Author Archives: daniel

IE’s float/margin bug

I’m at home today working on a new WordPress site… just came across the glorious IE Float/Margin bug. Thankfully there are a couple of workarounds, one involving putting an extra Div around the troublesome ones, the other involving a harmless display: inline attribute.

I also note that when wrangling with a CSS file and WordPress, continually tweaking, uploading the tweaked file, then re-loading the browser page, Firefox handles it fine and refreshes completely. IE doesn’t; sometimes it’ll only do a partial refresh, and chokes on something, which in my case means my navigation bar disappearing until I re-load via a link. Very odd.

Patches for Win2K and WP

If you’ve been holding off patching your Windows 2000 boxes with the latest security updates, do it now, because the Zotob worm is spreading fast. Thankfully it only affects Win2K, and anybody who’s already patched with MS05-039 is already protected.

Also new this week is WordPress 1.5.2. I’ve used WP for a while now, but am now dabbling with it for a company site… it’s increasingly impressive, especially for CMS/Non-dated pages work.

PS: According to a report, car-maker General Motors Holden has lost A$6 million in car production due to the Zotob worm. Other major companies have also been hit.

Why I need a better keyboard

I need a better keyboard at work ‘cos once I’m in the zone and coding at a rate of knots, no way should I be frustrated and have my train of thought derailed by unresponsive keys. A bit like why they brought back the Sonic Screwdriver (to paraphase Russell T Davies, the story shouldn’t be delayed by a locked door).

Is this a problem? Yup. My keyboard at work noticeably misses me pressing Ctrl-C at times, and other keys seem sluggish too. Has been like that since new, about 6 months ago. Maybe I’ll see if I can swap it for another one from somewhere.

Triumph of the Nerds

Triumph of the NerdsTo give my kids an education in the ways of the tech world, I dug out my old VHS copy of Robert X Cringely’s documentary masterpiece from 1996, Triumph of the Nerds. Almost to my surprise, they enjoyed it. And why not, it’s a ripping tale, well told. I don’t always agree with Cringley’s pulpit columns, but he does make good TV.

I wouldn’t mind getting hold of this on DVD. But of course, three things stand in my way:

  • It’s not available in Australia. And of course, it’d be wrong to buy an out-of-region DVD release, wouldn’t it…
  • Apparently the DVD is butchered somewhat, cutting out some of the best anecdotes. It may be no worse than my copy, which was taped off the ABC, who had chopped it up into 6 x half hour episodes, but it’d be nice to get the complete version.
  • US$49.95 for a single disc DVD release? Holy crap, is it coated with 24 carat gold? I know PBS is short of cash, but seriously, wouldn’t they raise more by pricing it at a reasonable level?

It’s worth noting that Cringely went on to do Nerds 2.0.1, about the rise of the Internet. I don’t recall that airing in Australia. Where can I buy that one? Not even from PBS, who appear to be out of stock.

What a shame I can’t buy this stuff and dutifully pay the copyright holder with my cold hard cash.

PS. Wednesday 8am Found Nerds 2.0.1 on another (rather fuzzy) tape, so it obviously did air in AU.

Various stuff

Ren on what happens when somebody buys an iPod but has no idea how it works — Yep, one of my music nut friends who doesn’t have a computer keeps asking me about them.

Tim Berners-Lee on where the web is going.

Jakob Nielsen on designing web sites for international use — Previous rants on this topic: MSN Weather (F vs C); Web site globalisation (date and address formats)

CNet on ten sorely missed technologies — I knew a couple of guys who had Newtons… I wonder what came of them?

Game nostalgia strategy quiz

GyrussGame nostalgia strategy quiz:

In Donkey Kong, did you bother getting the hammer to smash the barrels, or just head for the top?

In Galaga, did you try to get the double fighter?

Gyruss: double bullets? Or not bother?

Did you keep feeding in coins in Moon Patrol, to try and get to the end?

