Yes, you told me that already



  • I just popped by Gerry Marsden's site, and got informed that the weather feature has been retired, and the stock feature has been retired. Since I'm new to the site ... what weather feature? What stock feature? Each time you open the front page ... Oh look, the weather and stock features are retired. Hang on, didn't you just tell me that? There's no grace period in which it doesn't tell you -- hit refresh if you find the messages pleasing.

    It's nothing to do with an ageing artist's stocks and shares -- MSNBC are referring to the weather forecast service as a stock feature. Gerry's site calls on two separate scripts at MSNBC which are both replaced with nothing but alert() (but not showAlert() sadly):

    weather_d_src.asp:

    function makeWeatherObj() {
                alert("This weather feature has been retired.");
    }

    wea_fp_r_src.js:

    function RenderWeather(oWea) {
    	alert("This stock feature has been retired.");
    }

    Nice way to annoy anyone who was formerly using your code. The HTML itself includes other delights like the doctype being the last line of code after </html>, and a schizophrenic copy of FrontPage:

    <head>
    <title>The Official Gerry Marsden Website</title>
    <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
    <meta NAME="Author" CONTENT="PulsArt">
    <meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
    <bgsound src="images/ferry.mid" loop="1">
    ...

    Curiously, <bgsound> is not played. In iCab on the Mac, I could select whether to play background audio or not. Firefox seems to simply ignore background audio outright -- strange, but in my case, most welcome.



  • Oh, forgot to mention. I reported the problem to the site's webmaster -- the e-mail bounced :-)



  • It says 2003 but it looks more like 1993



  • Heh, that site is horrible. All I see is about 10 things blocked by NoScript and some blinking text.



  • Even with NoScript, I got some audio file popping up in an external windows media player window.... must be that MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin.



  • @vt_mruhlin said:

    Even with NoScript, I got some audio file popping up in an external windows media player window.... must be that MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin.

    Ugh, crap.

    The page has a <bgsound> tag that plays a MIDI file, so if you got MIDI that will be it. I wonder if you can disable support for <bgsound> in your plugin? Stock Firefox appears to ignore it, which is great because it's extremely irritating. Personally I'd make any background audio, <bgsound> or Flash, illegal. I typically have my own music on and have to stop that and maybe even backtrack it once I've figured out how to kill whatever is on the page.

    I know Mister Data can listen to at least four complex orchestral pieces at once, but I cannot. The most mind-blowing one was a MySpace page with two embedded players. Visit that page and it will play tunes from two different styles of music at you at the same time. I don't know I even want to know what sort of person set that up. Did they forget they had an old player there and never bothered to check that the new one worked? Argh. (With my own music that would be three concurrent tracks ... rather like Winamp when you select 30 files in Explorer and press enter, and the mutex single-process-assurance checking fails and several extra copies launch and all play at once ... No idea why in Win2k Winamp refuses to support DDE like other software.)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    The most mind-blowing one was a MySpace page

     

    A poorly designed MySpace page?  What has the world come to?

    I signed up for a MySpace account to keep in touch with friends after I moved.  Now that I've got that cookie, the music players don't automatically play; but they did before I had an account.  I guess there's a setting somewhere in that crapfest they call a UI that says not to autoplay those.

    The moral of the story is that the guy in question probably didn't realize that they do autoplay for some people.
     



  • There are a few things in life that I just will not stoop down to, one of which being having anything to do with MySpace. I tend to end up there from Google Image searches or when investigating bandwidth theft. Hotlinking from my site is now blocked for the entire of MySpace, so that should get the message across to a few people. (Though not as stupid as whoever it was on Xanga who hotlinked a screenshot of Lava Lamp as his tiled background, even when the screenshot had a window border and title bar ...)

    I'm not hard to find if anyone actually wants to, without having to resort to MySpace.



  • Wow. Firefox just completely blows chunks on Gerry's page when noscript is on. It hangs there for a while so I can't even change tabs, then completely crashes out.

    Turning off noscript wasn't much improvement, although at least I did see the prompts

     



  • @Quinnum said:

    Wow. Firefox just completely blows chunks on Gerry's page when noscript is on. It hangs there for a while so I can't even change tabs, then completely crashes out.

    Turning off noscript wasn't much improvement, although at least I did see the prompts

     

    LOL wtf? You've got bigger problems dude :P



  • Almost the same thing for me, firefox freezes for a few seconds, but doesnt crash.



  • I do NOT recommend this page for anyone. After viewing it both with NoScript on and off, it reported a "Java applet failed" error. The error kept showing up in the Firefox status bar and the CPU usage of my laptop kept increasing. I killed Firefox and then the RpcSs svchost.exe process started using 60%+ of my CPU. Had to reboot the box after this. Nothing else running that could have explained this fucked up behavior.



  • Oooooo I didn't realise it had any navigation. D'oh. All the navigation links (quite a few in fact) are all done with Java applets, and I refuse to install Java on anything. I thought that Java-based navigation was pretty much dead, but then again, this site is a bit of a relic anyway so I guess it's only natural to have totally inaccessible, slow, RAM-wasting Java applet navigation. (I've never seen a browser yet with a decent RAM reclamation policy for the JVM and plugins; iCab has a three-quarter-hearted attempt with a choice of closing the JVM when the last applet closes or when the app closes, but no grace period in case you suddenly need Java again.)

    This page is oozing with fail. Though I do have to wonder what can be so bad about a few copies of a Java applet that would cause so much trouble for Firefox and whichever JVM you are using. Ah, and I see that the RPC service can't be stopped. I don't know whether it can be killed and restarted without harm, but I am not going to try ;)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Oooooo I didn't realise it had any navigation. D'oh. All the navigation links (quite a few in fact) are all done with Java applets, and I refuse to install Java on anything. I thought that Java-based navigation was pretty much dead, but then again, this site is a bit of a relic anyway so I guess it's only natural to have totally inaccessible, slow, RAM-wasting Java applet navigation.

    Frontpage created Java Applets for navigation by default, back in ... 1998?



  • wpe36685.gif (49406 bytes)

    <SCRIPT language=javascript src="http://www.msnbc.com/m/chnk/d/weather_d_src.asp?acid=EGGP"></SCRIPT> <SCRIPT language=javascript src="http://www.msnbc.com/m/chnk/r/wea_fp_r_src.js"></SCRIPT> <SCRIPT language=javascript>var oWea = new makeWeatherObj();document.write(RenderWeather(oWea));</SCRIPT>

    undefined

     

    Leave the poor guy alone. After all he is 'undefined'



  • Well the page froze my Firefox. Doubt there's anything really worth while there anyway.



  • Oh yes, that is one special page.  For me, Firefox froze for about 15 seconds, then Java started up and I waited for about 2 minutes while it updated all my cached Java applets to version 6, then I waited about another minute and finally the page came up in all it's glory.  Unfortunately the Java applets don't load or initialize so there are white rectangles all over the page and I can't navigate anywhere.  I'd guess this page was actually authored sometime in the late 60's.  Or perhaps by someone in their late 60's.



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