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imagine just for a second that you have been sat in front of a couple of flickering monitors for eight hours drinking coffee, then you wander outside and are as alarmed as I was to see this huge mushroom out of the corner of your eye, protruding from a roundabout.

I’ve always shyed away from putting pictures of myself on my site, but this one had to go up – me floating around…

on IE on a mac, the grey vertical subheading bar was expanding to fill the whole screen and clicking onto the lab menu item is causing safari to freeze..

fixed the IE problem – specified 12px widths to the grey box and the dynamically created boxes holding each letter.

looking into the safari problem…. CPU goes to 100% when you try to load anything within “the lab” section.

fixed! thanks to tim at twisty.com – he pinpointed it to a problem with the text-transform:uppercase property used on the heading selectors – safari didn’t seem to like applying it when some of the content inside was wrapped in divs and some not – if you remove the spaces, the problem was solved. I wanted to keep the spaces and so I moved that property to the individual divs surrounding each letter.

the same problem presumably doesn’t happen on the vertical submenu because I had already replaced all the spaces with “ ” because without doing that they weren’t creating any vertical space.

something i’ve always said* – from an interview with Andrew Beach:-

Q. Tell us what the future (net) looks like?

A. It will be more useful and less visible. It has to finally break free of the desktop and laptop to hit its next evolution.

* no proof

Because all the formatting and styling for this site is done with CSS, this site should degrade to work on any device which supports HTML.

Below, starskiweb is being displayed on MS mobile explorer on a Sony j5e phone.

On the styled version (i.e. when displayed in a web browser which supports CSS), the site menu, login form and logos are displayed in a column at the right hand side. Without the styling these appear at the bottom of the text. I chose to do it this way because some mobile devices are very slow and as the menu grows, if it appeared at the top for vanilla content it would be a pain to scroll through it to get to the first blog post.

At some point I will create a seperate unstyled menu page which can be bookmarked for mobile devices and used tomove between the blogs.

Are you sure you haven’t just got the caps lock key on? I mean of course i’d never make a stupid mistake like that, but….

The road verge on this industrial estate where I work is covered in rotting leaves and caked in mud from passing traffic. I was holding the camera down pointed at the floor to check the settings on the LCD screen when I noticed these dandelions poking through.

like where you want to create a repeated pattern like a background image in a web page:-

solution from Hozza:-

In Photoshop marque the section you want to make a pattern from, goto Edit, and then define pattern. Then select the entire page and go to Edit, Fill.., select Use Pattern and select your pattern from the custom pattern drop down.

it was returning an error code -2147217887, and I believe this *may* have been because of brackets (now removed) from one of the blog titles. I say may because I also went through and republished all blogs and archives at the same time, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything

update: just been having the same problems again, and there were no brackets. This time i managaed to pin it down to a particular blog name:

“linux install :: on time m series notebook” fails
“linux install :: time m series notebook” doesn’t

i’m sure there’s a reason for it but…..

UPDATE: 06 Jan 2004 – just discovered that it was because of the length which was limited to 40 chars – I just edited the function getUsersBlogs in listen.asp. I didn’t realise until now that the error messgaes are generated by blogworks rather than w.blogger

because I make them wear huge plastic collars to stop them pulling their stitches out.