All entries for June 2006

Twice the fun!!!

I was sat using my laptop, and juggling applications as I like to 'massively multitask', then I suddenly realised. I had another monitor sat in the same room, and my laptop was capable of 'DualView'. I plugged him in and voila, twice the screen real estate. It makes so much difference, as I'm regularly using two applications at once, photoshop/dreamweaver, dreamweaver/FireFox, FireFox/FireFox. I think I may even have to invest in a cheap TFT screen for when I go back to uni. Having two screens saves so much time, and is so natural.
Screen shot:

Other notes:

• Yes, viral for MathSoc.
• Photoshop and Dreamweaver are just the best, yes they cost a fortune, but they're so worth it. Photoshop allows me to get my ideas direct from my head onto screen, and everyday I find a little more of its power. Dreamweaver has become little more than a text editor for me, but its feature set is second to none, other programs seem to have lots of gradients on their menus etc. But with Dreamweaver, if it doesn't do something you want it to, you just write some javascript to change how the program works, its genius!
• I'd prefer it if the start bar split across screens, that'd be far more intuitive.

: 29 Jun 2006 22:18 |  Tags: Computery Stuff |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

USB teddy bear holds data, scares children

Writing about web page http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/18/usb-teddy-bear-holds-data-scares-children/

Genius, sheer genius:

Title shamelessly stolen from engadget.

: 21 Jun 2006 22:25 |  Tags: Bear Computery Stuff Funny Teddy Usb |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Holly Hack

Writing about web page http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=2&cid=C37E0

Tonight I’m getting my blog back to its roots.

First up, some background. I’m currently developing a website for a society that I belong to, and I’m being a very good boy and using semantic code, css and no tables (unless I have tabular data). I’d like to share with you the ‘Holly Hack’ for it is pure genius, and solved a problem I thought was intractable. You see its been a long while since I developed for the web properly, i.e. producing production code. In the mean time tables have become shunned in favour of divs, spans and tons of css. I’ve got myself past the ‘i know how to do it in tables, so how can i emulate that behaviour?’ stage and moved to a halfway house of ‘I’ve done it without tables, but it doesn’t quite work right, I wish I could use tables.’
The problem is, is that although css is amazing and very powerful it is rather dependent of the browser rendering the markup properly. Firefox is a joy, and things do what you want, but Internet Explorer, well shame on you.
One particular problem was that a container of floating elements without a specified width would not render the correct size, i.e. enough to contain them and no more. The solution to this problem came in the form of the ‘Holly Hack’ which was amusing to me because my housemates name is Holly. In any case the ‘Holly Hack’ is:

/* Hides from IE5-mac \ */
* html .somediv {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */

It does a number of things, 1. only IE understands the CSS selector ’* html’, well in fact it has a rather strange implementation where html is not a ‘top level’ tag!
2. The height of the div is set to be too small for the content, but IE expands the container for us, and rather happily to the correct size!

It curious that the bugs in IE often ‘balance out’.

[Edit: the missing ‘slash’ has been inserted!]

: 06 Jun 2006 23:40 |  Tags: Computery Stuff CSS Web Design |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem