We're baaack

It took us about 13 hours, but we're back from Destin, Florida.

Not a lot to write about, except to say that Turtle and I had a nice time relaxing and spending time with her mom and dad.

There are a few more pictures on Flickr.

Where on earth are Foo and Turtle?

Despite the post title, my grand plan was less to make a real contest of it than to provide a place to drop some vacation photos. Unfortunately, after the first couple, the weather turned and there haven't been many photo ops.

It's been raining here, and when it's not raining it's so humid that when we went out for a while yesterday, all the store windows were steamed up. Last night (10/22), the waves were quite large - by my landlubber standards, at least - and all the "local" TV stations were issuing tornado watches. On the up side, the locals have really been needing the rain that we (apparently) brought with us from Texas.

Here's a quick shot out the door from this morning. I'm hoping I'll get to take some more interesting pictures before we leave this weekend.

Don't start with me

Over the years, I've installed a lot of Windows applications on my computers, and I find it irritating when a new addition has the arrogance to set itself up to start every time I boot up my computer. Often, the solution is as simple as setting a configuration option, but sometimes the application doesn't provide the option to turn off auto loading.

This morning, when I installed an application that allows me to synchronize my Palm handheld with my Yahoo! calendar, I quickly discovered that it was one of the rude variety that insists on starting up, whether I need it or not. That's when I paid a visit to Annoyances.org, a handy site where you can find lots of tips about how to deal with all sorts of obscure little Windows... well, annoyances.

In this case, I learned that the solution to my auto-run problem went like this:

1. Open Start -> Run and type in "msconfig". Press enter.
2. When msconfig starts, select the "Startup" tab and find the offending program in the list.
3. Uncheck the box next to the program you want to stop auto-loading.
4. Click "Apply" and then "OK".
5. When you reboot, you'll receive a message telling you that you've changed your configuration and do you want to run msconfig and see this message every time you reboot? Check the box that says not to show the message again, and... voila!

Link

Missing

I strolled in to my cube this morning with plans to dive back into Beginning XML 1^st ed., which I'd been studying when I left. Weighing in at over five pounds (by my estimation), about 2½" thick, and with a cover printed in the WROX standard red and gold, it's hard to miss. Yet missing it was. In that spot next to the pile of ASP.NET and C# books, there was no nerdily-grinning photo of the book's author—only bare desktop.

I promptly fired off an e-mail carpet bomb, requesting that whichever of my developer colleagues had "borrowed" the book in my absence should please promptly return it (or state their ransom demands). They promptly fired back notes disavowing any knowledge of my book.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions: either one of the cleaning staff has higher aspirations than emptying my waste can, or He is trying to tell me that my seven-year-old 1st edition isn't going to cut it, and I should order Beginning XML, 4^th ed. (and expense it).

Update: The XML book never did turn up. I need it to prepare for my new job responsibilities, so I went ahead and ordered a new, 4^th edition copy of the same title from Amazon, yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from the receptionist informing me that I had received a package that was too big for my mail slot. I thought, No frickin' way. But sure enough, it was the book I'd ordered earlier in the day. Now, I did spring for 2-day shipping, and the book did ship from just the other side of the Metromess, but... holy cow, that's fast. It usually takes at least a day just to process an order.

Weekend update

This past week, my employer sent me, along with two of my colleagues, to a five-day ASP.NET training course. Two days of C# with one instructor followed by three more days of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET GUI training. The C# side didn't really cover much that I hadn't already picked up from books and web tutorials, and the instructor had a tendency to wander into personal anecdotes unrelated to the material. But the ASP.NET section was awesome. The instructor was very knowledgeable in the material, but perhaps more important, she did and excellent job of keeping us engaged and focused. There were cow jokes involved.

I find training classes like this exhausting but worthwhile. Sitting in class, trying to cram everything into my brain is tough enough, but the training facility was clear on the opposite side of the metroplex, and the classes ran 9am-5pm. In other words, I had three hours of rush hour beep-and-creep driving--for the first couple days, at least. After that, I decided I'd rather get up and do my morning drive at my usual time, in lighter traffic. In my mind, it's much better to spend 40 minutes driving and kill the slack 2+ hours 'til class time reading a Dan Brown book than to spend 1½ hours clawing my way through traffic and arriving in a Really Bad Mood. The return trips still stank, but I did manage to find a route that cut the drive time down to about an hour.

But I digress. It was a good class, and I learned a lot of good stuff--not the least of which, that I need to learn to "let it go" and accept the fact that using Visual Studio to create ASP.NET 2.0 web applications means that I don't have to code everything myself, from the ground up. Weird... but cool.

