Recently in Internet Communication Category

I have a confession to make. I am a terrible, insensitive web developer.

I was working on a brand new, snazzy HTML 5 design for my personal web site, but could not get it to look half decent in Internet Explorer 6 (a 10 year old browser at the time of this writing) and Internet Explorer 7 (a 5 year old browser) without bogging down my web page with hacks and work arounds.

After wrestling with the markup and CSS for weeks, I finally threw in the towel and decided that people using IE6 and IE7 do not deserve to see my new web site.

I added the following configurations to Apache in httpd.conf (.htaccess works too)

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 6"
RewriteRule . upgrade.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 7"
RewriteRule . upgradeagain.php [L]

Which serves up the following 2 pages depending on the browser being used by the visitor.

Internet Explorer 6 users are treated to Tandy Kitteh:

While Internet Explorer 7 users are treated to baby IE7 Kitteh:

Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun

Skype is a free P2P telephony program that enables you to make PC to PC voice calls over the Internet. It has an interface very similar to popular instant messaging programs, but its strength lies in lag-free voice communication, reportedly even over dial-up connections. It is extremely easy to install, and no special configuration tweaking is needed, even if you are behind a firewall.

My brother has a cable Internet connection and I have DSL. When we were testing it out, transmission was crystal clear; the voice quality far surpassed that of regular telephone calls.

Skype is currently available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, and Pocket PC.

If you would like to give Skype a try, my user name is firevixen.