IE Death March

Since its release, I have supported IE6 in all iterations of this site. Since the launch of IE7, I’ve had to twist and fight to test in IE6. No longer! The IE Death March is at hand.

On personal sites and projects I will neither test nor directly support IE6. It’s old, it’s buggy, it’s been deprecated by IE7.

This, obviously, won’t fly at work, where we are in the hands of our clients, but I have noticed a distinct lessoning of clients to use IE6. This is great news for us designers. IE7 is more standards compliant and requires less “Fix IE” time. The less time I spend on a project, the more profit we make. Plain and simple.

The death of IE6 is good for everyone. If developers can focus their resources on the practical development of the site and not on breaking standards compliant code to pick up the slack in IE then everyone wins. Clients will get more for their money and developers can focus on what they do best, develop.

• Changed a diaper
• Given a bottle to a baby
• Bathed a baby
• Woken up at 3 am to rock a baby for an hour
• Watched my wife pump milk from her boob

Out of Chocolate Milk?

When we found out we were having a baby I did what every normal father would do, I searched the internet for tips for a first time father. I found some lengthy topics about what to do, I found some short joke posts that consisted of various combinations of the words “Pray, Sleep, and Cry”, and I also found four cds I wanted from cdbaby.com.

I knew the standard advice that everyone gives. What I wanted a short, specific list of things to expect. The things that would be helpful from day I. The common sense advice that would be a life saver. The internet failed me that day my friends.

Here is the list I wish I had found.

1. Babies cry when they are sad, hurt, happy, or bored. Don’t sweat it unless they never calm down.
2. From day one don’t let them sleep in your bed. People make cribs and bassinets for a reason, use them!
3. It will take a while for your wife to get use to breast feeding. Her boobs are going to hurt like crap for a while.
4. If she is going to pump, expect blood, yeah, scary stuff. Don’t worry. If your baby drinks some blood, they’ll crap it out. No worries.
5. Babies like tv. Don’t let it babysit for you, but it’s cool if you let them watch some while you have the first quiet meal with your wife in months.
6. It’s your baby. If someone else only dresses their baby girl in pink, that’s them. Don’t feel pressured to do anything you don’t want to! Remember: other people are stupid.
7. Changing diapers is nasty, but once you get past the asphalt smelling sludge you’ll get use to it.
8. Babies throw up constantly. You can never have too many burp clothes, so stock up.
9. Establish a nighttime routine. Do the routine every night. Try to do it at the same time every night. They will get use to it and make your life 300x easier.
10. Don’t stress out. Billions of people have had children prior to you. They made it through it, and their all morons, so you can too.

Me with my reading glasses

The mere idea of me getting my eyes examined was enough to make me uneasy. I still had memories of the old style glaucoma tests dancing like sugarplum ferries through my mind. You see kids, before the magic puff of air did tests the technician would have to push a gauge onto your eye to test the pressure. Let me say that again, the testing device was placed directly on your eye and pushed down until it felt resistance. One week after I had this test I heard they had come out with a device that did the same thing by blowing air on your eye. I died a little inside that day.

So, back to today. I wanted to get my eyes checked because I come home everyday with a headache. I work 8 hours a day in front of a computer, so it’s to be expected. I normally use +1 reading glasses to fight off eye headaches, but these past few months they haven’t done the trick. Yesterday I came home with an especially terrible headache and decided enough was enough, I was making an appointment!

Turns out you have to make appointments far in advance, but they welcome walk-ins. So my natural question was, “What’s the point of the appointment?” They acted as if no one had ever asked them that question before. I guess I’m the only one who thinks like a normal person.

So today we did a “walk-in” appointment. I put my tgpo signature on the list and 30 minutes later I was called back. Look at this, look at that, better or worse, blurry or clear, does this look infected, read the smallest line. After the test and while the doctor was “making notes” we made small talk. I told her about the old style tests, she looked confused. I told her about me having 20/15 vision, she looked bored. I told her how to properly clean a fish, she looked hungry.

Once she compiled her notes she wrote out my prescription and sent me on my merry way to give them money. I paid and went out to the glasses area to see what I looked best in. One of the many blond assistance came over to help me. She look a little confused. She pulled me away from the normal glasses and to the reading glasses. She pointed to the +1 glasses and asked if I liked any of them.

There are so many course out there, why not chose them? Why not try something new? Why must you always choose the same course we just played?

People like this are the reason why I prefer Time Trials to playing online. Time Trials allow me to play more than three courses.

With so many sites begging for attention, I often find it difficult to update this site.  Not wanting this site to go to waste, I’ve decided to find a way to tie it all together.  I’m unsure how exactly I’m going to to it, but my goal is to make all the others sites be the backbone of this site.  After all, if all those other sites are being updated with my information, it only makes since that my website should be.

I understand it doesn’t help that I’m not a blogger.  I don’t find it fun to post the usual blog filler, nor do I read many blogs.  I’m of the mindset that life is boring, and people writing about it is even more boring.  I’m more interested in sharing ideas about Linux flavors, comparing musical taste, and giving short reviews to the books I read.  To me a website should not me so personal that it only discusses its author, instead it should be filled with the likes/dislikes of the author, and welcome discussion from others.  That is what I want this site to be.  It’s also what I feel this site has never been.  But I feel this is the direction it will be heading from now on.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgees, was originally printed in 1963, twenty years before I was to step foot on this earth, eighteen years before those feet were to walk on this earth, and fifteen years before those feet brought me to a book that I could read. If you add those numbers up and divide my 3 you’ll see that I shouldn’t care about this book because it’s freakin’ old. My dad was only eight when this book was printed. Not that that really matters, because his age is directly proportional to mine.

