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June 26, 2006

Warning - ENGINE FAULT

Posted by mavisrueda at 06:26 AM
We've been without our beloved Citroen Picasso for almost a week now. As the system of the car is electronic, it flashed a warning lamp for the engine and displayed "WARNING - ENGINE FAULT" when I turned it on one day last week. It was still running but everytime I hit on the brakes and halted, it doesn't accelerate the next time you push the gas pedal. You have to turn the car off and restart for it to respond again. That means that I had to turn the car off on every corner and every stoplight. Luckily, this happened while we were close to our flat. I was supposed to bring it myself to the Citroen Service Center but Mavis convinced me that I just dial the number for the Citroen Service center for them to tow the car. An hour later, a guy was hauling the Picasso at the back of his tow truck. When I went back inside the flat, my wife asked me if the guy gave me any receipt or anything that would say that my car is with him. I said none and I didn't even ask the guy for anything. He told me that the guys from the service center would call me in a while once he gets it back to the shop. I trusted him. I guess I'm more trusting of people in Qatar that in the Philippines. It's just that I don't hear news about cars being stolen, "chopped" into pieces and being sold off to the gray market. After about 2 hours, I did decide to call the Service Center. I was told that they we're not able to call earlier as they were too busy with other stuff. Fine as long as my car is with them. I was hoping that my car would be fixed and serviced in two days time as I don't see a lot of Citroen cars in the city. But apparently, my car is in line with other cars being serviced or fixed. Now, almost a week later, I'm told that the engine problem has been fixed but they still need to road test it again and have the service for 15,000 done. For the meantime, I've been able to call a private driver who takes me to work and back everyday for SR25. Cheaper than renting a car. Hopefully, I'll get the car today as we've spent the whole week at home aside from the Rafael's helping us do some grocery last Saturday night in CarreFour, City Center. 06/27 Update: Got the car back and paid SR1351. They said it was a pressure gauge in the engine that they replaced.

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June 16, 2006

Where have we been?

Posted by xtian001 at 05:29 PM
Well, since Mavis and Xiane arrived, we've been quite busy especially that it's going to be Xiane's 3rd birthday tomorrow. We've been preparing a bit since we're going to invite some friends over for dinner. Mavis and I have been staying up late and going to sleep at 1 AM the past couple of nights. We were supposed to have the food catered but then last week, Mavis decided that it was better for her to cook so that she has more control on the taste of the food and not leave it to the chef who was to cater for the dinner. Xiane's been excited about her birthday too. We already bought her a LeapPad Learning book which she has already tried (just to make sure it was working correctly before wrapping it and losing the 7 day warranty). She already has a dress which she'll wear tomorrow plus a crown and a scepter to boot. Hopefully, everything would turn out ok tomorrow.

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June 09, 2006

Click to Activate

Posted by xtian001 at 06:53 PM

As Microsoft (MS) rolled out an Internet Explorer update (KB912812) months ago, you might notice that websites which uses Macromedia Flash or those which uses ActiveX controls now show a bounding box around them and on mouse-over, asks users to click on the content to activate it before you actually get to interact with the ActiveX control. This modification comes as part of an ongoing patent dispute with Eolas Technology and the University of California.

How does it affect IE 6 and Websites: The update changes how it handles active content viewed in certain Adobe products, including Macromedia Flash Player, Authorware Player, Shockwave Player, SVG Viewer, Help Center and Adobe Reader, as well as Sun Java, Apple QuickTime, RealNetworks, RealPlayer and other ActiveX controls. Active content that is embedded in HTML pages in certain ways may not be able to receive user input (for example, keyboard or mouse events) until the user clicks to either activate or continue loading the control.

Recommendations:
Solution 1: Revert back to previous version of IE6 with a Hotfix published by MS themselves. However, this is a temporary fix as MS rolled out the fix for enterprise users to have enough time to prepare their sites for the changes and make sure that all deployed applications which interact with IE can be tested and be recoded to the new way IE handles ActiveX controls. The hofix is only valid till this month as MS would permanently impose the changes soon after. The hotfix can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/917425.

Solution 2: If you are developing a website, remove the user activation requirement for active content. Developers need to go back and review all their websites which use ActiveX controls and modify and create an external the script to automatically turn on such function. Microsoft provides a guide into activating ActiveX automatically: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp Adobe/Macromedia also provides a JavaScript Fix on their website and an explanation why one should use the Adobe Solution: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/why_adobe.html

And My Concern
This whole thing is currently messing up our deployed websites which uses Flash. The first time our IT rolled out the update, some of out flash content went invisible. We had to change some navigation elements on some websites and recode them again. Even then, we still got the "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate" tab on these elements. We got to solving this by using the methods above but since we have about 40+ items we need to fix, we're slowly doing the upgrade as we also need to test everything again. This is ok for websites as we know we have a fix but for third party applications which we use ActiveX, Java and IE, it poses a big headache for us. Either the software maker comes up with a license agreement with Eolas or go back to their code and o the changes. A sample of this is our EDMS (Electronic Document Management System), Filenet IDM web interface. We now have to click twice for each tab that pops up. Talk about minimizing user clicks! And the thing is, the local vendor says it's the first time that they encountered this on Filenet. We're trying to get hold of a username and password to get access to the FileNet's support center. Hopefully, we'd find a way to get this thing solved or else, I'd die clicking away as I update about a 100+ documents and files which I need to upload on EDMS. Argghhh!!!

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