write(msg)

Aircrack-NG SVN Ebuild, Rawspeed is a No Go

2009-02-28T07:23:00.005-05:00

I was going to attempt making a Rawspeed SVN ebuild but the repository only has a VS solution file. Yuck. So I'm not going to touch that one until there is some kind of Linux build system in place. I've been filling up my time lately with the new Aircrack-NG. SSE2 support was added which speeds things up tremendously. Performance improved by more than 300%. The only issue I had was getting it installed. I'm lazy so the first thing I tried to do was just rename the RC1 build from portage to RC2 but it wouldn't compile because the released RC2 isn't 64-bit clean. It was fixed shortly thereafter in SVN. I threw together an ebuild quickly and got everything working in short order. The only complaint I have is that computed PMKs in Airolib-NG haven't sped up at all compared to the massive improvement in Aircrack-NG. I think I'll stick with the SVN version of Aircrack-NG for a while too see if the situation improves. Anyway here's the ebuild I used to get a working SSE2 version.

/usr/local/portage/net-wireless/aircrack-ng-9999.ebuild

Rawspeed RAW Image Loader

2009-02-22T12:58:00.002-05:00

I read this interesting post about a new RAW loader being worked on by Klaus Post called RawSpeed that is written in C++ and focuses on speed. I'm already a huge fan of RawStudio so I think my next project may be an SVN build of RawSpeed. Development of RawStudio isn't exactly lightning fast but the application itself is by far the fastest RAW image editor I have ever used. It's also extemely easy to use. I'm looking forward to seeing what RawSpeed can do. Linux photography has a writeup about RawSpeed and a few other intersting tidbits about the future of some other photo editing applications.

LastAgent ebuild

2009-02-22T07:31:00.004-05:00

I love Last.FM and I have been using Banshee for quite a while for scrobbling. The only issue I have with the plugin is that you cannot love, share, or tag a local music file. You can only perfrom these operations on your music playing from Last.FM itself. Enter LastAgent. It's a small prorgram written in python that adds this missing functionality and it works with multiple media players, including Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox, and Audacious. I whipped up an ebuild to install LastAgent and check it out. I'm happy to say that it works as advertised. Here's an ebuild for all you Last.FM fans.

/usr/local/portage/media/sound/lastagent-0.3.02.ebuild

I plan on tweaking this ebuild a little bit but it works well now. It's early still and I had a problem fetching the source with the ebuild for some reason so if you have that problem just download it manually and put it in your distfiles directory for now.

Dillo SVN complete, Fast-Track on its way...

2009-02-19T16:03:00.002-05:00

The Dillo SVN ebuild is now complete. I successfully compiled and ran Dillo SVN. You will need the ebuild and the updated patch. The png is available in the files directory of Dillo2 in portage but I will provide it here for convenience.

/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/dillo-9999.ebuild
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo2SVN-inbuf.patch
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo.png

I have also successfully compiled and installed Fast-Track and all of its dependencies including Winexe. Winexe required an older autoconf for me to get it installed so that's still an issue. Also it seems that Fast-Track has a whacked out directory structure (probably due to its origins on BackTrack) and its taking a good amount of work to get it to work seamlessly on Gentoo. I'm not sure there is much I can do at this point without some serious work. I'm going to take another look at it to see if I'm missing something simple to make it all work better. Right now it works but there are PATH issues so you have to be in the same directory as fast-track.py for it to run properly.

Fast-Track, Dillo CVS ebuild progress

2009-02-18T12:52:00.004-05:00

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get Fast-Track to work with Gentoo and portage. The first problem I ran into was that the fast-track installer tries to download and install its dependencies outside of the package management system unless you happen to be using Ubuntu. I created a patch that strips that out and configures the metasploit directories to the default Gentoo locations. Then I made an ebuild that depends on the packages that the default installer tries to download. At this point I ran into another problem because one of the dependencies is Pymills which isn't in portage so I made an ebuild for that. That part was a little tricky because Pymills doesn't want to install if its parent directory has the version number attached and that's how the tar.gz is setup. I hacked out a working, but not pretty solution. After that I got Fast-Track installed with my ebuild but it was complaining about not having Winexe installed so I took a go at creating a build for that but I'm stuck again. The build instructions and dependencies don't seem to be correct because I can't even get it to build using their instructions. I think it has to do with Samba but I have to dig a little deeper.

