Locked Down

I've been here in Washington, D.C. since late Sunday for training, and I've been restricted in the systems I can use.

At the hotel, the wireless connection is unreliable at best and inaccessible at worst. At the training center, we're running on locked-down desktops running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition and Internet Explorer 6 in high-security mode.

I wish I could say I was surprised at how much of the Web just doesn't work in this locked-down scenario, but I'm not.

AJAX is gone. Basic JavaScript is gone. Pop-ups (thankfully) are gone. Basic functionality (like ASP.NET hyperlink postbacks) can even be gone at times.

Sites that have the login prompt hidden by JavaScript (like Shacknews) are unusable. Functions that completely rely on JavaScript (like the directions functions over at MapQuest) fail.

It is definitely reminding me that when I am architecting our new system for release next year, I have to ensure that I have fallbacks in place for those poor unfortunate souls who are chained to neutered browsers.

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

Reminder

I'm going to be in Washington, DC from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, and I'm going to be at Microsoft PDC 2008 in Los Angeles the last week of the month.

Seen At Lunch

How To Blog, Er, Break Software

Dr. James Whittaker, author of the invaluable QA training resource How To Break Software, has been working at Microsoft for over two years.

I just now found out that he has been blogging.

I really need to get back into QA a bit more.