And this is why I hate big companies

I tried to log on to my credit card’s website (http://www.citicards.com) from my Firefox 3.0b5 browser running on Hardy Heron.  The page only loaded from the bottom half down.  The top half where the login form is supposed to displays for a split second and then goes blank.  I checked the page source and I’m fairly sure the Javascript and CSS is partly, if not mostly to blame.

So, I called technical support.  I explained my situation.  The support person who answered the call said the reason I am having problems is because only IE, AOL, and Netscape are supported.  When I asked the support person why, he first mentioned that the site traffic is monitored and that IE, AOL, and Netscape are the most frequently used browsers.  Of course, I didn’t believe him (AOL??? Netscape??? Really???) and pushed for a better answer.  Almost immediately he gave the “to maintain a secure site” excuse.  Again, I didn’t believe him (IE??? Really???).  I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast talking to this particular support person so I asked if I could talk to someone who was involved with the actual development of the website.  He asked if there was a particular person I would like to talk to.  When I said “Director of IT”, the support person said that he was an executive with the company and that he’d be sure to pass along the information.

I promptly asked for his full name.  According to the support person, he only has one name, Abbey, but he was happy to give me his id number – AIS5804.

Running Ubuntu and Windows XP in Parallel

I initially installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on an existing system running Windows XP and configured the system to dual boot.  Unfortunately, there are Windows applications that I am required to use at work including (choke) applications that only run in IE.  Thus I couldn’t scrap Windows altogether.  Still, I hated having to login and logout everytime I needed to switch applications.  (Talk about an efficiency killer.)  So, I researched some ways to run Windows XP in Parallel with Ubuntu.  The solution I settled on was a combination of VMWare Converter and VMWare Player.  A few tweaks later and I’ve got access to Windows from within Ubuntu.

First, I logged on to Windows XP and installed the converter.  I ran the converter on my two Windows partitions and stored the output on the larger of my Windows partitions.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Then, I logged on to Ubuntu and installed the player.  There were a few issues with getting the player installed and configured, but I was fortunate to find help online.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

The first problem involved missing resources during the configuration (compile) step.

http://www.nalinmakar.com/2008/05/05/vmware-player-on-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron/

The next problem involved not being able to allocate memory when running the VM image.  (This was related to the fact that I had saved the VM image on the Windows partition.)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=528614 (ocake)

There was also a minor issue with the floppy drive not being detected properly (because there isn’t one) and an annoying message popping up.

http://www.linux.com/articles/54411

Lastly, since I’m on a network at work, I needed to configure the network settings.  I set the ethernet connection type in the .vmx file to “bridged” rather than the default “nat”.  I think it takes a while for the network to initialize when first starting up though.  So I’m not sure if this step was necessary.  I might have just been impatient the first time I tried with the default settings.