I decided to try something else before going back to the Winexe ebuild. A Dillo cvs version seemed like an easy task but try as I might I couldn't connect to their cvs repository. I guess I'll I have to look into that again today to see if things have changed. So I did a little search on Gnome Files for applications that I might want to create ebuilds for. I found Smuxi which looks promising. It's an irssi-like graphical IRC client written in C#. Fortunately for me (considering my recent track record) there is already an ebuild in portage. Unfortunately for me it doesn't work. All the dependencies installed without a hitch but Smuxi itself gets stuck in an infinite loop during compilation. I filed a bug so we'll see what happens.

New Pyrenamer Ebuild

2009-02-12T10:58:00.003-05:00

I made a couple of tweaks to the pyrenamer ebuild, one of which was an added dependecy on eyed3. Here it is:

/usr/local/portage/dev-python/pyrenamer/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Pyrenamer 0.6.0 Ebuild

2009-02-11T10:35:00.004-05:00

Per request I am making available an ebuild for pyrenamer. It's a nice mass renaming utility. I haven't had much time to play around with it but I have been looking for something like it. Thanks goes to a reader who suggested this ebuild. As with all my ebuilds, there are no gaurantees. It works for me but dependency info is minimum because I couldn't find much information on particular dependencies. Try it out and let me know if there are issues with the ebuild.

/usr/local/portage/sys-apps/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Miro 2.0... the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2009-02-11T08:31:00.005-05:00

First lets start with the good news. The gui is much more responsive. Interacting with the sidebar is a smoother experience. With previous releases it was possible to lock up the entire application for seconds at a time when selecting a new channel or trying to play a video. All of that has been fixed. Switching channels and videos is now seamless and instantaneous. Not only has the underlying code obviously been reworked but the look and feel has been overhauled too. It fits in with my GNOME desktop better than before now that Miro seems to use more GTK elements. Another change in the look and functionality in Miro is the playback mode. When viewing a video the sidebar is no longer visible. This is a a good improvement because it was useless before when a video was playing because any interaction with the sidebar would stop the current playing video. If you detach the video window you can manipulate the sidebar and its contents. . Since Miro uses xulrunner to display the guide you can also use it to view other web pages like Hulu. Unfortunately I can't get this to work because Miro won't recognize my flash plugin for some reason. It's possible it has something to do with my setup but I haven't looked too hard into it yet. It would be better if they could integrate Hulu channels and video directly into Miro but there might be some technical or licensing issues with that.

Now let's take a look at some of the bad, or more accurately, the ugly. The previous version didn't use many native GTK widgets. The only native GTK looking part of the previous version was the media controls. Now it is one of the few parts that does not respect the native GTK theme. The controls now have an iTunes-ish look. The GTK theming definitely isn't perfect either. I use a dark theme and while most applications I use now work with a dark theme without a hitch the new Miro is problematic. The text details for videos is the same color as the background and isn't readable with my theme unless the selection is highlighted and even then the text has a very low contrast with the background.

Overall I like the new Miro. I was getting tired of dealing with latency issues and the fact that it wouldn't work for me without an ancient version of openssl. That's all taken care of now and for the most part I like the new look, or at least the direction it is going in but it needs some polish. I am completely happy with the way it works though which even more important. For those of you who want to play around with new Miro here is an ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro-2.0.ebuild

New Webkit-GTK SVN Ebuild...

