wiredfool

I’ve uploaded the rest of the butterfly pictures from our trip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago. I think these would work well with Apple’s ‘folder of pictures’ screensaver.

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Seen on the EMP while waiting for friends at Folklife.

Some pictures from this weeks weblog meetup. Sorry, no wookies.

Tiger still has some issues for me. Mail.app is still terribly slow reflecting that the status of mail messages has changed, either by showing the new mail notification in the dock for minutes after items have been deleted as spam or not showing the notification when new items come in.

X11.app has some issues with copy and paste, so that pasting from an xterm to aqua sometimes crashes the xterm with a bad atom error message. I’d never seen this before Tiger,and reverting to Panther’s X11.app helps a bit.

I really like the dashboard, but especially the ‘dev mode’ setting. (see item 2 here) The setting allows you to drag dashboard items off the dashboard layer and into a floating layer above the rest of your windows. I’m using this for an ambient monitor of a server, a green dot if it’s up, red if it’s down. On my bigger display, I’ve got the weather widget shining light or raining on whatever window is under it. Someone should hack this so that the window underneath starts to ripple an run.

UPS was nice to me on Wednesday, delivering a shiny new lens for the camera and a DVD of Tiger. Three installs later, I’m pretty happy with Tiger.

On the desktop, a g4/400. Ancient machine, has 10.1 through 10.4 installed and runnable, as well as 9 and 9.2. While adding a new drive for Tiger, I discovered that the dual drive Oxford 911 firewire case doesn’t boot off of the second drive. That’s only a minor issue, as I have a ton of other partitions to work from.

On the ibook/500, we did an upgrade install, pretty much uneventful. It’s had a couple of issues attaching to the airport network when waking from sleep, but that seems over now.

The tibook was going to be an upgrade install (after a full backup), but drive errors forced the wipe of the os partition. So that became a clean install. My home directory was on a separate partition, so it was unaffected, but I do still need to go find all the little bits and pieces that I’ve installed all over the place, (python stuff, subversion, mysql, postgres, imagemagick, …)

All in all, it’s not a huge update. It seems faster in most cases, shinier in almost all cases. I’m starting to poke around with CoreData, which was the real driving force behind the upgrade right now.

My one major disappointment is mail.app. It’s always had some issues with my mail server (dbmail) but it’s worse with this version. It churned on importing my existing messages (100k) overnight, then all morning hammered the server downloading everything again. It’s taking far too long to deal with junk mail or anything that’s not in the main inbox. That said, it is snappier for my one pop account, so I may need to rethink what I’m using as a mail server.

A Komodo Dragon

One Hippo, all alone

The Jaguar

Wandering around the zoo last weekend, we found Tigers and Penguins, but there were no Longhorns to be found. Perhaps they haven’t shipped yet?

And trying very hard to be respectful of this otter, but I only got the hind half.

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Things my baby has taught me lately:

• Dinner is much more fun if it requires a bath afterwards.
• One of the cats like Kamut Puffs.
• Mango yogurt can be used as hair styling gel.
• Sweet potatoes can too, but they’re a bit more obvious.
• Toys belong on the floor. Only rarely within reach of the baby.
• Cardboard boxes are the best toys.
• Except for power cords.
• Laughing hysterically for no reason at all is a lot of fun.
• A baby and bike trailer is a good way to get a workout.
• A 42×23 low gear is not appropriate for even slightly hilly terrain.

We interrupt the regularly scheduled baby photoblog for some web dev stuff.

It may not come as much of a surprise that IE has trouble with some css elements, but I’ve just run across a really nasty one and a reasonably good solution.

I was trying to use a DHTML calendar (not on this site though) that is completely dynamically created dom objects, styled with CSS. So far so good, it works on my test browsers, and amazingly enough, it ‘works’ with IE6.

Unfortunately the background images flicker, as others have figured out. If you have a background image on a dynamically created node, the cached version of the background image is not used, and the image is downloaded again from the server. Over and over. I was seeing the background for table cells download on every mouseover event, and for a calendar, that’s a lot of cells and a ton of requests. Thankfully, most of the requests where getting a 304 not changed response, but it’s still not nice to the server to be requesting an image 50 times when it should just be requested once.

So, the background images had to go. But only for IE, and I couldn’t change any of the html generated, since it wasn’t in my library. The only saving grace was that all of the items that I needed to change had class definitions.

Enter the attribute selector bug. I’m not normally one to code to browser bugs, but since I’m working around a bug, hopefully they will fix all of these at the same time. Or none at all.

The basic version of the attribute selector bug is that when IE/Win or an old version of Opera (3.x) hits css like

div[id] { }

it completely ignores it. Everyone else applies that css to a div with an id attribute. That’s pretty general, and not of a ton of use, except that there are specific equivalences of common class/id methods and selectors. (see the spec)

Classes are a space separated list of attributes applied to an element, and an id is a single exact attribute applied to an element. Thankfully, there are two versions of the attribute selector that support those exact semantics — both of them completely ignored by IE6.

/* Shows up everywhere */
div.classname {border: 3px solid green; }
 
/* Hidden from IE/Win */
div[class~=classname] { border: 3px solid red; }
 
/* Hidden from IE/Win , the same as div#idval */
div[id=idval] { background: #ff0; }

See Example

The class selectors are more effective, since the attribute selector version is interpreted as more specific than the more common dot notation version. The id attribute selector, unfortunately, does not take precedence over the has notation version. It is still possible to send additional css to Mozilla/Safari, IE just won’t get any.

While this is a browser bug exploitation hack, It’s simple, effective and what’s more, it validates.