Pacman: save the power pills for when you can get multiple ghosts, or just clean up the board ASAP?

Who was your favourite character to play in Gauntlet?

In Popeye did you favour the top, or bottom of the screen waiting for the hearts?

Space Invaders: start shooting the sides, the middle, or in rows starting from the bottom?

Scramble: Try and shoot the fuel tanks ahead, or bomb them from above? Make it to the end?

Five years and counting

My favourite Mozilla bug, the cropping of “title” attribute tooltips, recently turned five. That is, it is now more than five years since the bug was originally reported. A flurry of new discussion has popped up around it, with some people strenuously arguing that tooltips should be cropped, as they were never intended to hold long strings of text, and people can’t read a lot of text in the six seconds displayed.

Pah, to hell with that. At least if all the text is displayed, the user has the choice of reading it or not. And it could be an option in about:config if it were that worrisome to the Inquisition. It’s not even as if the web standards spell out that the text should be cropped at a particular point.

Until bugs like this are fixed (without users having to install a separate fix such as PopupAlt), it’s hard to justify pushing Firefox onto everyday users.

(My original rant on this bug)

Google blacklists CNet

Google blacklists CNet, saying they won’t talk to news.com reporters for a year, in reaction to a news.com story that highlighted various information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that could be considered sensitive, but was found through Google itself.

It’s interesting, because it seems so at odds with Google’s cleancut friendly image. I suppose it was a bit cheeky of CNet to use a Google executive as the subject of its searches, but the proliferation of personal information on Google and elsewhere on the Net is an important subject.

And if you’re wondering, yes, you can find this story in Google news.

(BTW, Lucas Heights nuclear reactor are nervous about Google Earth, though the Federal government doesn’t seem too concerned.)

Two things Google can do better

Google r0x0rs. Utterly. But there’s a couple of things they can improve.

If they’re clever, they should read sites like those done on WordPress and work out how to index the content at the permalinks, rather than the front page, so that people can find content on sites that have frequently updating front pages. Example: Geekrant is currently top hit for “melbourne itrip frequency”, but it’s pointing to the front page, and is no longer on the first screenful. It will have fallen off the front page in the next few days.

They need to realise that sites hosted in country X are not necessarily about, native to, or located in country X. A better way would be to check the country of the admin contact of the domain. (Tony mentioned an example of a .co.uk site he did for somebody; it hardly rated on Google UK until he moved the physical hosting to the UK.)

HDCP is coming soon

Buying a monitor? Make sure it has HDCP, the up-and-coming digital content protection standard that will be built into Windows Vista and other future playing devices and systems. People with monitors that don’t have HDCP (and that’s almost everyone) will find their display deliberately fuzzy or even blacked out completely. Pah, bastards.

Will Apple and Linux follow suit in supporting this standard? Will monitor manufacturers start actually telling people about this, rather than actively selling them new kit that has built-in obsolesence? Will somebody hack the Vista Media Player to ignore the protection flags?

Stopping WordPress spammers

The blog comment/trackback anti-spam refinement continues.

I’m testing the WP-Hashcash plugin, which inserts Javascript code to calculate an authorisation code into the comment. Since comment spammers don’t actually use the comment forms (at least I hope not; not until they start using people to enter the comments), this means only real comments get through. Well, real comments from people with Javascript running. If they don’t have Javascript running, they may be out of luck. Hopefully that applies to nobody these days, and I think this solution is less painful than a captcha-based one.

But trackback spam is still a problem. One available option is to block direct access to the WordPress trackback PHP, but this isn’t very effective, since most current trackback spammers however are clever enough to call the “real” URL.

A version of Auto shutoff comments modified to close trackbacks on posts older than 28 days, however, seems more effective. I don’t particularly want to shut comments off (especially since the above plugin effectively stops comment spam), but trackbacks are less compelling to keep open.

Together with previously discussed .htaccess entries to block big bandwidth thieves, this appears to be a fairly effective set of anti-blog spam measures. For now.