dolphinling’s weblog

Holy cow. I just marked a bug a duplicate of the alt text bug, and bugzilla had so many emails to send out that the (new) bug had been verified duplicate before the page finished loading.

There’s a post on the IE weblog entitled “What have you guys been doing since IE6?”. In the entire post (680 words) there was not one use of the word “standard”.

Wow.

Via: Anne’s hrefs

I got 7 trackback spams this morning. I’ve turned trackback off for now, but what I’d really like is for trackbacks to be held in a moderation queue, but comments not to be. Anyone have a plugin for that (or know of a better solution)?

CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders (a new version) was just released a couple days ago. I’m reading through it now, and I’ll post some nice things as I see them.

• background-attachment:local, which applies to background images in elements with their own scrolling mechanism. However, it really should be expanded to local-scroll and local-fixed.

Is it just me, or is http://w3.org/ no longer redirecting to http;//www.w3.org/ ? I swear it did last time I tried…

Anyone who pays attention to the netscape.public.mozilla.layout newsgroup will know that David Baron is working on a new way of doing reflow in Mozilla. It aims for (to quote him)

• simplification of code
• fixing incremental reflow (”{inc}”) bugs
• allowing better integration of nsIBox and nsIFrame layout
• allowing easier implementation of new features like ‘inline-block’

It’s nowhere near done (”nowhere near compiling” in his words), but this will be nice to have!

Can someone who knows about http headers look at bug 282793? What justdave says makes sense, but I’d just like another opinion. :-)

According to slashdot, Microsoft is warning about spyware that infects the Windows kernel and can intercept and filter system calls, thus making them impossible to clean.

It, of course, takes no more than a second or two to come up with the answer: stick the cleaning tools on a Knoppix CD. Then back up your files and install Linux, and you’ll never have to worry about spyware again.

http://netcenter.netscape.com/ doesn’t allow people without javascript to enter. I thought this was a web company, how stupid can they be?

Edit: Anne put this in his hrefs, so I decided to turn javascript on and try again. It popped up a dialog asked me to upgrade to the latest version of my browser (Firefox 1.0, which the latest release) at which point I promptly went and downloaded the latest nightly, and revisited with it—only to recieve the same message. What do they expect, bleeding-edge CVS? Anyway, it also had no flash of any sort, the only reference at all being that Netscape 7.2 includes flash 7 (oooh, aaah). So I’m wondering exactly what Anne means, though in much more of a curious way than a confused one. I’ve never seen such bad web design before from a company that was built around the web.

That’s odd… there’s a fly buzzing against my monitor, but it’s backwards, its legs are facing me and its back is to the monitor. Bugs can be so strange.

Now that’s annoying… for some reason, WordPress doesn’t show the checkbox to post in sub-sub-categories, even in the edit area. I made a new “computers” category for my non-web computer posts and wanted to make web a subcategory of it, but when I did I couldn’t post in any of web’s subcategories. Oh, well.

I want to have my window manger customized in the following way:

• Moving the mouse does not shift focus
• Clicking in a window does shift focus (and passes the click through to the window—obvious but important), but does not bring the new window to the front
• Double-clicking in a window or clicking on its title brings a window to the front (and focuses it)

Less importantly,

• If I open a window, it should come in front of other windows unless I’ve done something in those other windows since then—i.e., if I open firefox and then start IMing someone before firefox shows, I don’t want my IM window to suddenly be covered.

Can anyone help me get those?

I’m currently running Gnome 2.8.1-r4, Metacity (that’s the default window manager that comes with gnome, right?), and X.org 6.8.0-r4, but (obviously) since it’s my own computer and I’m root, I can do pretty much anything I need.

I’m posting this from firefox, back on my own computer! Woohoo!

‘Twas a pain trying to get my settings back… I hadn’t realized that I needed a particular driver for the firewire hard drive (that I’d backed up to) to work, so even though hotplug, etc. were working fine, the drive didn’t show up. Rather confusing, and when I went to look at stuff in the kernel I didn’t think at the time I’d find the answer there. But I did, yay :-). Now I just have to find a way to get the scroll wheel on the mouse working, which if the current trend continues (had to recompile the kernel to get my screen resolution above 640×480, had to recompile the kernel to get the firewire drive working) will mean I need to recompile the kernel again ’cause I got my mouse driver wrong.