There's a dark side to increased productivity, as illustrated by this morning's Dilbert, which Turtle just brought to my attention.

Next...

Back to work, tomorrow. I haven't heard anything from my new supervisor, this past week, so I'm assuming that I'm not to report to the new office yet. I'll be back at the old place, where I'm scheduled to sit in on a "webinar" and learn how substantial the benefits plan cuts will be.

I'm trying to impress Turtle with my efforts to embrace change, but I'm feeling a bit like a cork being tossed around in the ocean.

Veteran Removes Illegal Mexican Flag

In Reno, Nevada, a local Veteran may be brought up on charges after cutting down a Mexican flag being flown illegally above the U.S. flag. A local television station had received numerous complaints from residents and went to investigate. When their reporter arrived, the Veteran took the opportunity to make a public statement. He quickly lowered the flags and used his army-issue knife to cut them down, taking possession of the U.S. flag and leaving the Mexican flag where it fell.

The man commented "I'm Jim Brossert and I took this flag down in honor of my country with a knife from the United States army. I'm a veteran, I am not going to see this done to my country. if they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us, but I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back."

Link (Infowars.net)

According to the Infowars article, similar events have been reported in Maywood, CA., Tucson, Arizona, and Jupiter, Florida.

Earlier this year, there was a flap when it was discovered that someone had climbed the broadcast tower of a local conservative talk radio station and planted a Mexican flag there. It took a couple days to get someone to climb up and take it down, during which time the radio station faced fines for the infraction.

Call me reactionary, but I can't help feeling a bit like we're under siege and just too polite to do much about it. Except for Jim Brossert, I mean.

A tip of the hat to Cowtown Patty.

Boo Boo Kitty

Fuzzy Dependant #1 has lately decided that ear scratches and drive-by belly rubs aren't enough. He's discovered Daddy's Lap and is not shy about demanding his rightful place there, sometimes at the expense of whatever I happen to be typing on my laptop keyboard at the time.

Turtle recently captured this moment of pure bliss.

Incognito

I think we've established by now that my inner child is far too suppressed for me to get too excited about Hallowe'en any more, but some of these costumes are just hilarious. My favorites are the Parade Rock 'n' Roller and the Man-eating Shark.

If you buy one of these, I want to see pictures.

Oopsie.

So... I'm sitting here in my cube, with my XML/XSLT/XPath book in front of me, and I just finished rendering one of the exercises. What used to be a fairly innocuous bit of XML has transformed into a giant robot that's now duck walking between the rows of cubicles, trying not to step on the hotline people.

Could I have mis-coded something in my style sheet?

Paradigm shift

Ever since the company I work for was purchased earlier this year, the word has been that development on the project I've worked on for the past 10 years would be ending and that our team would be redistributed among several other groups. During my tenure, my primary responsibility had been to find ways to make the application run on the mainframe—a role that had long kept me on the periphery of things and under the radar of the people who hand out cool new things to work on.

Ironically, the fact that I wasn't well versed in some of the more esoteric inner workings of the code worked in my favor when we received our new assignments.

Because much of what I did wasn't very interesting and involved lots of time waiting for programs to compile and link, I entertained myself by learning what I could about HTML, CSS, and various other web technologies that I could get my hands on without having to request software licenses from MIS. All those years I'd spent tinkering, I thought I'd never have any professional use for the things I was learning, but it turns out that my side efforts positioned me well to be assigned to a team that's doing ASP.NET and C# development. And, because I wasn't one of the experts for the old project's core architecture, I was easily released from maintenance responsibilities.

That all sounded very promising, but I've been hearing for years how I was going on to bigger and better things. Nothing had ever changed, so I had my doubts that it would be any different this time—until this past Friday, at least. That's when it all came together. Decisions were made. Schedules were set and briefings held. Training classes were scheduled.

All the tinkering and reading I've done over the years, on my own time, is going to come into play now. My new responsibilities will involve large, steaming helpings of XML, XSLT, XPath, DOM, JavaScript, CSS, etc. and my familiarity with those technologies will make it a whole lot easier to get my head around the new stuff and more quickly make a contribution. I get to work with technology that's not 30 years old, and I'm kind of stoked about it!

CSS: IE7 float / italic / background positioning bug

I recently stumbled on a peculiar (but not unexpected) Internet Explorer 7 bug that has caused me hours of head scratching. To the best of my knowledge and Googling, this specific behavior hasn't been documented on any of the usual guru sites, such as Position Is Everything, so I'll attempt to document it here.

Overview

For purposes of this discussion, I've pared my page structure down to the most basic structure required to produced the undesirable behavior. Here you see a body element, which contains a centered div with the id content.

