Weblog by month (October 2008)
Seen Brett Domino yet?
Introducing keytar and StyloPhone virtuoso, Brett Domino:
Be sure to check out his other videos also. Truly marvellous, these guys will go far, mark my words.
Via MatrixSynth
Look who’s on twitter!
Crikey
Check those wee MacBook factoids
Macworld have been taking a closer look at the new MacBook (Pro)s. There are some interesting factoids about the machines, both positive and negative:
Within the Energy Saver preference pane, you can choose between “Better battery life” (the 9400M) and “Higher performance” (the 9600M GT) for graphics. However, this isn’t a switch you can do on the fly—nor can you set the system to use one when you’re on battery power and the other when you’re attached to an outlet. In fact, to switch between the two cards requires you to log out of your user account and log back in.
Bonkers! Hopefully the full story re dual GPUs will filter out in due course. I’m still scratching my head a little over why this design feature requires two chipsets, and not just one that scales down, but there must be a good reason for it.
Anyway, then there’s this wee feature, which is pretty nifty:
…these new MacBooks work with your iPhone headphones. If you click the button on your iPhone headphones, iTunes pauses. Click again, and the music resumes. A double-click advances one track, and a triple-click moves back a track…
(I note from photos that the MacBooks boast re-assigned function keys to cover iTunes (and video?) playback shuttle operations, which is quite nice). Continuing the keyboard theme, this is basically the same as that in the older MacBook range. I love the keys on Kinky, and the general feedback I’ve read is that the MacBook beats out the old Pro in the keyboard stakes (bar the backlighting), so this sounds like another positive (unless of course you just hate the MacBook keys).
Summary? Nice machines and all—but read the reviews before you decide for sure; on that front, I sincerely hope Ars Technica’s John Siracusa steps up here: his stuff is exhaustive and amazingly well-informed.
Read more: Macworld - First Look: MacBook and MacBook Pro.
Save our language!
Editors of the largest volume of Collins’ dictionary have opted to excoriate some of the lesser-known words from their take on our lexicon, much to the dismay of many. There are twenty-four words up for excision, and they're all corkers; it is apodeictic that they remain in the English language, lest our noble heritage fall in to a malison of caliginosity:
- Abstergent
- Agrestic
- Apodeictic
- Caducity
- Caliginosity
- Compossible
- Embrangle
- Exuviate
- Fatidical
- Fubsy
- Griseous
- Malison
- Mansuetude
- Muliebrity
- Niddering
- Nitid
- Olid
- Oppugnant
- Periapt
- Recrement
- Roborant
- Skirr
- Vaticinate
- Vilipend
Stop the abstergence—now is not the time for mansuetude!
Read more in The Times (hat tip to MW)
Look at the lengths Micro$oft will go to!
Tried to download Firefox in IE6 in my virtual machine just now:
No joy :o)
A wee CSS / JS tip
You live and learn. I thought I knew quite a lot about CSS but I found out something new a few weeks back.
Whilst doing some CSS and Javascript work to make an IE-only site play nice with WebKit and Gecko (urgh), I discovered that there is another CSS display attribute, in addition to the usual none, inline and block. We also have display: table-row;
This is quite an important one, if you want to avoid weird display issues in browsers other than IE6. If you use Javascript functions to hide and reveal page elements, you’ll want to change your code to cater for the table-row attribute type (this only applies of course, if your dynamic elements are in HTML tables).
Most hide / reveal functions out there just toggle the attribute between none and block, but this is not enough. Your carefully laid-out table will freak in any sensible browser if you apply display: block; to one or more table rows.
(Note that I’m setting aside arguments about using HTML tables in the first place—they do have their place you know, so long as you’re not using them for layout purposes )
Be warned however, that IE6 knows nothing about this attribute, so you still need to use display: inline; (or whatever) for older versions of Internet Exploder. In the Javascript function provided, I do the simple document.all test for IE to work with this, but you may want to use your own browser sniffer here.
Anyway, here’s the example function for hiding / revealing a table row. A suggested improvement? Instead of having a function specific to table row elements, have a generic show / hide function which is clever enough to test a given element—if said element is a table row, do the table-row thing, otherwise block or inline—you get the idea.
function showHideTableRow(el)
{
var styleType = "table-row";
// Different for IE
if(document.all) styleType = "block";
tr = document.getElementById(el);
tr.style.display = (tr.style.display=="none" ? styleType : "none");
}
By the way, you can read more about this attribute in a thread on the Velocity Reviews forum.
Outlook? Look out!
Yesterday was a bit of a disaster work-wise, in that I managed to royally snarf up my main VMware instance of Windows XP (entirely my own fault, buggering around with hard disk settings—will I never learn?)
Luckily, I had a back-up of said image on my NAS from the night before. I run nightly back-up scripts (plus weekly off-site ones) and I am very glad I do! So, off I went to retrieve the relevant bit of my back-up… Well, that worked just fine (I love Super Duper). But the file was huge, and took three hours to come back down over my network. Ouch! Never mind, I had other stuff to do. So, once it was all complete, I fired up the instance to check everything. All was well. Lotus Notes was happy. So was Eclipse and the VPN software I was using. The one app that threw a wee hissy fit? MS Outlook. Check this error out:
How pointless is this? People whinge about Lotus Notes, often quite rightly. But are they seriously telling me that messages (and underlying functionality) like this are better? There are a fair few things wrong with this dialog:
- Why does it matter that the local file is out of date (albeit by approx. 18 hours)?
- Why can’t Outlook just download all updates from the Exchange box at Send / Receive time, and be done with it?
- Does the average user really know where to find their .ost file? (its location is buried in one of the program’s various settings dialogs)
- Is the average user—indeed, any user—happy about deleting a file as vital as their Outlook cache?
- If the software is pretty much inoperable until this (stupid) step is completed, why doesn’t it just, erm, do it?
All hail replication!
Oh well that’s alright then
OK so at a mere $300m over eight years he wasn’t the fattest of the fat cats, but this story still beggars belief:
Mr Fuld said he took “full responsibility for the decisions that I made and for the actions that I took” and defended his actions as “prudent and appropriate” based on information he had at the time.
The former boss of Lehman has taken full responsibility for the decisions he was paid $300m to take. Oh that’s good of him. And hey, at least he was “prudent”. But wait! There’s more!
“I feel horrible about what happened,” he added.
What a splendid chap. BBC news: Lehman Bros head took home $300m.
My office
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Paul and Bill started it, others have joined in, so it’s my turn. Must tidy up someday…
The full set (be sure to click through for the witty notes).
