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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Tuesday, March 26, 2002After all these years, the proceedings in Microsoft's anti-trust case still make me laugh.
Gateway Testifies To Microsoft's OEM Treatment: [T]o qualify for market development funds, PC makers have to put a Microsoft OS on every PC. [via Slashdot]
OEMs are a bunch of spoiled brats. They're whining that they actually have to do certain things to qualify for Microsoft's steepest discounts and refunds.
Someone please explain to Gateway how the Universe works.
"You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."
From the "wouldn't you love to have such problems" department:
To quote myself, the lack of drivers for desirable peripherals is one reason that the Zaurus isn't ready for prime-time:
Presently, low-power WiFi cards from Socket and Symbol are unsupported. [...]
Turns out that this is a big deal for non-US buyers. WiFi cards from Socket and Symbol have regulatory approval for the EU and elsewhere. SMC's card does not. That leaves buyers with the worst available WiFi options: cards from D-Link and Linksys that drain batteries faster than the SMC card (which is horrible enough), with bulky antenna designs to boot!
Supposedly, Socket has finally assigned a developer to the task of porting the Linux drivers to the Zaurus. I can hardly wait to see results...
I've used the phrase "Pixel-Perfect" a number of times during my quest to get the Default theme for Radio converted to CSS wherever possible. The column on the right of this page, with the calendar, is one of those instances where CSS was sacraficed for a pixel-perfect conversion. So far as I am aware, there is no way that I could create a CSS box with rounded corners.
In reality, my resulting theme is not pixel-perfect in a number of ways. When the browser window is of an appropriate size, I think that my theme re-flows better than the default. However, when reduced to a width of 640 (or lower), my theme is not as readable as the default. To prevent that I could switch the outer columns from fixed to relative widths, preserving my main column on narrow windows at the expense of the outer ones.
My CSS stylesheets also use pixels to specify font sizes nearly everywhere. That practice is generally frowned upon, as it prevents some browsers from being able to resize text (including IE). However, as Zeldman documented some time ago, pixels are the only way that work across browsers. The situation is probably better now, pre-5.0 browsers are largely irrelevant. And CSS hacks to change the behavior of IE/Win are well-known, my own CSS uses a few... but using those hacks in every place where a font size needs to be specified is a lot of work and makes my CSS messy. For my personal site, I'm willing to risk some mis-sized fonts.
Designing for the web always involves trafe-offs.
This page displays perfectly under Windows in IE5, IE6, Mozilla 0.9.9, and Opera 6.0. Anybody got a Mac? Pocket IE (without CSS) degrades in the expected manner. Opera on the Zaurus (with CSS) has a less-than-ideal display, the center column isn't wide enough even with "tiny" magnification selected, but I blame Opera for not providing the CSS over-ride functionality from the desktop version.
It took me less than an hour to get my first CSS-rendition of the Default theme ready. Since then it has been minor fixes to work around IE tweaks that caused breakage in other browsers.
The biggest problem in getting a near pixel-perfection conversion of the Default theme is that coffee mug at the top. Originally it was three images: the mug was spilt in half horizontally, and a vertical split where the large and small mountain meet.
The reason for the split was to (a) turn the mug into a link, and (b) allow the title text to be positioned next to the mug. The Default theme used a table to get the images aligned properly, while I've been trying to eliminate tables as much as possible.
Mozilla was loath to position the images together seamlessly within a single <div> without a table when a DOCTYPE of HTML 4.0 was used (transitional or strict). Using a different DOCTYPE, or none at all, produced other display issues without clear work-arounds. Using a <div> for each portion of the image was difficult at best, and created a very ugly look in non-CSS browsers.
Solution: Forget about the link (how many times have I clicked that damned mug trying to get back to the home page?!), merge the images and use them as a table background. Specifying pixel heights / widths for individual cells gets the text positioned where it needs to be.
It's "dirty", in that there is still a table there, but it is much simpler than the one in the Default template. Where a table cannot be eliminated, simplifying it is perfectly acceptable.
Eh, stripping out my DOCTYPEs produced a few problems:
- Mozilla no longer respects <hr size="1">
- IE table size bug
#1 was expected, haven't really looked for a work-around. Actually, I have that problem with or without an HTML 4.0 DOCTYPE.