<body>
<div id="wrap">
 <div id="content">
   <div id="timestamp">Updated 09.25.2007!</div>
   <div id="copyright">Copyright © 2007</div>
 </div>
</div>
</body>

My CSS code sets a static width of 500px for this block, gives it a white background, and centers it horizontally in body. The body has a 1008px x 3px background image that repeats on the y-axis and is centered horizontally. The content div's left and right edges align with the left and right edges of the background's gold "box".

Within the content block, I define two more divs: timestamp and copyright. I want timestamp to appear in italics and line up to the right, so I apply font-style:italic and float:right to it. The complete CSS looks like this:

body {
 background: #000 url("bg-test.gif") repeat-y center top;
 font:normal normal x-small "Trebuchet MS",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
 margin:0; padding:0;
 /* IE hacks follow */
 text-align:center;
 font-size/* */:/**/small;
 font-size/**/:small;
}
#wrap {
 width:500px;
 margin:1em auto;
 background-color:#fff;
 text-align:left;
}
#content {
 margin:0;
}
#copyright {
 background-color:skyblue;
}
#timestamp {
 background-color:pink;
 font-style:italic;
 float:right;
}

In most browsers (yes, even IE 6), this renders like the following screenshot:


In IE 7, the content div remains centered, but body's background image position has shifted toward the right.

The Cause

So what's happening here? After a bit of tinkering, I discovered that the layout broke only so long as I floated the timestamp div. Unfortunately, none of the usual tricks for correcting IE's float bugs had any effect.

Eventually, I removed the italic style from the timestamp text, in an attempt to reduce the code to the bare minimum required to reproduce the problem. Which went away. I put italics back, and it returned. This reminded me of an article I'd seen on PIE, which described a bug in the way that IE handles widths for italicized text. It didn't seem to directly address the background image problem, but it led me to experiment with setting an explicit width for the floated timestamp div.

The Fix

I set width:10em, which is large enough to accomodate the timestamp text and, because it's in em-units, will expand if the viewer increases the browser's default text size. Then, to make the date text align as far to the right as possible, I set text-align:right.

Bingo. Problem solved circumvented.

Update: I submitted this write-up to “Big John” of PIE fame only to discover after several rounds of head scratching e-mails that this bug doesn't seem to occur in all IE 7 installations (including Big John's). I get it on my personal laptop and my desktop box at work, but my work laptop and some co-workers' workstations don't exhibit the behavior. All IE 7 version numbers tested are the same, so it may be related to something in the maintenance levels of Windows XP itself or in the metrics of the fonts installed on a given computer. Very weird.

To see if your IE 7 installation exhibits the bug, try the demo here. For the record, the IE 7 Windows factory at browsershots.org exhibits the centering bug.

How did I get here?

This month's search terms:

• sparks are going to fly cause i'm turned on again (see "friction burns")
• "dilated eyes" eye drops Which reminds me that I still haven't made my opthalmologist appointment.
• jessica alba shoulder ride Blasted thought police...
• buy.pickle.juice Not. While. I. Can. Get. It. For. Free.
• i'm singing a song rolling along "Locomotive Breath", occasionally.
• "rear steering bike" I've read the discussions, but I still think this sounds like a Bad Idea.
• zoom foo Yes, but probably not for another week or two.
• a word for people addicted to riding mountain bikes "Mosquito bait". No, wait. That's two words.
• badonkadonk site:blogspot.com Sounds intriguing.
• ladiesladies "flush them" Dial back the mysogyny, dude. You just need to find the right one. And you might try bathing.
• nabumetone dogs I think I get it: an anti-inflammatory punk rock band. Revolutionary (or not).
  

Now playing: OK Go, Oh No

How the Web works

I was Googling to find a web page cross reference of CSS color codes to named colors, which I found at the Color Schemer blog. I stayed around to browse the blog postings and found this posting with a photo of a Mazda 3 hatchback with a clever license plate (Dorian's would probably be "A0A0A0", for those geeks playing along at home).

I followed the photo link to Flickr, where I learned from visitors' comments that the car lives (or works) right next door to my old office, in Dallas. Considering that most Mazda 3 hatches seem to be gray, silver, blue, or white, I figured there was a pretty decent chance that this was the same red Mazda I've seen a couple times over the past few months. One of the commenters seemed to be the car's owner, T. Scott Stromberg, and curiosity compelled me to follow his posted link to his web site.

I don't have the sort of eye for art that some of you have, and Stromberg's style doesn't really speak to me; but the guy definitely has talent. I could easily see his art hanging in some jazz joint or Mexican restaurant. And, if I were working on a festive web design, I might well be inspired to borrow from his palette of colors.