The book tells the story of Alex, a bad little fifteen year old who with the help of his three friends have a sort of gang that rule the streets at night. They speak in their own language, Nadsat, which my intro was written in. Because the book is told from the perspective of Alex, the entire book is presented in Nadsat, which basically means you will only understand three words per sentence.

The story unfolds, people get killed, Alex is incarcerated, milk gets drunk, chapter one begins (this list not in sequential order). If you’ve seen the movie you will have a good idea what’s going on and be able to follow quite easily though the plot.

The real fun of the book is seeing the differences between the book and the film. There are a lot of small details the movie leaves out (Georgie dying, the drunk women at the bar, the last chapter). All these made the book feel more complete than the movie.

The overall theme of decision making is the primary focus of not only the book, but also the book inside the book (a character is writing a book called A Clockwork Orange). If you take away a person’s ability to decide between good and evil, that is to force them to do good, are they still a person? Is the ability to choose good or evil what makes us human? If a person has no choice but to do good, are they truly a good person?

These questions are what the book is all about, and I feel they are all valid. In a world that is increasingly forcing people to adopt their mindset I feel this book has never been so relevant. It tells the story of a kid who rebelled against the system, did things his own way, and it pissed people off. I like stories like this.

The biggest difference between the book and the film is the final chapter. When the book was originally released in the US the final chapter was removed. This is the version Kubrick used as the basis for the screenplay, thus the movie ends rather abruptly. The book continues explaining Alex’s life after he gets out of the hospital, and I must tell you, it gives the story a very different perspective.

Instead of leaving the plot open ended, it further explains Alex’s previous actions and his plans for the future. I feel this gives the story a more human feel, it makes Alex more of a person. It also makes you look back on the rest of the book with a different light. It gives you another point to think about and really makes the book about two things overall.

I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I’m happy the final chapter is now included with the book, but I must warn you not to read the Foreword by the author. It’s nothing but a spoiler for the final chapter and needlessly ruins the ending.

I’d recommend the book to fans and non-fans of the movie alike. It will make you think about the actions of teenagers and where were are leading them, how our world treats them and how we deal with them when they rebel, our view of their culture and our handling of their shortcomings.

Which option does what?

Point of CSS Hacks

CSS Hacks are quite useful. IE interprets the box model differently than Firefox and sometimes requires different CSS styling to achieve comparative results to Firefox. To pass CSS styles to IE only CSS bugs were discovered that allowed designers the ability to keep all their CSS code in one CSS file, but target a specific browser for bits of code.

This made it easy to pass IE styles to make it display properly. The most famous and most widely used of the CSS Hacks is the * html hack. By placing * html before the selector in your CSS you could target IE specifically with whatever styles it contained. This was done because Firefox would skip right over the statement, but IE would read and apply it. Although it was a pain to have to fix IE, CSS Hacks at least made our job as designers easier.

But then IE7 was released.

IE7 didn’t require the same styles that IE6 needed because Microsoft upgraded IE’s CSS standard compliance. Thus all your * html styles that once fixed IE6 could be breaking IE7. Combine this with the fact that IE7 seems to randomly choose when to follow * html styles, which in my experience has only been about 50% of the time, and you have a big problem.

Since then newer hacks have been found to target IE7, but they are flimsy at best.

So what’s the answer? How can we insure that our styles for IE reach the proper browser and proper version? Unfortunitly it now requires conditional logic to detect the browser used and feed it either a style tag or a CSS file.

CSS Conditional Logic

Using CSS Conditional Logic you can now target not only IE, but also specific versions of IE. This is useful when IE 6 needs different code than IE 7. You can read more about CSS Conditional Logic on Microsoft’s site. Conditional Logic allows for greater control of your CSS styles. It allows you to know 100% that your styles are reaching the exact browser you intended.

The downside of Conditional Logic is from a maintenance point of view. In the span of fixing each browser you may find yourself now using three or more CSS files. The usefulness of CSS Hacks was that it allowed you to keep all styles together. Conditional Logic requires some styles to be on its own, either on the page or in a separate CSS file.

Which way is the best?

The fact that CSS Hacks can sometimes be skipped by the intended browser is a deal breaker in my eyes. If I need a style to be applied to IE 7, I don’t want it to only work 75% of the time. In my experience CSS Hacks simply can’t offer a 100% track record. I’ve used them in the past and have had them fail far to many times. CSS Conditional Logic offers a 100% guarantee that your browser specific styles will be picked up and used, and when you’re working on big websites, a 100% guarantee is exactly what you want.

Before I dive back in I have a three questions. Seeing as how y’all had so many great ideas last time, I’ll ask them here and hope for the same amount of enthusiasm.

• On a PPC machine, has anyone gotten gnash or swfdec to work? In what distro?
• On a PPC machine, has anyone gotten Exaile to work? In what distro?
• On a PPC machine, has anyone getten Awn to work? In what distro?

Based on the answers to these questions I’ll decided which distro to begin with. My hope is to find a distro that will work with all three, but I’ll take two out of three if need be.

My fear is that some of these programs simply won’t work on a PPC machine. I hope I’m wrong and one of you can tell me how to get it done.