#2 affects tables with their width specified as a percentage, <table width="xxx%">. When IE is determining how wide the table should appear on-screen, it ignores the width of any parent <div>. Tables can end up much wider than they should be, possibly resulting in side-scrolling.
This didn't cause any problems on the static site, rather it messed up a bunch of stuff on the desktop site. If Radio UserLand used the "Desktop Website Template" for all desktop pages instead of just the home page, it wouldn't have been a problem (I haven't seen a need to modify the desktop template).
Experimenting further with the DOCTYPE, I can't find any values that result in Mozilla rendering pixel-perfect and IE not fouling up tables. I've got another solution that looks like it will work... It's a little dirty, but aren't all good things?
I'm going to throw in the towel on using client-side script to display the ideal stylesheet, the "FOUC" is annoying the heck out of me and has the potential of messing up anchors. CSS-capable browsers on PDAs are the only scenario where dynamic stylesheet selection makes much sense for me, a three-column layout on a tiny LCD is wasteful.
Once I'm self-hosting again, I'll solve the problem with ASP and browscap.
Made the switch at 10am. Dropped the DOCTYPE from my templates too. No "FOUC", nearly pixel-perfect rendering in IE5/Win, IE6/Win, Opera 6/Win, and Mozilla 0.9.9/Win. Sweet.
I happened to glance at my referer log, and beyond the "usual" weird stuff (like a Google search on "girl of budweisser") I found a pointer from John Robb:
Bryce has an excellent Radio weblog on PDAs and CSS.
Thanks!
Ximian ships connector for Microsoft Exchange
Through the Connector, Evolution will function as an Exchange 2000 client, thereby allowing users to manage e-mail, calendars, group schedules, and address books using their current Exchange 2000 servers. [via IDG InfoWorld]
Wow. If it works as described, that is a major step towards getting Linux installed on corporate desktops. I firmly believe that Exchange sucks overall, but it is pervasive and nothing comes close it's group calendaring/scheduling features.
I guess it's time for me to take another look at the latest that Linux has to offer. I've done so every 12-18 months since 1994-ish (Slackware, ick). My last attempt ended when RedHat 6.something refused to work with DHCP under VMware...
Slashdot has a brief review of the new StarOffice.
Sharp's Linux PDA debuts in US
Sharp this week put on sale its Linux-based Zaurus handheld computer and included one unexpected feature: a $50 price cut. [via IDG InfoWorld]
On A&E tonight I caught "Palm Beach: Money, Power, and Privilege."
Visit a supermarket with valet parking and a caviar selection to rival all of Russia, a club that still bars entry to Jews and minorities, and a money store that makes bouquets of "roses" from $100 bills.
I live in a very affluent part of South Florida, just outside of Boca Raton. We don't have valets at the grocery store (none that I've shopped at anyway), but we do have valet parking at the mall, movie theater, and pool hall. As far from the norm as this community is, the Palm Beach crowd is still alien by comparison. Old Money aren't like the rest of us. We buy a Ferrari when the money finally hits. They get them as graduation presents, or by charging them to their American Express card to force their trust fund manager to pay for it.
A&E's two-hour program offers an insightful glimpse into the alien world of Old Money, with Robin Leach nowhere in sight.
San Diego based Media Metastasis LLC has quietly announced their plans to bring QuickTime video formats to your PDA. [...] The most interesting aspect of this system is that they are currently using a Handspring Visor Prism and Sharp Zaurus to demonstrate it. [via PDABuzz.com]
My old photo albums from Europe are back online. The ones that were in a form that I could drag-n-drop into Radio, anyhow. Still have to work out how to handle the ones from my old database-backed site, and there are a number of unsorted pictures to go through.
The albums cover my second tip to Milano (Milan), a walk around the Regensburg altstadt (where I lived in Germany for 18 months), a boat trip to Riedenburg, and my first trip to Praha (Prague).
I'm not much of a photographer. Got a few gems in Praha, rare moments when the weather was being cooperative. Having a good travel companion probably made the difference. Ahhh, Czech women.
