Right I’m sure many of you don’t even know what modernbill is, but for those that do I’m going to have a little moan about what really should be working in a stable production environment copy of their latest v5.1 release but infuriatingly isn’t

• Importing of TLDs from eNom reseller account - you have to enter every TLD manually at the moment, a total nightmare when there is over 40 to do.
• Disable credit card forms - for sellers who don’t take credit cards and set their admin panel as such still have their clients presented with the ability to pay by and store details of a credit card in the client area. Totally stupid.
• Paypal links to settle outstanding invoices are not included in the client area or on reminder e-mails so customers can’t complete their payments. Sellers go without being payed and clients run up a debt while we wait for modernbill to fix the issue. Doing business is like getting blood out of a stone with this problem.
• Disabling of the FAQ - I have my own FAQ, why can’t I stop the empty one modernbill provides from coming up in the client area?
• Helpdesk integration - v4 handled Intellodesk fine, why can’t v5 do the same instead of just spitting out some message about settings not being available?
• Documentation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen documentation for such a large released piece of software being so scarce. If you are lucky enough to find something in there that even mentions what you are trying to do you can be rest assured that it doesn’t go into enough detail about it to actually be of any use.
• Developers refuse to accept that the above (and other issues) are not acceptable in a stable release of the application

So there you have it - a total disaster. As someone said on the modernbill forums, I feel like an alpha tester here, call this a release version? *sheesh*

I really hate it when this happens; you’ve got so many things to be getting on with but somehow every single one of these things ends up being stalled because there is soemthing you are waiting on in order to complete every single task. Strangely reminiscent of an SY21 lecture on scheduling algorithms I know, but still, its happened to me today.

I’m working with several very new pieces of software for a project I’m trying to complete but at present there is a problem with every piece which requires a response from a third party which I’m just sitting around waiting for. The main reason why its so annoying is I have a little less work to do for my course right now so I was trying to use the extra time to complete the project. Looks like its going to be delayed by weeks now though, all because of a load of problems hitting me at once in the space of two days, and in another two days I’ll have a load of coursework again. I really hate being a developer sometimes

Could this be true? Me writing about MS making some kind of progress, well yes actually, your eyes are not decieving you. Today I have been doing battle with the age old issue of getting valid CSS to behave the way the standards say it should behave in IE 6. This is an issue that has always driven me stark raving mad, to the point of shouting at the screen simply because I know I am right with respect to the CSS and its MS’s fault that it isn’t showing properly, worse, I know that if I don’t employ hacks to make it show correctly a whole load of my IE using customers will think my sites are non-functional.

In sheer desparation today I decided to install IE 7 beta 3 and see if there was some hope that the issues that frustrate me every day as a web designer would one day come to an end. Amazingly the first thing I tried (the site I had been trying to iron out issues with) rendered correctly. This has to be at least some progress as it gave me a little bit of hope and started to bring me out of the pit of dispair. I started noticing other things too, mainly valid code showing as expected.

There are still many old issues remaining; things like gaps where there should not and automatic indents and suchlike not specified in the style, but it is making progress, at least progress when bench-marked against older versions of IE. I will never be an everyday Windows user, but I like to think that looking into the future there is possibly a glimmer of hope that one day the code I write that validates at W3C will be displayed on IE in Windows the way I see it in Firefox and Opera for Linux.

My phpBB Bertie bear has finally arrived! It’s great to have something to show how far forward the development of the new forum system is coming along, and not only that, but Bertie makes a great buddy to have around when on late night coding sessions - he’s already found his fave spot, right next to my screen

Its amazing when you really try, how many different weird and wonderful exceptions you can get out of Java. I was tinkering with some simple Java over MSN with Dan earlier and we managed between us to generate no less than 7 different types of exceptions all to do with file I/O, each seemingly more colourful and interesting than the ones that preceeded them. If only you could get marks for such wonders in the exam.

Dan coined a truely fantastic reaction to seeing Java exceptions you don’t understand:-

*sees strange and unknown java exception on screen* *GULP* “Arghhh! Run away!”

In the midst of my exam revision it would appear that I have missed the deadline to apply for the Google summer of code 2006. While this is disappointing, I realise that with the busy summer I have lined up I probably wouldn’t have been able to dedicate the required time anyway.

What I hope to do now is keep an eye on the progress of the projects this year, subscribe to the blogs, get a better idea of exactly what these folk get up to and then apply as early as possible next year, possibly having a full resumé and project plan in place well before applications open.

It goes without saying that congratulations go to all those who have got onto summer of code this year - I wish you the best of luck