Ever have trouble getting your Internet Explorer-specific Web applications to work with Mozilla? This article covers common issues associated with migrating applications to the open source Mozilla-based browser. You’ll first learn basic cross-browser development techniques, and then develop strategies for overcoming the differences between Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

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Filed under: Applications, Development
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Per the BBC World News in Technology…

A third of software worldwide is fake, according to industry group, the Business Software Alliance.

“Sir, I’m sorry to inform you, but your software… it’s fake.”

“What??? How can that be!?!?! FAKE????”

“I know, sir. Just remain calm. We’ll find you some real software around here somewhere.”

Filed under: Applications, \\\ ETC ///
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My friend Isaac turned me onto a guy’s blog (Joel on Software) He’s got a great article there, called “Hitting The High Notes“, which he presents some great ideas on what really makes a software company successful—hiring the best designers or programmers. No brainer, right? Well it seems that while most companies are down-sizing and trying to get the most with least expenditure, they’re missing the boat altogether.

He cites successful examples, gives some good raw data and statistics, and and gives a few good illustrations, too. Heck, he makes me wanna work for him—just in his criticism of Wal*Mart alone sold me.

In a related topic of excellence verses just getting crap out as fast as you can without serious overhead—I’ve got this newer Curtis portable CD player for my desk that I bought at Target. I didn’t wanna buy anything super expensive, but for $70 you’d think it’d last a while, right? There’s something seriously screwed up with the LED display. On the track number display, the furthest left | line doesn’t show up anymore. And today? My clock is displaying in what appears to be 24-hour format… even if I didn’t change it to that display. I can’t figure it out. I didn’t do anything to it and it’s showing 24-hour formatted time. Cheap POS.

It just underscores why it pays off to build good stuff, period.

Filed under: Development, Gear, Websites
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On my way home this evening I saw a van, which had printed all over it: Messiah Realty

Gee, I didn’t know that Jesus was now a licensed realtor. I must have missed that old testament prophecy.

As a footnote, Messiah Realty is a registered business. No website tho.

Filed under: Christian Subculture
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EMC formally launched its newest high-end storage array, a tiered storage box that can store one petabyte¹ of data and help customers move files from smaller systems onto one machine… (InternetNews.com)

I couldn’t even begin to think of how I could fill all that space.

¹ 2 to the 50th power (1,125,899,906,842,624) bytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes.

Filed under: General
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Because I work much faster than the speed of bureaucracy (particularly definition #3) and can’t seem to slow down at that pace, I find myself challenging myself to do new things that I’ve never done before—one, because I have the time to, and two, because I might as well learn something new, right?

So one of my most recent projects I decided that I was going to format the entire page with style sheets without the usage of tables, blank .gifs to act as spacers, etc. Now keep in mind that I’m from the old school of HTML (a raw coder to the core) and know all the tricks of creating complex layouts with nested tables, transparent images, etc—in the very least, moving to a stylesheet-driven layout will have a bit of a learning curve for me. And it has been.

(more…)

Filed under: CSS, HTML, Uncategorized
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Well, when I was googling for the URL for the “Metropolitan Artists Market”, the first result was for WCCO’s photo gallery of the opening day, which I performed for. Looks like my mugshot made it onto their website. That was one warm morning. Tomorrow’s gonna be just as warm, if not warmer.

This will be the first time in a loooooooong time that I’ve done any playing on a Sunday morning—and it’s finally not church-related.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve really been having issues with the whole church thing and christian culture. I’m just so annoyed with it right now that I want nothing to do with it—that sometimes puts me in scary territory of laying aside my “christian spiritual life”. It’s not that I don’t believe in God and all that Jesus has done for me—I’m just tired of church and tired of Western-Brand Christianity.

That leaves me in a bit of a lonely spot.

Anyway, I need to get to bed. 8:00 is gonna come awefully early.

Filed under: Christian Subculture, Performance, Spirituality, Websites
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In follow-up to my previous veting about how lame Internet Exploder is, I’ve spent some time in the W3C standards documentation on stylesheets. According to that documentation, here is what the specs are on the height tag as it pertains to stylesheets…

5.5.24 ‘height’

Value: | auto
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level and replaced elements
Inherited: no
Percentage values: N/A

This property can be applied to text, but it is most useful with replaced elements such as images. The height is to be enforced by scaling the image if necessary. When scaling, the aspect ratio of the image is preserved if the ‘width’ property is ‘auto’.

Example:

IMG.icon { height: 100px }

If the ‘width’ and ‘height’ of a replaced element are both ‘auto’, these properties will be set to the intrinsic dimensions of the element.

If applied to a textual element, the height can be enforced with e.g. a scrollbar.

Negative values are not allowed.

CSS1 core: UAs may ignore the ‘height’ property (i.e., treat it as ‘auto’) if the element is not a replaced element.

So if it’s true that the height percentage value is to be ignored and is only to be read in absoultes, then IE is technically behaving. Sort of. Firefox seems to take a liberty and include the percentage value, perhaps figuring stellar coders like myself actually would have a valid use for a percentage value.

So it seems that perhaps the W3C is being too narrow in the usage of the height tag—considering its usage only for IMG objects. W3C considers it “most useful” in application to images, but I see plenty of validity in application to div tags or tables, in being able to control the relative or absolute height of an item’s attributes.

Filed under: CSS
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Since I’m contained in a quietly-situated area of cubicals, I can’t just stand up and scream at the top of my lungs

IE SUCKS!!!!!

So, instead I’ll blog about it, eh?

IE does NOT know how to properly behave when a stylesheet is telling it what to do (I guess Bill Gates [*cough* anti-christ *cough*] doesn’t like taking orders). I’m essentially trying to make a formatted div tag span the entire height of the web browser and of course Firefox is behaving like a good little browser should.

I’ve tried using height: 100%; as well as bottom: 0px;, both of which WORK in Firefox/Mozilla but IE just seems to sit there and picking its GUI-nose and assumes that when I say height: 100%; or bottom: 0px;, it’s thinking “oh, you must mean the bottom or height of the area of content that’s actually being filled with content”

MORON BROWSER

I say it again…

MORON BROWSER

Go for three? Nah. Ah, sure, what the hell. MORON BROWSER.

Of course this just scratches the surface of how stupid IE is when it comes to stylesheets. If anyone knows of any good resources out there of how to find good IE-workarounds or equivalents, that’d be much appreciated.

I think I’m going to go now and hurl some more unspoken insults and explicatives at that good-for-nothing-browser people call “Internet Explorer”.

Oh, Choose Firefox.

Filed under: CSS
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Not only is Google good at remembering historic events and reflecting it on their main search page (i.e., their custom google logos that pay tribute to those events), but they’ve also got a sense of humor, too.

Head over to http://moon.google.com/, where they’ve plugged a piece of the moon into their maps program. They’ve got a few “landing spots” noted from the various space craft that have landed there. It gets better though….

Zoom all the way in. The mystery of what the moon is really made of is finally revealed.

Filed under: Websites
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