Random Traffic Through Nick's Brain

Thanks to Jeff, I learned how to do cross platform image rollovers.

function logoChange(imageSrc) {
	document.getElementById("logo").src = imageSrc;
	return true;
}

Next, I have to get my résumé properly centered in Mozilla, like it is in IE.

What do I like about Firebird?

• It’s free.
• Unzip and it works. No installation.
• Popup blocking.
• Tabbed browsing. Ctrl-Click on a link = open in a new tab, leaving the current tab on top.
• Open folders of bookmarks in tabs. Great for reading your morning comics and news.
• Type in page find. Great when used in conjunction with Google.
• Select and search. Ditto on Google.
• Ability to turn off selective JavaScript behaviours.
• Works mostly like IE. Notably, Alt-D = Address bar. Ctrl-Enter = complete .com address.

What’s missing?

• Switch to turn off image resizing. Found it, it’s in the geek-tweak settings.
• Too much real-estate taken up by controls, even in full screen mode. None of the skins quite fix this problem. I may have to write my own.
• Ability to turn off animated images.
• Font is that garish bold thing that Netscape uses. I can probably turn this off using a skin or the userChrome.css file.
• The interface lacks accelerator keys in numerous places.

Friday was weird… being up at 04:00 always gets me feeling a bit alone… probably half solitude, and half lonely. It brought back a lot of memories of being in London, when I’d frequently be alone in my room writing letters to friends. It used to be how my life was, and I liked my life then. It is no longer how my life is in general. Besides being with Dina, I’m constantly around friends. I like my life better now.

Downloaded Mozilla Firebird. Pretty good browser. Just need a few small tweaks, and I’ll be willing to use it over IE.

I like Firebird enough that I finally sat down and fixed the display of the Page HeaderCurrently the black strip at the top of the page with the site logo and “Email Me” link. under Mozilla browsers. The <p> that contains the logo and link needed

height: 35px; /* For Mozilla: Same height as the logo */

and

margin-top: 0; /* For Mozilla: Despite the fact that the body has margin: 0; */

Guess that’s the next phase in my web programming development: learning to care about cross-browser compatibility.

Also stopped the horizontal scroll bar from appearing on the blog pages. Two culprits: one, a

width: 105%;

was understandable. The other,

text-align: justify;

causes IE6.0SP1 to display it, but not other browsers. Weird.

Am downloading the ISOs for Red Hat. So far, WinXP hasn’t crashed. On the other hand, I just watched the IE/Explorer dialog display:

1 Hour 0 Minutes Remaining

1 Hour Remaining

60 Minutes Remaining

Car noise was but a pebble in the brakes.

Signed the lease for another year at the same place.

Got my new business cards for work. Finally. Ironic for reasons I can’t mention.

Heard back from Heidi again. I’ve been hashed into the “sin” bucket in her memory.

<sigh />

Wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but it wasn’t unexpected either. In fact, I’m so unhappy about it that the part of me that enjoys tempting people is neither proud nor guiltily ashamed; it’s just staying quietly in it’s little corner of my mind/personality.

Another possibility is that, all along, I never even had cards to play. That would probably be the worst outcome, since it would mean that I was manipulated and lied to all along. I try not to think of that much, mostly for my own self esteem.

Nadine used to tell me that I sounded like Kermit D. Frog. I never told her that I liked this song.

It’s not that easy being green;

Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.

When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold,

or something much more colorful like that.

It’s not easy being green.

It seems you blend in with so many other ord’nary things.

And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re

not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water

or stars in the sky.

But green’s the color of Spring.

And green can be cool and friendly-like.

And green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain,

or tall like a tree.

When green is all there is to be

It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why?

Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful!

And I think it’s what I want to be.

From “The Sesame Street Book and Record”.

‘Green’ is ©1970 Jonico Music, Inc.

Jeff: One entry, no “points of ellipses” …Fine, only one…

Figured out JavaScript for the mouseover on Mozilla instead of IE. One would think that rollovers would be an easy thing to do. This is what I came up with… if anyone has suggestions for better, I’m all ears.

if (document.images) {
	logoRed = new Image;
	logoWhite = new Image;

	logoRed.src = '/images/varacalli-logo-with-home-red.gif';
	logoWhite.src = '/images/varacalli-logo-with-home.gif';
} else {
	logoRed = '';
	logoWhite = '';
	document.logo = '';
}

function logoChange(imageSrc) {
	var bWorked = true;
	// This one works on IE
	try {
		document.all.logo.src = imageSrc;
	} catch (ex) {
		bWorked = false;
	}

	// This one works on Mozilla
	if (!bWorked) {
		try {
			document["logo"].src = imageSrc;
		} catch (ex) {
			// Do Nothing. Ignore error.
		}
	}
	return true;
}

function logoHighlight() {
	return logoChange(logoRed.src);
}

function logoNormal() {
	return logoChange(logoWhite.src);
}

There are times that I use my blog as a means of expressing myself, writing can be fun and therapeutic. Other times, it’s a way to learn about various technologies. I’m currently in the mood to do the latter.

I’ve ditched VSS, and have installed SubVersion and TortoiseSVN. I’m using NAnt as a build system, instead of a homebrewIt had a kick-ass UI. Maybe I should write one for NAnt. system of batch files and XML. I’ve signed up for SourceForge, and hope to contribute to both NAnt and NAntContrib. After that, integrating NUnit, NDoc, and FxCop.

Although I’m currently using a pre-processor, I’m unhappy with it. I have to build my web site by running the pre-processor before I can view my changes. I think I need to figure out how to write a handler for my un-pre-processed files so that my local web-server will run the processing step before displaying the files.

Theoretically, I shouldn’t need a preprocessor, I should just be writing the whole site as XML fragments, then use/write a utility to aggregate the XML into XHTML. An additional advantage of that is I can start publishing an RSS feed.

I’m shifting from a writing bent to a technical bent because I may need to learn some of these tools and technologies for work. Also, work is digging into my writing time. As a geek, writing software, or other facets of development, is much easier than writing prose.

Updated the pictures page. Added all the pics that I’ve been uploading for the blog. Changed the layout.

The web hosting transition is done, modulo getting the dns entries to propagate out. Site is up, mail is flowing. I can now easily check my web logs for referrers, visitors, and all sorts of other stats.

Whether or not I’m tired / dazed after work has less to do with the amount of work I do, and more with whether or not I finish popping my stack by the end of the day. Two hours alone in the morning at work is very productive, BTW…

CSS / XHTML are fun, though still frustrating at times. I think I’m done making changes to the look and feel. My résumé is pretty much done modulo proofing by friends. I think that it actually looks pretty slick, although the verbiage is a bit awkward in places.

I actually downloaded Mozilla 1.21, Netscape 7.02, and Opera 7. The pages look pretty good in Opera. Things look almost the way they do in IE, and the way I think they should look based on the way I read the CSS specs. The popup blocking may be enough to make me use it as my main browser.

Netscape and Mozilla have problems rendering some things, especially the header with the site logo and email link. They seem slow and slugging compared to IE and Opera. If I get motivated, I may try to fix things, but I’m not sure I care enough. Maybe they’ll eventually fix their rendering engine.