Author Archives: daniel

Hassles with background-image and font sizes

The other day I was working on upgrading the eVision web site to the new look (as well as the latest WordPress 2.02). While I’ve been using HTML for more than a decade, I have to admit, my grasp on CSS is patchy. I’m still picking it up. So it took a bit of wrestling to get it to (more or less) match the design provided by the graphic designer. The big graphic still isn’t in quite the right spot, but no matter, it’s still a vast improvement over the old one.

I did learn a couple of (possibly) valuable tips:

  • In Firefox, the background-image of a div doesn’t display in the portion of the div that has nothing in it. In my case, I had a UL (which forms the dropdown menu) in there, right justified. The background only appeared in the left hand bit in IE, not Firefox. I had to add a   to it to get it to appear… and then I had to specify a height, so the background image would go to the right height, instead of just the nominal height of the non-existent text.
  • Font sizes… after complaints from a colleague who is keen on big text, I had to remove all the references to pt sizes in text, in favour of em, so that IE would resize the text when asked. Firefox handles this even if you’ve got all pt sizes.
  • I also learnt I need to study CSS a bit more. The next projects will be doing some more upgrades and new WordPress themes, I think. I’ve got a few that need doing.

RIP Neil Raine

You may not have heard of Neil Raine… sadly neither did I until today. He died on Wednesday in a hang-gliding accident in Spain. His role in the geek world? He was a contributor to RISCOS, the operating system of the Acorn Archimedes range, the first consumer computer to use a RISC processor, way back in the late 80s.

He also contributed a number of games that BBC users might recall, including Hopper, Planetoid and one of my personal favourites, Magic Mushrooms, a platform game that allowed you to design your own levels.

Neil may not have been rich or famous, but geeks like him make an untold contribution to the world of computing. Here’s to you, Neil.

Local news report. RISCOS News Report.

AU govt pulls down satire site

Richard Neville says his spoof johnhowardpm.org web site has been shut down on the orders of the government, with Melbourne IT and Yahoo Hosting cowering to the demand.

Unfortunately it’s not in the Google or archive.org caches, but you can see it in a PDF. But on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like there was justification for shutting it down.

Update Monday 7am. Peter has found a comment from a John Dalton on Margo Kingston’s site showing a way of viewing the site — it’s only Melbourne IT that cowered; Yahoo still has it up, but you can’t see it without doing hacky things to your DNS. John suggested changing your proxies, which makes every other site not work. A better way is editing your Hosts file. On Windows, this is in somewhere like c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add a line:
216.39.58.74 www.johnhowardpm.org

And you’re set.

Friday quickies

What if Microsoft was marketing the iPod? (Article about the origins of the video here.)

In case you’ve been living in a virtual cave, VMWare’s basic VMServer product is now free.

Google is beta trialling GMail from your own domain, primarily aimed at organisations to start with. (via Patrick)

Found an old quote of mine:
To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things – essentials like “Help!” or “Hello” – I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook. (Quoted here, originally posted here.)

Migrating .Net 1.x to 2.x

Having got Visual Studio 2005 into my hot little hands, I’ve upgraded one of my projects from VS 2003 to 2005, and .Net Framework 1 to 2. Just loading it into VS2005 seemed to do most of the work for me.

I did find the new VS gives out a few very informative warnings in the code editor, such as unused variables. Good stuff (and shame on me for being so sloppy during repeated revisions of code).

The other thing I found was a few things had changed in the Web.Config file format. After much fiddling I found it easier to create a fresh one and copy my custom settings into it, than try and convert the old one over.

The only catch is that after copying it all over to the test server, it didn’t work. Turns out apart from installing the .Net 2.X Framework on your server, you’ll also need to get into the IIS setup and make sure it knows it’s now a 2.X application.

Other than that, pretty smooth. The one gotcha on my actual code was a custom button click routine that took the form QueryString and stripped out all the ASP.Net guff I didn’t want needed a bit of tweaking, as in .Net 2.0 there’s an extra __EVENTVALIDATION value. (My version is adapted from a 15seconds.com article, and is used to produce tidy QueryStrings that can be bookmarked.)

29th of February exists in WordPress (almost)

I discovered the other week that if you put an illegal post date into WordPress, such as 29-Feb-2006, it displays as the next day, 1-Mar-2006 on the page, but doesn’t allow commenting or going to the permalink, because in the database it’s still there as 29-Feb, so it doesn’t show up if you try to click through to it.

I suspect it’s just PHP’s date handlers being helpful, so it may show up in other PHP-based software.

The legend of Llamasoft

I’ve discovered that though Way Of The Rodent started publishing Jeff Minter’s auto-biographical history of Llamasoft, there’s actually more on the Llamasoft web site.

I’d thought I was good at Space Invaders until I met Chico. He was so good at Space Invaders that he could play it forever – it was no longer a challenge to him at all. So if he played the game at all he’d set himself some task that us mere mortals simply could not even begin to comprehend. Shooting all the Invaders was too simple. He’d time his shots so precisely that he could shoot individual Invaders out of the flock to eventually form his initials from the remaining attackers.