A Close Call

An asteroid is passing relatively close (in astronomical terms) to the Earth today. The rock is roughly 300m in diameter, and will pass within a distance roughly twice that of our moon’s orbit.

“If it struck land, it would wipe out an entire country. If the impact point were London, then scientists estimate there would be total devastation for 150 km and severe destruction for a further 800 km, meaning that not only would the UK be destroyed but France and the Low Countries as well.”

Netscape 4 Can Bite My Butt

Recently, I’ve been working on a redesign of my employer’s web site. It’s not going to be any kind of ground-breaking work of art or anything, but it will be a welcome change from the kludgey frames-based page we’ve been using since forever ago. I’ve been playing with the cool soopa-rollovers and ypSlideOutMenu widgets from youngpup.net, and they’re really nice and easy to use, and degrade reasonably well for Netscape 4. This is important, because our web stats indicate that we have a significant number of users who still use that old dog.

However, my nice, mostly CSS layout turns into sludge when I load my page in NS4. Every time I try to do some nice standards-based CSS, NS4 finds some new way to disembowel itself.

It’s not like I’m doing anything particularly fancy, either. It’s just a few absolutely positioned DIVs, a couple of small forms, and a table. Does anyone know what perverted rules NS4 follows that makes it decide to ignore positioning? I had a similar problem on another website a while back, and was able to fix it by simply rearranging the order of the DIVs on the page. But I haven’t been able to make it work in my current project. Yet.

Back to the Grindstone

Okay, the bulk of the holidays are over now. We had a good Christmas in the Campbell household, with lots of family visiting, and lots of toys to unwrap. And some of them were even for the kids! Among my goodies were a new Dilbert desk calendar, a couple of Dilbert magnets, a Coleco electronic football game (nostalgia rocks!), and some Rockem Sockem Robots (did I mention that nostalgia rocks?) My brother-in-law, John, made a beautiful wooden Celtic cross for Susan and me. We’ll hang it up in our new house after we get it built.