Posts Tagged ‘technology’
2But it sure is addictive. I was skeptical at first, but within moments ended up embroiled in this:
And that is just a single Buzz. So… yeah.
I’m surprised at how quickly everyone seemed to jump on the Buzz bandwagon. Normally, at least amongst the folks I know, there’s a period of skepticism that follows the announcement of a new technology or service. Then the few technology junkies will bravely step forward to try it out, and if it’s good, they’ll hook everybody else in. This did not happen with Buzz. Everyone jumped on Buzz at the same time. All day I was pummeled with posts from people far and wide, not all tech junkies either. Most were friends that I haven’t spoken to in a long long time. Suddenly we were chatting like we just saw each other yesterday. It was fantastic. Facebook has never even come close to bringing me in touch with so many friends in such a short time.
So that’s the good side of Buzz. The bad side is… well, all day it was like this constant, incessant, um, buzz in the background, sabotaging my every attempt to be productive. I filtered out Buzz announcements in my Inbox. I turned off new Buzz notifications. It was no use. I felt drawn to it like a… bee to honey. That was awful. Oh yeah, and the pun-tastic simile was pretty bad too.
Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This work is part personal journal, part manifesto, and part self-help book. Essentially, Gordon Bell tries to make a good case for the “inevitable revolution” towards “Total Recall” (caps, mind you) that will “force” us to “adapt” to it. His diction gives you a good sense of what’s to come, sigh.
If you can stomach his single-mindedly evangelical agenda, you’ll find that this book pursues some interesting ideas about the implications of recording as many details of one’s life as possible. And not just in writing, but in photos, sound, video, drawings, scanned documents, GPS locations, chat logs, pedometer readings, etc. etc.
Just wanted to write a quick post to link some articles for future reference.
Writing an HTML email is like taking a regressive leap 10 years into the past. Mangled, reinterpreted markup; wildly inconsistent rendering; table layouts and font tags everywhere. Aeiieeeee!
But in case you need to dive into this mayhem, here’s how you’d do it:
- Writing cross-client HTML email – emtek.net.nz
- Email Design Guidelines – CampaignMonitor.com
- CSS Support in Email (2008) – CampaignMonitor.com
- Video in Email – CampaignMonitor.com (long story short: you can’t do it)
I know, I shouldn’t be posting at work, but I just had one of the most convoluted multi-browser debugging sessions ever. So I’m going to blog about this now in case I forget the solutions… because I don’t ever want to relive that ever again. ^^;
So, I’m working on this site for a client at work, and it was all going very beautifully until they wanted drop-down menus. The drop-down menus would have been a piece of cake too, except that they overlay a Flash intro gallery thingy. I embedded it using the much-touted SWFObject method.
For the dropdowns, I used my favorite method for dropdowns, called The Son of Suckerfish (yeah, you know them programmer names =)), which involves using CSS hover attributes applied to a list item to trigger the re-absolute-positioning of the dropdown menu. Here’s where the hilarious fun started.
I implemented the dropdowns, and they worked great, except, as expected, the Flash went over the dropdowns. Applying z-index +100000 would have been the perfectly gar and sensible thing to do, except Flash objects exist in their own stacking order. No good. A Google search took me to some results that suggested adding a WMODE parameter of “transparent”. And voila, it worked in Firefox Mac. Onwards.
I pop open the PC and load the site into IE 6, which is reputed to be worse than IE7 so I always go to it first. Padding and float issues abounded, but I zapped those quickly enough as they’re to be expected. Surprisingly, the dropdowns and Flash played nicely together!
Then I get a phone call from the client. She said the dropdowns were staying open in IE7 even after the mouse leaves the menu. It resulted in a veritable party of open menus. I didn’t have IE7, so I downloaded it, and it overwrote IE6. Then I spent another 15 minutes figuring out how to make the PC let me have multiple versions of IE. I found MultipleIE which turned out to be amazing. I wasted some minutes exploring the internets using IE 3.0… which was a little amazing. It was like time travel. Anyways. That is the first thing I should remember for future reference, that I discovered today: get this amazing tool for debugging “bliss.”
So I opened IE7 and then for the next half hour was trying to replicate the bug. It turns out you have to click somewhere else on the page to get it to show. Another Google search took me to this article, “The IE7 Sticky Hover Bug Enigma” which documents the bug thoroughly and showed me how to fix it with percentage-based absolute positioning instead of pixel-based. Yay!
Next up was Firefox PC. I opened it and blerg, the pop-ups weren’t staying over the Flash. After an hour of searching, I finally found out what the problem was: Firefox PC requires the wmode parameter to be set on the embed tag, instead of on the object tag. I had implemented SWFObject with its static method, which uses 2 nested object tags only. I had to switch to the dynamic method which uses Javascript and includes an embed tag. This nifty little code generator made things so much easier. And that fixed that.
Just to make sure everything was still ok on the IE end after I changed the way Flash was embedded, I went back to IE6 and loaded the page with the Flash. It gave me a scary “Operation aborted” error! AAAAH. And no further explanation. And a blank page. Again, Google saved the day. I found this page which basically pointed out that it was a javascript-related error. So I knew it had to do with the SWFObject, but I didn’t want to undo the work which fixed the Firefox PC issue, so I forged on, looking for a solution to the bug caused by the solution to the last bug.
Back on the SWFObject page, FAQ #4 came to the rescue. It had to do with a base tag. I didn’t even know I had a base tag, but since I was using CMSMS, and it was auto-generating all sorts of site metadata to go in the head, I figured it was probably configurable somewhere in the backend. My template had a {metadata} tag in it, and I found its source under Site Admin -> Global Settings. However this did not have a base tag in it.
I went to the CMSMS Forum (where I seem to be spending an awfully large amount of time these days) and someone wrote that the base tag is generated from one of the CMS’s core PHP files. He/she also helpfully gave instructions to modify it. Again, people on the internet are amazing. I am so thankful.
Finally, that seemed to solve everything. Hooray!
… That is, until on a whim I also decided to open Safari on the Mac and see how things looked. I had expected to look perfect, but instead the body background was missing, as were all the CSS styles I set to the body tag. Argh. Another half-hour of Googling resulted in this find, which miraculously solved my problem.
One last lookover through Firefox Mac, Firefox PC, Safari, IE6, and IE7 seems to reveal no other glaring issues….
Lessons learned: Google is amazing. The internet is amazing. Support from fellow dorks on the internet is wildly better than it was even 4 years ago. Never underestimate the hive mind.
