Conventional wisdom (and Microsoft) has always said that there was no way to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer onto one PC. Not without booting multiple operating systems, or using a virtualizer product like VMWare.
Lockergnome has converted to a CSS based design. View that clean XHTML 1.0 Strict source. Wow. I mean…just…wow. Great job. I have a feeling that a lot of people will be able to learn a lot by studying their design. And I think that I’ll be one of them.
Halloween went pretty well. Originally, Jamie was going to be the Incredible Hulk, but he had a last-minute change of heart, and decided to use his Harry Potter costume from last year. Oh well, it would have been hard to carry his candy bucket while wearing his Hulk Hands anyways. And besides, Mary had also decided to wear her Hermione costume again, so that made them a matched pair. At one point we saw some kids point at Mary and say, “Hey, look, there’s Hermione! She looks just like Hermione!” Mary was eating it up, and grinning from ear to ear.
Susan’s parents kept a tally, and said that a total of 57 Trick-or-Treaters came by the house this year (a new record), if you count those two kids that came back for seconds because they liked the cool rubber bats and spiders that we were giving out along with the candy 🙂
After ToT was over, we went over to John and Melissa’s house, ate some mummy dogs and other treats, and watched Creepshow, which is classic bad horror. If you’ve never seen it, Creepshow is actually 5 short stories, tied together by a meta-story. Really, the only one worth watching is “The Crate”. Though, “They Creep Up On You” is at least good for the gross-out factor from all the cockroaches.
It’s once again time for the National Peanut Festival, held in Dothan, Alabama.
Wow. Their web site really sucks. I was going to say some other things about the Peanut Festival, but that page threw off my groove. Nevermind. Move along, nothing to see here.
So, Mr. Hulk, I hear you recently got a new job. What did you do when you got your first paycheck?
HULK CASH!
Uh huh. And what does someone like yourself do to stay in shape? Do you go to the gym, play sports, do a lot of swimming?
HULK SPLASH!
We heard that back when you were in college, you got into a little bit of trouble at one of the football games. What can you tell us about that?
HULK FLASH!
Ah, well. Um. I’m glad we missed that game… Anyhow, back to that new job of yours. You’re working with computers, right? How are you liking Windows XP?
HULK CRASH!
I hear that. So, you’re a unix geek then? Which shell do you prefer?
HULK BASH!
I’m a tcsh man, myself. Well, thank you for your time.
PUNY HUMAN!
Last month, my wife informed me that she couldn’t post comments on this site using IE6. I found a work-around, but never got around to tracking down the real source of the problem. I received an email from Michael Heilemann this morning, informing me that this problem was back. I had forgotten all about it, so when I updated my site to a newer version of WordPress, the problem reappeared.
I finally spent a few minutes digging around and found the source of the problem. It’s an interaction between my local PHP configuration, WordPress, Liorean’s Style Switcher, and apparently a bug in Internet Explorer. Hmm… where do I start? PHP has a setting called “register_globals“, which my web server has turned on, to support some legacy code. This means that variables set via cookies, GET, or POST requests are automatically turned into global PHP variables. Next, WordPress has some code which attempts to reset certain global variables that it is going to use, but only if they aren’t already set. Next, we have Liorian’s theme switcher (which I use on my site), which checks for cookie support by setting, then deleting a cookie named ‘c‘. And lastly, we have IE6, which apparently does not delete said cookie when told to do so.
So. Someone visits my site with IE6. The theme switcher code attempts to verify cookie support. IE6 erroneously leaves a cookie named ‘c‘ in the environment. PHP sees the cookie and registers a global variable, ‘$c‘. WordPress sees that there is already an empty global variable named ‘$c‘, and so decides not to reset it using the value passed in the GET querystring. And because the value of the ‘$c‘ PHP variable is used to determine whether or not to show the form for leaving comments, you can’t.
Anyhow it’s fixed. I’ve turned off ‘register_globals‘ for my blog.
I’ve recently become aware that some people are having problems with my Service Pinger. Apparently, something about the halloween stylesheet is causing the form elements in the menu sidebar to overlap some of the ping form elements in such a way that they become unclickable.
I’ve made a minor adjustment to the stylesheet. So if you were having problems before, please try again now, and let me know if you are still having problems or if it is working for you again now.
Update: Ah, okay, it’s an IE6 issue… I normally use Mozilla, and I hadn’t checked IE lately. Working on it…
Update #2: Okay, tracked down the problem. I had an inline stylesheet on that page to set the width of the form, but it wasn’t specific enough, and caused the form elements in the menu to be too wide. Everybody should be happy again. 🙂
After reading lots of good things about Knoppix Linux Live CD, I thought I’d give it a whirl. I downloaded the ISO image, intending to burn it using the OEM version of Nero that came with our CDRW. But darned if I can figure out how to do it. I found an option in Nero Express for burning from an image, but when I try to open the 700MB Knoppix image, the software keeps telling me that it is “not a valid Nero image”, or some such nonsense.
Does anybody have any ideas? Is there some other easy way I can burn that image under WinXP without purchasing anything?
Last night, I tried out Apple’s iTunes for Windows. Susan wanted to make a music CD with a customized set of songs, to play during a Mary Kay gathering. She searched through our personal music collection and found most of the music she wanted, but she wanted to round things out with a few more songs.
I installed iTunes, imported the MP3s that I had ripped from our CDs into the iTunes Library, performed some searches in the iTunes Music Store, purchased and download the additional songs we wanted, created a playlist and put the songs in the order we wanted, then burned a CD with our selections. I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly everything went.
And hey, wow — our Memorex 52x CDRW is hella fast! It burned 56 minutes worth of audio in 2 minutes. Awesome! Since I had just installed the CDRW a couple of days ago, this was the first real test it had 🙂
Zeldman has announced that the new design for A List Apart is now live. In addition to the new look, the article index, and category selections, there are three great new articles available. I was already up-to-speed on CSS image replacement techniques and random image rotation with PHP, but that article on sliding door tabs had some great techniques in it that I hope to put to good use soon.