Chinese New Year was yesterday. Ernie tells a story that many of us can relate to. I used to think my family was uniquely fucked up until I realized that it was about on par.
I put my favicon.ico back up. I’ve used the <link> tag for pointing to it, so theoretically I’ll be able to move it later on, but I’ve left it as the default URI that IE looks for because I have no idea quite how stupid older versions of IE are. Here’s a doc on shortcut icons for IE5
I’ve been digging out the tarballs from my old server, so eventually everything should be getting restored in some form or fashion.
I was reviewing some of my old DOM experiments and getting excited because so much stuff has been fixed in the latest versions of Mozilla. My excitement, however was dampened by the fact that Bug 58850 – this.selectionStart is broken in XBL handler for textarea was still open and has been pushed back in fact and is now targeted at mozilla1.0.1. For some perspective, this bug was opened in Nov 2000, I first encountered this problem back in Dec 2000 when I was trying to replicate the blogger interface (over the summer I was trying to replicate the Blogger HTML editing widgets and was blocked by getSelection (searching through the moz source revealed the function was empty) but when I gave it another go, I ended up being blocked by 58850 and was so frustrated that I have never returned and swore off moz DOM dev until v1.0 – I guess now it’ll be v1.0.1) getSelection is needed so that you can find out where your selectionRange starts so you can inline any changes into the TextArea.
Here’s an actual comment on the bug from a Netscape engineer:
Yes, selectionStart and selectionEnd don’t work for multiline text fields
(because it’s hard to calculate them from content). This is a known problem.
I just can’t wrap my head around what he’s trying to say. We just skipped over it and waited for someone to submit a bug because we were lazy? (it wasn’t in bugzilla before someone reported the problem) We only get paid to fix the easy stuff? I dunno, it’s just beyond my comprehension I guess.
get your enr on
From the makers of get your war on (pg6 is pretty damn good): get your enr on.
Today at work we were thinking up of names for our new server (a big Dell brick finally came in). We wanted to name it ‘bender’ but a scoundrel had already taken the name. I suggested that we check the Kabalarians for names (haha) and we ended up searching for Bender, and surprisingly it popped up.
Bender as a first name gives you a very independent nature, yet you are friendly, approachable, and generous. You can be a spontaneous, expressive, and talkative person. Generally you are good-natured, though at times you can be rather blunt and sarcastic. This name incorporates creative, artistic, and musical abilities, and there would be an element of originality in all that you do. You like to do things on the spur of the moment without planning or prior arrangements. Your spirits are buoyed up greatly by encouragement and appreciation. There is a tendency to be scattering in your efforts and you prefer to avoid menial jobs of a routine and repetitive nature. You are inclined to pursue good times and emotional indulgences to excess. Weaknesses in health due to the influence of this name centre in the head. You could experience headaches, or difficulties with your teeth, ears, eyes, or sinuses. Disorders related to the liver, which would be aggravated by rich foods, could also arise.
Who knew? For real trivia about Futurama names, this Futurama’s Who’s Who has some really neat tidbits.
Google Search Solutions
It’s cute, I’ll give you that.
Too busy for a full braindump. Again, things have been piling up. At least I know that I won’t have a shortage of things to talk about. I wonder how I went for several months without writing any stuff down. Was it better or worse? I can’t really tell now.
I’ve found quite a lot of stuff I’d like to go back to and explore more fully when I have the time (umm, probably never, *sigh*): saila.com, langreiter.com, www.e7l3.com, Mike’s Blog, developer-x.com, afongen, Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog, webgraphics, info-arch.org, IAwiki, memes.net, shawn.michael.miller, noise between stations
Browser thoughts: I don’t really use IE much anymore, except for or Blogger, and for creating shortcut .url files with illegal file characters in the titles (really, what a lame Mozilla bug), and since I never feel like going through the Java rigamorole. Oh, and how can I forget, to find stupid CSS bugs.
I inlined some ie5mac style changes, so that should work. I have a feeling I’ll be sniffing browsers until the cows come home to get this working. I’ll be treating this page as a test for production level code, I suppose…
Lars Pind says Goodbye ArsDigita.
You know, CSS really needs to have a ‘browser implementations type’ attribute like the media-type attribute. Then we wouldn’t need to figure out convoluted hacks (and use them for years and years) to support some software-weenie’s brain-fart.
It’s too bad that correctness gets such short shrift in the browser world. Browser makers treat what their products as simply some consumer product, but really, it’s also a development platform. I don’t even want to imagine counting up the number of man-hours expended by web designers and developers in working around browser bugs, especially the CSS ones (ahh the ironies).