Kablingy

Did you know that some people defend Internet Explorer? It’s true.

We got a support call from a client yesterday who was demonstrating their Kablingy-built product in a  school (I believe a third level one). They application we had built for them wasn’t working on Internet Explorer.

No surprises there.

When I gave my stock answer to the IT administrator to try Firefox, I was truly shocked at the response.

“Sorry, we don’t want Firefox in the schools because it can’t be controlled”.

Apparently some IT administrators want or need to set what the users can visit, what they can download, and what the homepage must be, all from the server. I’m told Firefox doesn’t allow for this. Furthermore, the IT administrator did not want to see Firefox in any school in the country. No disrespect meant towards the IT admin, but this is the fear, uncertainty and doubt propaganda that’s being spread to our children and their keepers.

I generally meet two kinds of clients in my travels – those who use Firefox/Safari/Chrome etc. and those who don’t know about the latter and use Internet Explorer because they don’t know how crummy it is.

I have never met someone who actually stood up for the product. It also makes me sad to think that this is how IT administrators and schools think about students. We must restrict and control everything they do on the web in order to protect the school, and in the process we must make them use the worse software out there.

What kind of adults are we going to produce with that attitude?

And for the record, there’s no hard feelings directed at the IT administrator – he’s just doing the best job he can with the demands made of him. But what hideous demands they are.

Today is a public holiday. We're currently on a crazy sprint to get a project finished, so we're taking advantage of the public holiday today.

Below are photos of the business park that we work in. This business park is mostly populated by small businesses. Yet, as you can see, it's like a ghost town and the shopping malls will be quite popular today.

If business owners want to take the day off and shop in the mall, then that's great. But let's not kid ourselves that this recession is as bad as the 1930s. Clearly, people are not affected by the current economic climate as much as the media would have us think.