Gah. The world has gone mad. I have installed IE7 and my site now renders better on IE than it does on Firefox. Actually they both display the same; however in firefox the tabs under the banner only have a very small clickable area, whereas on IE7 the whole tab is clickable… Answers on a postcard…
I finally started updating the styling of my MT blogs to give a more personal feel to the sites and almost straight away I have a question: Where is the middle gound? At the simple "point and click" end of things we have Style Catcher (and taking it even further the non-customizable themes in vox). At the DIY end we have styles-site.css.
Where is the solution for when you want to start with a basic layout and make gradual changes until you hit your sweet spot?
My original thought was to use the "minimalist" theme and then make a few simple overrides; except that it duplicates a lot of stuff and you end up having to recode most of the sheet just to override the font… What about base-weblog.css? That's what the official themes use as a base, so it must be a good beginning, right? It certainly saves effort over fully redisigning from scratch but a few fundamentals are missing; like the fact that the two-column layouts don't display as two columns…
What I have ended up doing here is importing base-weblog.css and defining the alpha and beta divs for my chosen layout (two-column-right). It would have been nice if the default stylesheet took this approach rather than containing most of base-weblog.css making modifications a pain. I know; I have spotted a niche and I should fill it. Unfortunately lack of motivation coupled with lack of intellectual property rights to my own code make that a non-starter.
A bit about the style. This was someting I was thinking about for a beekeeping blog, but I'm doing that over at vox and they don't have customizable themes over there. The altruistic nature of a single honey bee has a number of parallels with individual developers in open source projects or individual routers in large networks so I thought the theme idea could be applied here.
The logo is five interlocking hexagons representing the comb structure build by the bees for raising young and storing winter provisions. The colours represent the standard marking colours for honey bee queens used to make it easier to spot her as well as indicate her age. The first colour should actually be white but because the honey bees visible spectrum is shifted further into the blue than ours I've used violet (kind of an in-joke for beekeepers I guess).
Currently the style fails miserably in internet explorer. Not sure if I will fix that or not.
Need to finish laying out meanderings and need to do a layout here too.
I want to put tabs under the main banner, meanderings, then here and then vox. Layout customisation on vox is minimal so linking back will be a pain.
Should the vox be for family friendly posts? News about Lex, etc? Still not sure.
I've decided to split my blogs due to creative differences.
My tech posts will now be made here so that they don't get lost amongst the background noise over on Random Meanderings.
Most of my posts will still be on meanderings. Every now and then I'll also be posting on my vox blog too. Haven't quite decided on a theme over there yet.
Who made the arbitrary decision that new motherboard=new pc? It's not even as if its consistent, I've changed mbs in the past and its just installed the new drivers and away. But not last night.
After the swap over the pc wouldn't boot, would reset before any screen output. Refresh install time thinks I. In goes the original media. Type in my original product key. All seems ok: great I think; job done. And then I log in to check for updates… Wtf? I'm not activated?
So now I find myself with another reinstall in the works. I do have another key I can use for this pc, but its for a different install cd and won't work with the oem cd I used to repair last night.
I guess thats my point. I did a repair last night, not a full install on a new pc. It kept all my other settings, why not my activation?
I'm glad I only run one windows box on the network at home. don't have any of these issues with the OSX, Debian or Ubuntu boxes.
Microsoft, I know you are not listening, but here's a suggestion. The main reason you have such a stranglehold on the os market is because your OS has the apps support, and your own apps are a large part of that. Make windows free. You'd kill Linux as a desktop contender just like making IE free killed Netscape as the dominant browser.
Of course, as a longterm Microsoft hater I don't want this to happen; I love that modern linux distros such as Ubuntu or SuSE make an open source desktop viable for non unix geeks; however in my mind it seems like a plausible option for them to take and a surefire way of killing the opposition. Sure they'd lose the revenue from new pc installs, they'd still have their apps though, they could still get revenue from the specialised variants (embedded, server, 3+ Cpu) and most of all they would get rid of the headaches of having to figure out new ways to stop OS piracy without generating extra support overhead when it breaks existing customer installs. It'd get rid of almost all of the bad press about MS too; very little of the bad press is about their office productivity apps. A lot of it is about oppressive os licensing. They'd still catch flack for their DRM stance and the crappy standards compliance in Internet Explorer (I gave up trying to make my sites display properly in IE ages ago; why should I work harder because MS don't read the standards properly before writing their code?). IE7 is supposedly more standards compliant. I don't want to get started on that though, I'll just say this: Why does fixing a bug require a major upgrade? Would it really be that hard to backport the fixed standards compliance as a critical update for 6 so webmasters don't have to wait years for everyone to update?
I was going to do some reading on the train this morning after a quick post. I seem to have got carried away...
I've been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu Linux for a while now.
I'm a debian boy and have been for years (I can't remember whether it was bo, rexx or buzz that I first installed… whichever was earliest). I am plenty happy with my etch box, and have no problem keeping up with the various packages, etc directly using apt-cache and apt-get; however I share the PCs at home with my wife and son and have recently started wondering whether the Debian based Ubuntu distro was worth a shot.
Cisco and Juniper both provide an option to easily strip private autonomous system numbers from outbound advertisements.
This article was started because I thought this aproach was flat out wrong; however during the research I managed to convince myself that it is the almost the right thing to do; just needs a couple of knobs to tweak to make it flexible enough to always do the right thing.
For some reason the default method of setting tags in outbound atom feeds stores the numeric tagid in the term attribute. Certainly caused me some confusion to see that the Technorati profile for this blog said that my top tag was "10"
Modified the MTIfTagged section of the atom.xml template to match the following:
<MTEntryIfTagged>
<MTEntryTags>
<category term="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>"
label="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>"
scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
</MTEntryTags>
</MTEntryIfTagged>
So I installed MT, I used StyleCatcher to pick a theme. Nice one.
Hang on... All my tag clouds are actually bulleted list without any weighting. Surely there must be a way to fix that?
In the aftermath of a spanning tree failure I found myself revisiting the IEEE ethernet standards documents. Specifically 802.1d and 802.1q. As I write this both are available as part of the Get IEEE 802 program, ymmv.
While reading the standards, and some related websites about tuning spanning tree parameters, I realised that there were a number of references to network diameter; however there was no precise definition of this term.