Blog Standard Stuff

In the immortal words of Rolf Harris, "Can you guess what it is yet?"

… and then you’ll start to see some real content appearing on the Typepad holiday blog

Tim Roberts has the coolest set of pictures of the doggy carwash thing he uses (or rather George the ex-stray uses) in Malaga Spain:

It’s got to be a lot tidier than doing this:

Book Recommendation Please …

I’m after a small Apache reference book that can be used for quick reference while learning the ropes of Apache. O’reilly pocket book perhaps? I would appreciate your recommendations!

From a story in the Register about a Sunnyvale, California programmer who went off the rails at a company that kept spamming him with offers of penis enlargements:

Of course, Mackay denied any responsibility for the spam tsunami, claiming that a rival firm had dispatched the "unsolicited bulk e-mail". Mackay said such firms "give a bad name to the penis enhancement business".

Indeed, there’s nothing worse than distreputable penis enhancement outfits besmirching the good name of the penis enhancement business by bombarding already-satisfied males with unwanted offers of donkeydom.

When we hit the road on our travels, we’re not going to be able to access email as often as we otherwise might. Personally, I’m gonna miss not being able to watch Strongbad access his emails quite so frequently. Today I checked in and caught up with a whole bunch that I’d missed, including this classic, ‘Children’s Book‘. Strongbad, you da man.

A colleague of mine at Nationwide, Chris Whitlock, appears to have stumbled across a very useful CSS hack - one that is only interpreted by IE4. In addition, there is not any obvious limit to the styles that you can apply in this class (none of this ‘one line and then the CSS parser recovers nonsense’). Try it out, as I have, and let me know what you find.

For info, I have tested on PC, Win2000 running IE3,4,5,5.5 and 6; Netscape 4.7,6.1,6.2,7.1; Mozilla 1.4,1.5;Firebird 0.7, Opera 6,7.

The hack also works correctly on OS X/Safari 1.1, but have not yet tested on other Mac browsers.

<style>
.testclass{
 color : red;
 font-size:30px;
}
useie4bug-.testclass{
 /* this stuff only gets seen by IE4 */
 color : green;
 font-size:100px;
 font-style:italic;
 border-bottom:3px solid green;
}

</style>

...

<h1 class="testclass">Hello! I am Red!</h1>

Enjoy …

Update: It appears that the dash in the example above is a misnomer. In fact, as long as the element that the class is applied to in the CSS file is not a valid tag, it appears to work, so TBL.testclass would cause IE4 to apply the style to any element with a class of ‘testclass’.

Matt has added a favicon to his site … and I’m beginning to wonder whether he and Ethan were separated at birth?

Ahh, with just one month before I head off around the world, and just over four months since buying the 12" Powerbook, it’s developed battery problems. Or rather it’s reporting battery problems that are not there (and I haven’t just installed an OS update, strangely - I’ve been running 10.2.8 for about a month now). So here are the symptons - anyone had the same happen to them? Oh, and yes, I’ve logged this one with Apple but am giving it a couple of days to see if it rights itself beore sending off for repair.

• The battery indicator in OS X menulet shows full charge (it reads ‘Battery Charged’ when plugged in, or 100% when the mains lead is pulled out
• Battery test (pressing the hard button on the unit) shows 5 green ‘landing lights’
• The main unit plug (that fits in to the Powerbook) is lit green, not amber, suggesting full charge

So, all appears to be well. Well …

• I unplug the mains power to see if battery power drops noticeably - nothing apparent.
• I then close the lid on the Powerbook, the sleep light fades in and out as it should, and the battery hard button is still showing 5 landing lights
• I leave the Powerbook unattended - perhaps 5 minutes later I notice that the sleep light is not on. Lifting the lid doesn’t start up OS X - it’s shut down, apparently out of power.
  The only way to get it started is to plug the mains back in and hit the power button and OS X boots up afresh
• Wait a minute - what’s this? The date and time has reset to 1 Jan 1970)
  
• Oddly, the battery indicator menulet immediately shows battery is charged (this is backed up by pressing the hard button which shows 5 landing lights, and also by the green light on the mains plug

So, to summarise:

• One minute it’s fully charged
• The next minute it’s as if it’s completely drained and has forced shutdown
• Then it’s fully charged?

This happened three times … and then this happened …

• I plugged in the mains again, and after OS X fired up, the battery showed almost no charge (rather than the 100% it was reporting before!)
• The battery indicator ‘landing lights’ - only the first light was on, flashing.
• The mains plug showed as amber, not green
• Date and time reset to Jan 1970 again …
• Battery shows that it will take
  a loooong time to charge
  

The strange thing is that the battery does appear to be working OK - If I unplug what appears to be a fully charged battery, using the ‘Presentations’ setting in Energy Saver the laptop sits there for a good couple of hours without the mains connected. The battery is good, but the power management appears to have gone up the swannie. The most worrying aspect is the way that the date and time is reset - I mean, the really shouldn’t happen, should it?

Here’s hoping that I can get it fixed within the next 3.3 calendar weeks!

Imph youm arr hamphing tchubble umberstandg me, itf because I just hab my isdom teemph out and am biting ohn a bloodt swab

Ain’t wisdom teeth a pain in the arse? I mean mouth? Just waiting for the effects of the anaesthetic to wear out and the effects of the over enthusiastic plier action to kick in.