Which would lead me back here, which, if memory serves, is how the world wide web worked before we had all these cool search engines to take us right to where we need to go.

Hand me my pith helmet, Livingston...

...I'm on Safari.

Ever since I became interested in developing standards-compliant web content, using semantic mark-up and CSS, I've tried to keep a representative sampling of browsers and different versions of those browsers on the various computers to which I have access. All well and good, as long as we're only talking about Windows boxes; but what about the bunch of you Apple devotees?

When Emma first posted about browsershots.org, I rejoiced. Finally, I'd be able to see my pages as they rendered on Safari and other non-Windows browsers. The catch is that lots of web developers (and wanna-bes) rejoiced, as well, the result being that there's usually a long queue of other sites waiting for their screenshots.

This morning, I learned that Apple has made available a public beta of its Safari 3 browser for Windows XP and Vista and, although I wouldn't quite say I rejoiced, I did promptly download and install the thing to add to my collection.  It probably does not render XHTML/CSS in precisely the same way as earlier Mac-only versions do, and so doesn't replace browsershots.org in utility, but how can I pass up another weapon in my standards compliance arsenal? 

No accounting for taste

In previous postings, I've mentioned that I've become the caretaker of various family treasures, sometimes under mild protest. At an early age, I had it drilled into me that "It's impolite to beg" and, as a result, I've always been reticent about accepting my aging relatives' possessions. At least, that's part of it. Another reason is that I feel that I'm somehow hastening their departure from this world by allowing them to give away their stuff. I know: illogical.

None of which explains the wotsit at right.

During the same visit when my granduncle Carl sent home another of his clocks, we were hanging out in the cellar. It was all pretty much as I remembered it from my childhood. Same slightly musty smell. Same cinderblock walls. Maybe a little smaller than I remembered.

"I've got to start getting rid of some of this old junk," he said. "I'm not going to be around much longer."

At nearly 90 years old, he might have had a point, but I don't even like to think about his passing. In some ways, I'm closer to Carl and my aunt Mary than I was to my grandparents, the last of whom passed in 2000. Still, I know that with no children of their own, they've been sticking name tags on their various treasures for years, so that they could ensure that they found their way to the people they felt would appreciate them most.

"It's just a bunch of junk," Carl repeated. "But if there's any of this you want, I wish you'd take it."

Okay. There was one thing. For as long as I could remember, there had always been this weird cast iron bottle opener mounted on the wall. Kind of a scary thing, to a small kid, with its four wild eyes and bucked teeth, but it had made an impression. I'd always associate the memory of it with that basement, and I told Carl as much. He didn't know what I meant, at first. It had been there since sometime before I was born, and it had long since faded into invisibility for him.

When I pointed it out, he promptly grabbed a screwdriver from the battered toolbox he'd used when he worked as a machinist. Still shaking his head in amazement that I'd pick 'that old thing' as a memento, he placed it in my hand and laughed.

"You'll have to mount that on the wall in your kitchen and think of your old uncle whenever you open a beer," he said. Which is entirely the point.

Except I'm pretty sure I'd never get away with putting it in our kitchen.

But wait. There's more!

I can't remember what I was looking for, but I found a web site the other day that sells reproductions of Carl's bottle opener. And then, because my interest gets piqued by the strangest things, I continued looking. I found an auction site that had a mint condition specimen with its original box. And then, a woman's description of the same bottle opener, which she'd found in the remains of a fire. She's apparently interested in odd things, as well, because she actually took the time to research it.

Attention, entities of the earth

My fledgling attempts to learn HTML and create a web site came 'way back in 1995. My goal was to create a web presence for my family's genealogy research. Since much of that research is riddled with German, I frequently found myself in need of umlauts but never often enough to justify the mental real estate to memorize the HTML entities for the decorated characters.

Enter Leftlogic's HTML Entity Character Lookup tool. Now, instead of Googling all over the web for a long list of HTML entities that may or may not give me what I'm looking for, I can now enter a character that kind of looks like the one I want, and the tool shows me a list of candidates. For you fans of the forbidden fruit, there's even a dashboard widget you can download.

Sweet.

Shadow World

Turtle e-mailed me a movie file this morning, and I enjoyed it so much that I just had to run right out and find it on YouTube so that I could share it with you. The movie was a Raymond Crowe performance of "What A Wonderful World", acted out with shadow puppets.

I encourage you to watch this and be entertained.

Now playing: Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Corelli: 12 Concerti Grossi, Op.6

They came from the oil fields

That's right. This weekend, Turtle and I had the pleasure of meeting and having dinner with Janie and her husband while they were in The Metromess for other events.