2009-02-10T11:49:00.004-05:00

My webkit-gtk svn ebuild finally broke a week or so ago. I fixed it up per requests. It builds fine for me here but midori isn't working anymore so I'm still investigating the breakage. I'll link to it anyway so people can try it out.

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/webkit-gtk-9999.ebuild

In other news, I have been slow to get my new site up because of a lack of funds, and I have been concentrating on trying to get another job which I did not believe would be this hard or would take up so much time. I'll probably stick with blogger for a while longer just so I'm not in limbo. I have the drupal site all designed and ready to go I just need to find some money so I can get it hosted.

UPDATE: The issue I was experiencing with Midori was solved by deleting my Midori preferences and restarting. The newest Webkit is working great...better than ever.

New Blog coming soon...

2008-10-23T17:16:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted in a while because I have been messing around with Drupal and boning up on my design skills because that is where I am seriously lacking. I've got Drupal figured out for the most part, but I haven't looked into building my own modules yet which it seems I am going to have to do because of some limitation I have already run into. The big issue is that there are still a ton of useful modules that haven't been updated to work with version 6 yet. Currently I am putting to use a little knowledge I gained about design to create a new site which uses Drupal. I have the design almost finalized but I'm still ironing out the details.

In other news, Evolution-rss-1.1 fixed my dark theme problem and it works on Evo 2.24. Webkit got another performance boost but yet again I am left out with a 64-bit machine. And finally Flash 10 was released. It totally borks my computer. A while back I upgraded both Xorg and Flash. After that I was having problems with my system completely crashing when the display blanked and I thought it was due to Xorg but it turns out after reinstalling the official release of Flash 10 it started happening again. I uninstalled and the problem goes away. I could never figure out how I got rid of the problem last time it happed but now I know. It's sad too because Flash 10 actually fixed a lot of issues for me like the infamous disappearing drop down menus that seem to hide behide the content.

Rawstudio 1.1 Released

2008-09-15T18:07:00.001-04:00

Rawstudio 1.1 was released today. I compiled it today and so far the only noticeable difference is exif support. I'll report on it more later if I find anything else. There isn't an announcement up yet on the website but it is on the mailing list.

Xorg 7.4 Review

2008-09-12T09:02:00.002-04:00

Xorg 7.4 was released recently although the biggest features touted for this version, namely DRI2 and randr 1.3 were dropped from this release. Despite this there have been significant improvements. This is the first release for me that actually displays acceptable performance using the EXA acceleration extension with the Intel driver. This means I can use XV to for accelerated video rendering with Compiz. Before this was only possible using a patch for mplayer and a special plugin for Compiz. This was not a great solution though because no other players worked with this plugin, which meant no Totem, Xine, or even Gnome-Mplayer which also did not work correctly. I've also noticed that Blender works much better now with Compiz. It no longer flickers uncontrollably.

So for the only regressions I have experienced is a slower recovery from suspend and some minor artifacting on my Gnome Panel applets. The artifacts seem to go away when mousing over. Despite these minor regressions I think it is a good upgrade for anyone using the Intel driver. If you're anything like me you've been waiting a long time for a proper Intel EXA implementation to accelerate video while using Compiz or another compositing window manager.

Meanwhile Intel has announced that they want a release of xorg server 1.6 before the year is out. This release should include DRI2 using GEM and randr 1.3. Knowing the history of Xorg release schedules I have my doubts about getting 1.6 out that quickly but the latest Xorg has pacified me for now.

Evolution-RSS SVN Ebuild

2008-09-10T18:39:00.002-04:00

Ok so I haven't been able to get it to build yet but I am working on an evolution-rss svn ebuild. My main impetus for this ebuild has been the fact that I filed a bug a week or two ago about the appearance of feeds when using a dark theme and it is now apparently resolved in svn. This and the lack of a dbus connection are my two biggest gripes with evolution-rss. The theme bug is the classic "light text on white background" issue that seems to plague dark themes. I'm looking forward to GNOME 2.24 because they have been working on dark theme integration. Hopefully this will create a much more usable dark theme environment. Maybe I'll be lucky and a new version of evolution-rss will be released for the new evolution and I won't have to fiddle with this ebuild any more. If I do get it to work before a new version is released I will be sure to share it here.

