, this year’s most populat and fastest rising search terms. I’m not sure what to make of Anna Nicole Smith at #10 on the Fastest Rising (U.S.) list, while Shakira was #9 on the Fastest Falling (Global) list.
Illinois Board of Higher Education Web Accessibility Consortium: www.cita.uiuc.edu/collaborate/illinois/
There have been some recent questions regarding the volume licensing agreement MVCC has with Microsoft and its impact on continued use of FrontPage. Let me try to clarify:
1. Those of you that are currently using FrontPage to manage html content on our (public) internet site, our (private) intranet site or in course materials can continue to do so. Although distribution of FrontPage has been terminated, support (security updates and hot fixes) for the product by Microsoft will continue until January 13, 2009 (see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle page for FrontPage at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=2514). NOTE: Use for content on our internet site will eventually be phase out when the new content management system is fully implemented.
2. If you currently maintain your course materials with FrontPage on our web server and would like to learn more about moving them into our Blackboard environment, contact Sandi at extension 5214 or Scott at extension 5787. We would be more than happy to meet with you and discuss the options at your convenience.
Blackboard users who recently upgraded to the Vista operating system and Internet Explorer (IE) 7 may find that when they go to a tool (such as the Discussion Board) which contains the Text Box Editor, that there is a tool bar, but no box to type text in.
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To say I was a bit peeved when I discovered my home PC had become infected would be understating things. In fact I was furious. Yes while in some ways I may have been cocky or arrogant about infections, in other ways I was overly cautious compared to some? My wife more than once complained about why she had to keep clicking yes or no to allow scripts to run on almost every page. I would explain to her that on almost every page there are scripts running that do who knows what and if you don’t need them to get the functionality out of the web page you need then don’t let them run. But some how some way our PC did get infected and it wasn’t something that could be handled by McAfee, Spybot S&D or Ad Aware either. This began my education on SMITFraud. Read the rest of this entry
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is trying a new approach to combat what it believes is the “rampant pirating of digital music on college campuses” according to eSchool News online. (Full Story)
I’m sure Congress didn’t fully consider the potential ramifications a change to DST could have on my personal computer, but as Dst-Day (March 11, 2007) approached you could see a heightened level of activity on the part of the IT division. How will the change effect email? Will the updates require a system restart? How will Blackboard react to the change? Should the desktop systems be updated prior to the servers or does it matter? Those questions and more were the common topics of discussion during the last few weeks leading up to the time change.
Looking back, it was less an issue than we had anticipated – much like Y2K turned out to be. But was the issue tame by nature or was it the proactive approach of the technicians? I’d like to think it was a combination of the two. The updates provided by the vendors worked better than we thought they would, which was the worst case scenario – and the hours of research and hard work on the part of the technologists proved to be the perfect combination.
Great job to all involved!
We experienced a systems outage on Sunday, March 4, 2007 that affected our web services (internet web site, intranet web site, Blackboard, web registration, etc.). The outage happened between 3:30 am and 1:45 pm and was the result of a loss of cooling in the server room. Blackboard was also unavailable from 2:55 pm to 3:00 pm and 9:50 pm to 11:15 pm while we continued to work on the servers. Thanks to Scott Leturno and the Operations team for their efforts to minimize downtime by restoring the cooling and bringing the systems back online. Thanks also to Glen Kato for keeping our online faculty in the loop regarding Blackboard system availability. Nice work everyone.
Starting in 2007, Daylight Savings Time (DST) start and end dates will change as a result the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was intended to combat the country’s growing energy problems. Read the rest of this entry