I'm always just a little apprehensive when setting up a meeting with someone I know from online but have never met before, in the physical realm. That may sound like a strange admission, coming from a man who first met his wife in an IRC chat channel and regularly attended computer BBS gatherings during the early '90s; but a first real-life meeting with an online acquaintance is like a blind date. Or a box of chocolates. Oh, you can get a certain sense of people from how they write and what they write about, but there's always the chance to find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, with Too Much Information or too little to talk about.

Like that time in 1992 when I drove an hour or so to a BBS potluck. I'd had some good results making new friends when I attended a similar gathering from one of the other BBS systems in the area, and I was feeling adventurous. I arrived to find an unusual mix of nerdy, rough, and just plain unusual characters, but the people seemed nice enough. The conversation over dinner was typical computer nerd stuff, but afterwards, when everyone adjourned to the living room for a marijuana-fueled Traci Lords film festival...

Well, let's just say my capacity for new experience had been exceeded. Call me a coward—or a prude, if you must—but I faked the onset of a migraine and fled.

I'm pleased to say that our dinner with Janie and her husband was nothing like that. The four of us fell easily into a wandering, seamless, laughter-filled conversation that was cut short only when Turtle and I had to leave for an appointment before church. No weirdness, and the only hint of marijuana was the fern-like print of my shirt. It was big fun, and I'm glad we had the chance to meet!

So now I've met Bill and Janie, which makes me 2 for 2 in the Blogger Blind Date "success" column.

Nerds and the fashion void

In case anyone is keeping track, it stopped raining a month or so ago. The wet weather and cooler than normal temperatures have given way to the customary hot, dry weather that we north Texans are used to. When I rolled into the driveway after my evening commute, Dorian's in-dash thermometer read 105 °F.

I've been working some long hours lately. That has put the brakes on my after-work bike riding and makes it tough to find time for routine chores like mowing the lawn. Turtle, being in attuned to such things, was waiting for me when I walked in the house.

"You're not planning to mow the lawn, are you?" she asked. When I didn't immediately respond with the 'no' she was looking for, she continued. "I was talking to Mom, and she says you should take it easy, have a nice cold beer or two, and not die."

"Mmm," I said, noncommittally. I knew that the only beer on the premises was in the garage, where it was about 120°.

But what's that got to do with nerd chic? you're probably wondering.

For as long as I can remember, one of the defining characteristics of nerds has been their complete lack of fashion sense.* Thick glasses, held together with safety pins and Scotch brand tape. Highwater trousers. Sweater vests. Not last year's fashions, nor even those from the year before—five years, ten years ago.

I've always felt it was unfair to assume that nerds can't dress themselves presentably. It's just lower on their list of priorities than hacking the Linux kernel or re-watching the entire Firefly series from start to finish (including Serenity) in one sitting. Why blow perfectly good money on a new pair of eyeglasses when it could be spent on a Visual Studio 2005 upgrade?

It's with that kind of mentality that, the minute Turtle's car was out of sight and on the way to her meeting, I went to my closet and grabbed my old red, sleeveless cycling jersey (the one whose elastic waistband was shot). I dug out an old pair of navy gym shorts (the ones whose drawstring had broken) and my old Halo sweatband, dressed, and headed out to mow the lawn.

Sure, the combination of tight cycling jersey and shorts that displayed just how weird a cyclist's tan lines really are would have elicited hoots and jeers from the guys down at the local day labor office. But from a practical standpoint, the wicking fabric of the jersey got me the most cooling benefit from what little breeze there was to be had. The sweatband kept the perspiration (okay... rivers of sweat) from burning my eyes. The shorts... well, let's just say I don't have the flabbiest man legs and bum on the cul de sac.

I was just finishing up when one of those Lexus [snicker] trucks pulled up in front of the next door neighbors' house, and a woman in a tailored white linen suit climbed out. As she made her way up the sidewalk, I saw her eyeing me and imagined that she was horrified by my attire.

Yep, I thought, cracking a grin. Still got it.

That, or she was mesmerized by my tan lines.

* I say "their", but I don't think that's fooling anyone. We're talking about me.

Exxxcellent...

Through The Simpsons' eighteen-year history, we've seen lots of guest celebrities reduced to two dimensions. I've always wondered how I'd look with yellow skin and googly eyes... and now I know.

As part of the non-stop hype for the recently-released Simpsons movie, Burger King has put together a web site where you can upload a picture of yourself, answer a few non-personal questions, and see what the analyzer thinks you'd look like as a cartoon character from the Simpsons. I was frankly surprised by how well this worked.

You can try too. www.simpsonizeme.com