Buffer Overflow in Gnome-Panel?

2008-09-08T13:13:00.002-04:00

I upgraded to Gnome 2.22 recently as it has gone stable in Gentoo's portage. One issue I encountered was that the panel would crash whenever I clicked on the clock applet. Investigating futher I checked my logs and found that it was crashing due to SSP. I never had this problem with previous versions of Gnome Panel. Anyhow I disabled SSP and it works fine now but I worry that a bug has been introduced into the latest stable release of the panel.

Google Chrome

2008-09-04T15:36:00.003-04:00

Of course just as I post about Web 2.0 browsers Google releases their own take on a Web 2.0 capable browser, Chrome, based on the Webkit rendering engine but with a whole new JS engine called V8. Too bad It isn't available for Linux. I would love to test its apparent speed. From reports posted online it is about twice as fast as the current Gecko JS engine. I wonder how well it performs vs Squirrelfish and how well it will perfrom vs Tracemonkey.

This announcement only confirms my belief that Webkit and Gecko will be the future of Web 2.0. With Chrome Webkit will be firmly entrenched in the Web 2.0 discussion if it fairs as well as most Google technologies. Gecko will also continue to be a part of the discussion because of their Tracemonkey JS engine and because Firefox extensions and technologies like Mozilla Prism have the ability to replicate and build on what Chrome achieves.

Web 2.0 Browser shootout

2008-08-31T15:14:00.026-04:00

When I hear "Web 2.0" I think about the next generation of interactive, networked interfaces. Some of these new interfaces will not be attached to a browser at all but many will remain browser-centric, or will at least will be rendered using W3C standards. There are a lot of technologies like Flash and Silverlight that are helping to drive Web 2.0 forward but ultimately the oldest form of client side automation, javascript, is and will continue to be the preferred solution because of its entrenched usage and frameworks like AJAX and JSON. Adding to this is the recent javascript improvements from the Webkit team and the Gecko team. Soon we will be processing javascript at near native code speed.

As you can see from my previous javascript benchmarks the current leader is Gecko when it comes to performance of a stable release rendering engine. Webkit does very well in the SVN version and will be an excellent javascript performer when the current Squirrelfish implementation is stabilized. From the benchmarks released for tracemonkey we will see even greater improvement in javascript when xulrunner 1.9.1 is released. That is estimated to be about 3 months out at this point. Currently 64 bit is not supported as I figured out in an attempt to test tracemonkey performance. Opera seems a long way from Gecko and Webkit when it comes to javascript performance but the browser itself is featureful and Opera produces an excellent mobile browser which will only become increasingly important in years to come.

The next important piece to the Web 2.0 puzzle is standards compliance. This has become increasinly important as more browsers have shown up on the average users' radar. Mac users have Safari (Webkit), Opera and Firefox (Gecko), Linux users have Gecko browsers, KHTML from which Webkit is derived, and Opera, Windows users have Opera, Safari, IE, and Firefox. As you can see only IE is not cross-platfrom. The Unix version of IE died a long time ago and the Mac version more recently but there is no recent version of IE that is supported on another OS other than a Microsoft one. On mobile devices a variety a browsers are offered. Opera is offered on many different platforms. Gecko and Webkit, being open source can be ported to many different platforms and have already been ported to some. IE stands alone again as a MS only product. For this reason I think that IE has a limited future in Web 2.0. Not everything runs a MS OS and this isn't going to change in the future in fact I think this fact is only going to become more pronounced as mobile devices become more popular.