A while back I found a page online that tested browsers’ speeds by using a little piece of javascript to repaint an image several hundred times. (Not reload it over the wire, just repaint) Now I can’t find it, even after searching on several occasions. Has anyone else seen this/knows where it is?

For the record, I don’t remember who was fastest among Gecko/KHTML/Opera, but I watched it in Internet Explorer and gaped at how slow it was—on the order of 10 times as slow, IIRC

Does anyone know how to get rid of those annoying backslashes that show up every time someone uses an apostrophe in the comments? I’m guessing it has something to do with the comment moderation plugin I’m using…

In my last post, I was originally going to post the poem. I didn’t, but had I done so it would have brought up an interesting question:

If I want to include a certain piece of styling in a post in my blog, like making something blue, what’s the proper way to do it? Should I use a style attribute? Or should I use a class attribute? If I do use a class attribute, where should I put the stylesheet? I don’t really want to put it in the global stylesheet, since it’ll probably only be used once. Ideally each post should have its own stylesheet (should it need one), but where would it be linked to from? I really can’t think of any way to link from inside the post, but it doesn’t quite seem right to add the individual stylesheets into the head of the page that contains them actually, thinking about it more, I guess it does feel right to add the link in to the head of whatever page contains the post. How’s this work for RSS(-type) feeds, though? (I’m not really really versed in feeds, though I do have a post I need to make about them…)

Anne should probably add this (or some other solution to the problem, if someone comes up with something) to his perfect weblog system.

ThinkGeek got a new T-shirt in. I’d seen the poem before, but it still made me laugh for several minutes.

I’m mostly offline right now; my computer doesn’t currently have a GUI, and that makes it hard to run most of the programs I use, so the only time I can get online is at school or the library. Lynx is nice for downloading programs you need, but it gets pretty annoying trying to actually browse the web with it. As for email, I much prefer Thunderbird over the webmail interfaces I can use.

The reason for this is pretty simple: Gnome and kdm (the login manager) both broke at the same time, and I wanted to try building my own system (as opposed to using a distro) anyway as a learining experience, so it was the perfect time. Then spent a while figuring things out, decided I’d have to use a minimal install of some distro because it was just a little too much work otherwise, and spent quite a while compiling X partway through seven times because I didn’t read the list of things it depends on. After that (after it hit something I was having trouble figuring out, namely that something was in a directory it didn’t expect), I was talking to my dad and he suggested Slackware and told me about it, and I thought I’d like it. So now I’m waiting for some Slackware CDs (I’m not sure my CD burner works, or how to use it if it does, so he’s going to burn them for me), and then it’ll probably be a few days until I’m back online for real.

So if you’ve sent me any mail or anything, sorry. I’ll get to it. I also notice there’s another last call for comments from WHATWG, and I’ve probably missed a bunch of stuff there.

I should have posted this sooner…

I just noticed that the google logo is now only one image on their homepage. It used to be made up of three, one for the Goo, one for the g with its descender, and one for the le.

I wonder when that changed.

Let this be considered prior art in case anyone tries to patent it (unless someone’s already patented it, or it’s in process, which would be unfortunate):

So I was thinking today about iPods (my friend got one recently, and I was listening to it), and about the problem of battery life and how battery capacity has increased approximately linearly while the power and speed of portable electronics has increased around exponentially, meaning battery life has gone down, and I came up with an idea.

Hard drive based players have to spin to read data, whereas flash based ones don’t, meaning (as far as I know) hard drive players get worse battery life, but they have larger capacities, which people like. So my idea here is to put both hard drive storage and flash-based storage into a device, and let the most popular data be stored on the flash so it takes less power to access it.

This really isn’t my forte, so I may have terminology errors, etc., or the entire idea might be completely stupid, but it might work, and in case it does I don’t want someone else patenting it.