IE7 is Dean Edwards excellent CSS+JS hack that fixes more display bugs in IE6 than Microsoft managed to in its six year lifespan. (OK, so MS had their hands full fixing the security bugs, and there’s still a bunch in the wild as I write this, but …)

So anyway, thanks Dean for the excellent work. Marvellous.

Also here’s a link to ie7.com where you can upgrade from that horrid Internet Exploder 6. This one doesn’t even require XP … hell, it even works with a Mac!

Oh dear. The spammers sound a bit sad today. Here’s one I just received … it’s not quite your usual viagra advert … kinda stream of consciousness though … hmm.

My own acquaintance with such a possibility began early in life andshocked me somewhat. You dont look as well as you didyesterday. The moral of the dramatic fable of The Simpleton is now clearenough. This situation, though new to our generation of Liberal plutocrats,is not new historically. You were quite disgusting when you tried to makeup to me in the taxi. Because life never came to me like it came toRhodes. Because life never came to me like it came toRhodes. The precedents established by the Inquisition furnish the materialfor a new legal code. A white persondoing such a thing in Capetown would be socially ruined. Itis for me now to object and to make personal remarks. I should say, if you ask me,that the boot is on the other leg. I had the gun ready in the drawer of thattable. Look here: I am an Englishman; and I shall commitsuicide where I please. The officer wearstropical clothes, neither too tidy nor too clean. I seemto spend my life making up other peoples minds for them. Everything what comes to youyou throw it back. Neither had the tramway horses nor the slaves, nor have thediscarded too old at forty. My own acquaintance with such a possibility began early in life andshocked me somewhat. Butnow theyre all educated they wont look at a white man. But the more you let life cometo you, the more you will find yourself bothering about religion. Theres a sort of fascination in it; and you might get giddy. I mean that you were quite right to object to me half anhour ago. The only conclusionthe pious will draw is that I, at all events, will go to hell. She says shes waiting to see what will happen to her. I always say let life come to you; and dontbother about religion. But the more you let life cometo you, the more you will find yourself bothering about religion. We all have them heresooner or later, off and on. You know, to me this is a funny sort of lunch.

Just spent half an hour trying to debug mysterious “mail server” problems on a customer’s MX server. The mail would download across the network, then mysteriously ‘disconnect’ when it finished. We tried lowering the load on the mailserver (it was quite busy, load average 1.8), various tricks. Webmail worked OK, but clearing the mailbox didn’t.

The specific error message in Outlook 2000 was something like, 51 messages couldn’t be retrieved from the server. This usually happens when the connection to the server is lost due to network problems. Contact your administrator. Download error 0×80040403.

Now, you’d think that meant there was - for example - a dropped connection, due to network problems, right?

Nope. When he finally read the incomprehensible 0×80040403 number at the end of that message, and it was duly googled, you know what? It’s nothing to do with a network issue. It’s 100% to do with the mailbox being too big.

I’m not even going to speculate on why they worded the error message so completely misleadingly. Thanks.

The punchline, I guess, is that despite some gentle suggestions that maybe Outlook 2000 isn’t the best email client in the world, the gentleman in question won’t budge: Outlook has a “nice calendar” which he uses to organise his life in. And I respect that.

And I hope that calendar is good enough to make up a day of his lost work.

http://www.internetisshit.org/

can’t fault that argument … what do you reckon?

i bought two reams yesterday from the warehouse at three times this price, so i think a little chrominance variation would be quite acceptable. (i did bother to buy ‘renewable plantation pine’ but who knows what that means.)

but “*whiteness may vary”? WTF? it’s white paper isn’t it?

hi there and welcome everybody i’m going to give a little talk about fixed and fluid today glad you could join us.

fixed design and fluid design
How do i lay out a page when i don’t know how wide the page is, but i have to put some images (which do have a specific width) into it?
most sites on the INTARWEB answer this question by either opting to use a fixed design (where the design has a specific pixel width on the page) or opting to use a fluid design (where the design element’s width is proportional to the page). curiously this really only seems to matter for horizontal width, because people find it completely acceptable to have to scroll vertically (they’re used to that) but totally unacceptable to scroll horizontally (that’s so un-TV).

when you’re designing a website, and you come from a page design background, this will probably strike you as completely dumb. that’s OK, you’re getting paid so just accept that it’s dumb and take the money and make the client happy, that’s why they gave up tooling around with stupid dreamweaver anyway.

back to the topic at hand

a successful fluid-width site is trademe.co.nz. you can see this “fluid design” in action by visiting the site and changing the width of your browser window. here’s what it looks like at (roughly) three dfferent common screen sizes:

you need to click these to view them; they show trademe.co.nz at 800×600, 1024×768 and 1152×864 pixels. hold mouse over and look at URL/hover thingy to see which is which if you can’t see already. note how the trademe page adjusts itself to this; the header is less dominant on a larger screen (because the header graphic has a fixed width of less than 800 pixels) and the white centre column expands more than the sidebars do, because it’s got the “juicy” bit.

a very successful fixed width site is google.com the front page at least. but i didn’t think of that in time, so i took some screenshots of dogandlemon.com, which is another quite nice fixed width site. notice how at various browser widths the design remains constant; instead the fixed width design sits comfortably inside an expanding ocean of tasteful grey.

if you’re used to PAGE design, where the paper is a nice stable platform for arranging letters and images, this is nuts. but on the web … well, you’ve got people seeing your site on a webpad, a laptop, a cellphone, a screen reader, or maybe - maybe - an identical desktop computer and monitor to what you’re using …

anyway this is important if you’re implementing design and i wanted to explain what it’s all about. but i’m not going to give you any practical advice in dealing with it, oh no. haha. maybe i will later but that’s it for now. just think about how it’ll look at various sizes … that’s all :)

oh if you google for ‘fixed versus fluid design’ i’m sure you’ll turn up some nice articles

anyway you don’t need to think about this stuff too hard, it’s not the nineties any more, but it might help to understand

first of all, some unrelated web developers association of aotearoa, er, new zealand, information. the web developers association of new zealand is a for profit company in the guise of a dot-org / ‘association’. best to not be fooled by this. an interesting definition of WDANZ may be found at sids blog, although i’m not sure how ‘warrior gene’ made it into the glossary too.

ok so this is what you get for trying to recycle peecee hardware that’s been left to rot on the side of the road. and RAM that’s been floating around in spare desk drawers for a few years waiting for anything that will have it. and other parts. random ones that dr frankenstein would be proud of. but no lightning required.

6153-4
6153-3
6153-2
6153-1

and

6153via-1.pdf
6153via-2.pdf
6153via-3.pdf

why does this matter? you may ask. and “why are you posting this here, when you know full well the only computer you might want to read it from currently doesn’t work anyway?” and i will say “it takes time to understand these things”, or “solar flares”, which is my favourite excuse for things not working and also a damn fine name for a clothing company if you don’t mind the hippy connection (surely not)

justin, what i’m trying to say is “i think it’s gone”. the damn thing won’t even light up. i wondered if it’s the mainboard being jumpered to 133MHz or something. maybe i’ll see if the CPU fits into the other box or SOMETHING.