The infamous Acid tests test W3C CSS compliance. The current test is Acid3. It tests CSS3 compliance. Browsers are on their way to achieving Acid3 conformance and in fact a previous SVN build of Webkit passed the Acid3 test but current versions do not. Here is how the current Webkit scores:

Unfortunately at this point Midori (using Webkit) crashes in addition to failing Acid3. The current unstable Xulrunner (Gecko) doesn't crash and make it farther in the test but the visual results aren't quite as good:

The unstable version of Xulrunner produces better results while still not passing:

Opera does okay but still isn't there yet either:

Testing IE with Acid3 shows similary half baked solutions but I don't have the results to show because I don't have Windows on this computer. It makes it to 71 with all gray boxes before it quits, much like the current Gecko engine. Regardless I think IE is going to have very little to do with the Web 2.0 revolution compared to other browsers simply because it is not cross platform.

Taking into consideration both javascript performance and acid3 compliance only Webkit and Gecko seems ready to take on Web 2.0 full force. They both have excellent javascript speed and are getting to acid3 compliance quicker than other browsers. Opera is a good browser but I think they might be better served working on Webkit and integrating it with their web browser than continuing their own engine. This would save resources to work on other aspects of the browser while retaining an excellent browsing experience. Gecko has made huge strides and continues to do so. In the future I think we will be talking about Webkit vs Gecko as opposed to IE vs Netscape like we did over ten years ago. Ultimately both engines are going to drive Web 2.0 development much more so than the alternatives.

Opera Javascript Comparison

2008-08-30T16:27:00.006-04:00

Since I've been posting about javascript performance lately I thougt I would compare Opera v.9.52 JS performance to the current release of Xulrunner running under Epiphany 2.22. The results are mixed. Celtic Kane's javascript speed test shows results that best Gecko but not Webkit.

In comparison I was only able to achieve a score of 255 (lower is better) for the current Xulrunner. This looks good for Opera. Let's take a look at the sunspider benchmark now. Xulrunner is show in the FROM column while Opera is shown in the TO column.

As you can see Opera's javascript perfomance is significantly slower than Xulrunner's performance. I am a bit confused by the results considering Opera did pretty well in Celtic Kane's test and I have heard that Opera's JS performance is very good. My sunspider results were so out of whack from what I was expecting that I ran them again but the results were the same. I wonder if anyone else can confirm my findings.

Tracemonkey javascript performance

2008-08-27T17:35:00.010-04:00

I thought that my comparison of the latest Webkit vs stable Gecko wasn't fair so I decided today to create an ebuild to fetch the latest xulrunner so I could test Tracemonkey. I had to tweak the ebuild a little (other than fetching with mercurial) because xulrunner would not compile with lcms enabled. I created another USE flag that toggles lcms. With this and some modification to the patch tarball I was able to build the latest xulrunner.

Here is my ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/xulrunner/xulrunner-9999.ebuild

This ebuild requires the xulrunner.conf from the original ebuild files.

Next I launched Epiphany and typed "about:config". I searched for "jit" and then toggled "javascript.options.jit.content" to true and restarted my browser. Then I proceeded to run Celtic Kane's javascript speed test and the Sunspider Benchmark. Celtic Kane's test didn't show much of an improvement over the old javascript engine and didn't come close to Squirrelfish's performance. The result was a paltry 23ms decrease in time.

Maybe the Sunspider Benchmark would be different. Here is the comparison of the old Gecko JS engine and Tracemonkey. The old engine is under the FROM title and Tracemonkey is under TO.

We see some significant improvements over the old engine but we see some regression too. The overall picture shows us a slight improvement. Next let's compare Webkit's results to Tracemonkey. Here we have Webkit in the TO column and Tracemonky in the FROM column. Get ready for an all out browser war!

Yikes! That's disappointing. For all the noise we've heard about Tracemonkey these were not the results I was expecting. Squirrelfish is still eating it for lunch. I guess it's a good sign that Mozilla's numbers are improving but I have yet to see the performance they claim. There could be many reasons for this and I'm sure things will only improve but as it stands now I cannot achieve the kind of numbers I've seen put up on the web about Tracemonkey.

UPDATE: Apparently JIT cannot yet be enabled in 64-bit browsers so that is why perfromance is so close between the new Tracemonkey JS engine and the old one. When that changes I'll post a real performance comparison.

Webkit vs Gecko Javascript performance

2008-08-26T15:40:00.013-04:00

If you haven't noticed I have a fascination with bleeding edge software. One of the pieces of software I have been following since its inception is the GTK port of Webkit. It is an excellent browser engine that is just as capable if not more so than other major competing engines. One of Webkit's strong points is javascript performance. The Squirrelfish javascript engine that was introduced a few months ago offers incredible performance.

To prove my point I tested the latest Webkit from subversion againt Xulrunner-1.9 using two different javascript tests. The first test is I used was Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test. I ran the test a couple dozen times on each browser. The Webkit based Midori browser scored an 89ms (lower is better) for its best case while the best I was able to acheive with Epiphany on Xulrunner was 255ms which makes it over 2.5 times slower. In fact Midori's worst time wasn't even close to Epiphany's best time. I took screenshots of the two best times I achieved. On the left are the results for Webkit/Midori while on the right are results for Gecko/Epiphany.

The second test I ran was Webkit's own Sunspider Javascript test. It is a much more complete javascript test and takes several minutes to complete. Again Webkit outshines Gecko in the Sunspider tests but the results are much closer. Webkit's javascript engine, Squirrelfish averages about 1.5 times faster than Gecko's engine. Webkit results are shown in the FROM column while Gecko results are in the TO column.

It seems this is all about to change. Firefox 3.1 is supposed to include a new and improved javascript engine called Tracemonkey that outshines Squirrelfish. It is not yet complete so it is hard to tell how much better it is actually going to be but preliminary tests show some amazing results. When I get a chance to test it I'll post another comparison.

With all the improvements going into both the Gecko engine and the Webkit engine it should make web browsing on either platfrom a much better experience. I do have to give the Mozilla foundation credit for Gecko. I was starting to prefer a Webkit based GNOME environment over embedded Gecko but Xulrunner-1.9/Firefox-3 was a very good release and the next release is only going to be better. Things are really heating up now in the browser wars again.

Updated sK1 gnome patch

2008-08-25T17:42:00.004-04:00

It seems that the latest revision of sK1 has a new configurator.py that breaks my old gnome patch. I've updated the patch to work with the latest revision. Hopefully this won't end up being an arms race type of affair where configurator.py is constantly changing. Just rename to gnome-sK1.patch and copy in place of the old patch and remember to edit the fonts and font sizes in the patch if you want to match your gnome theme better.

Updated Midori ebuild

2008-08-25T13:57:00.005-04:00

Midori is now using a new build system so if you attempt to emerge it like before it will not work. There is an updated ebuild available on bugzilla. Unfortunately I have yet to get it to work. It builds fine with the new ebuild but the program will not start. I am using it in conjunction with my webkit-gtk svn ebuild. If I find the solution to the problem I will post an update.

UPDATE: It's working now. I built it with a vanilla compiler instead of my default hardened compiler and it is running now. I test Acid3 on Midori everytime I rebuild it. It gets to 77 before it crashes. This is better than the 69 I was getting before. At one time I was able to acheive 100 percent compliance but that hasn't happened in months. My biggest gripe/bug continues to be the font settings. It seems that Midori will not respect my font settings until I adjust them. I have to change the font size and then change it back again every time I start Midori.

Journey to the 4th dimension

2008-08-25T13:19:00.003-04:00

There is an incredible series of videos called Dimensions available online that explore the 4th dimension using mathematics. The first half of the series is extremely accessible and allows even a mathematically inept person to understand the shape of 4 dimensional space. The second half of the series delves into complex numbers and spheres where the material is a little more complex but overall the creators of this series have simplified the concepts using excellent visual tools. Personally I think learning complex mathematical concepts has been made infinitely easier by the Dimensions series and I cannot wait for the next series.

CSS: transparency with opaque text

2008-08-22T19:22:00.014-04:00

CSS opacity is a relatively new feature that has become a part of CSS3. Currently Webkit, Gecko, and Opera support standard CSS opacity while IE7 supports opacity with a nonstandard CSS filter. The opacity tag is used like this:

#transblock {
opacity: .5;
}

This will give the div with the ID of transblock a transparency of 50%. You can do the same thing in IE7 with a filter. It looks like this:

#transblock {
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
}

Ideally you should use both attributes to get the same opacity in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE7. This does not work in old browsers, including IE6. Older versions of Firefox (<0.9)

#transblock {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 200px;
width: 200px;
z-index: 0;
opacity: .5;
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
}

#block {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 200px;
width: 200px;
z-index: 1;
}

Obviously you can add any other attributes you wish to the div. This becomes more difficult when you have a div with variable height because you need to repeat the div contents within both the transparent div and the opaque div. I find it is easiest if you limit what attributes you assign to the ID of the div and instead create a class with the shared attributes. So if you want a div with a background of 50% white transparency and a foreground of black bold opaque text it will look like this:

#transblock {
z-index: 0;
opacity .5:
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
background-color: white;
}

#block {
z-index: 1;
}

.block {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px
color: black;
text-decoration: bold;
}

Then when you declare these in XHTML you can use:

and

This way you only have to edit the class to change your layout without having to edit two different IDs. You should notice two things. First that this requires absolute positioning and z-index values to place the opaque text over the tranparent background. Second, I am using the same name for an ID that I use for a class. Normally I would say that this can be confusing but in this situation I think it is actually easier to understand and manipulate the code.

The use of a sperate class is only really needed if you have variable height because otherwise you do not need to repeat the code. The separate class makes sure that the attributes between the transparent div and the opaque div are always the same which ensures the size of the div is maintained whenever attributes or contents are changed within the div. The only time you would actually have to edit the IDs is if you wanted to change the opacity level or the color of the background.

One other thing to note is that IE7's opacity filter only works on elements with a specified height and/or width.

Rhinebeck bi-planes

2008-08-22T09:18:00.011-04:00

I posted a picture of the Nieuport 24 that crashed at Rhinebeck a few days ago. Today I will post a few others that I took that day. I regret that my picture of the famous Fokker Dr I triplane, known for it's association with the "Red Baron", did not come out so well so I did not post it. To be honest the Nieuport 24 picture came out the best in my opinion. I was in a hurry with my point and shoot so the pictures aren't great but they are the best ones I took that day.

This first bi-plane is known as the Albatros. It was a very successful German fighter eary in the war and was the type flown by the "Red Baron" before he flew the Fokker Dr I.

The "Jenny" as it was known was used to train American pilots during the war and became popular with barnstormers when the war was over and they were sold as surplus.

The Fokker DVII was a superior aircraft at the time and led to the second "Fokker Scourge".

A popular hobbyist bi-plane from the 1930's called the Great Lakes T2-1R. In the distance you can see a New Standard D-25 (left) and a Piper Cub (right).

Flash 10 update

2008-08-21T12:41:00.005-04:00

Four days ago I installed Flash 10 on my laptop. I was hoping it would solve some of the issues I was having with Flash. Unfortunately I haven't seen many differences at all. I'm not sure if my problems are related to Flash itself or nspluginwrapper but Flash still crashes or hangs my browser occasionally and some Flash videos still don't work, they just display a gray box where the video should be. The good news is that Flash hasn't crashed X yet which started happening on my laptop recently with Flash 9. Also I haven't had any regressions yet so that's good news. I would recommend checking it yourself. I would love to know how well it is working on 32-bit machines.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I visited some other flash sites that normally worked with Flash 9 and they were not working correctly. I reverted to Flash 9 for the time being and things are back to "normal".