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Style Sheet Reset

Start off on a level playing ground and clear out all of the settings that different browsers may inflict on you. I typically use Yahoo’s YUI Reset CSS, but there are plenty of others out there [google].

Start Styling

I typically do my initial implementation in FireFox 3.5 if for no other reason than the Firebug plugin. This is great for live editing of CSS, seeing why images aren’t loading, as well as AJAX and javascript debuging.

IE Selectors

So now that we have a fairly functional design, we fire up Windows to see what we have. I usually run IE8 in a Virtual Machine running the RC of Windows7. With this and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, you generally get good results in IE8, and can simulate what it would likely look like in IE7 by using ‘Compatiblity Mode‘ (though there are some differences). So how do we fix these?

The key is to use an IE only stylesheet and a few hacks. To make a style sheet only be loaded by IE we’ll use a Conditional Comment:

<!–[if IE]>
<link href=”/css/ie-only.css” media=”screen” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<![endif]–>

Now in this file if we define a property, it will be used by all versions of IE, but if we prepend an asterisk (*) to the property name, IE 8 will ignore it, and if we prepend an underscore (_) to the property name then both IE 7 and 8 will ignore it. So with this hierarchy of hacks we can now create something like the following:

#header {
width: 100px; /* Used by all versions of IE */
*width: 110px; /* Used in IE 7 and below */
_width: 120px; /* Used in IE 6 and below */
}

Note that, in the relevant browsers, each of these properties are being overridden by the subsequent values and so it is crucial that we maintain this order of 1) no prefix, 2) asterisk prefix, 3) underscore prefix to get the results you are looking for. However it is perfectly fine to use any combination of these if you want to achieve the same result in different versions of IE.

Extraneous markup

If you can’t get your code to work without hacks or strange CSS tricks, don’t be afraid to add an extra <span> to those lists of links, or a clearing <div> here and there. Doing so can some times make your CSS cleaner, and lets face it, more people are going to be looking at the website than the code.

Last resort – Javascript

With these tricks you should be off and running, but in-case you inherited a project that used lots of unsupported CSS tricks (like the ‘+’ sibling selector and IE6), you can resort to javascript. IE7-js is a project created to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Other Browsers

Now we have a site that works in Firefox and the 3 major IEs, but I haven’t mentioned anything about the other Grade A Browsers. If you look at various Google Analytics to find out for yourself.

In practice however, rarely do I find an issue with Safari that does not come up in Firefox and if we’ve done things in a fairly standard way, we should be ok in Opera.

Summary

That should do it. With these few tricks, you should be able to get your website pixel perfect in the most common browsers with out too much work. If you find this useful, or have any other tips, leave a comment!

There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.
Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work
correctly.
The Settings Daemon restarted too many times.

After poking around for a little while, I finally came across Gentoo Bug 150909. I didn’t have the linking problem found by Stian Skejelstad, but Daniel Gryniewicz’s Comment to add eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session` to your ~/.xinitrc worked great.

My ~/.xinitrc now looks like this:

#– ~/.xinitrc
eval `dbus-launch –sh-syntax –exit-with-session`
exec gnome-session
#exec startfluxbox

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc on

First, you will want to find out where the partition starts:

sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd

The -uS flag to sfdisk forces the output to be given in sectors (512 bytes), so the number you see there will need to be multiplied by 512.

Then:

mount -oloop,offset=xxxx image.dd /mnt/point

That’s it!

There is also a sharing section, where you can share a portion of your account with another user, and let them upload and delete files. It combines your usable space for this areas, so on group projects it gets quick first. Ohh and did I mention it has its own built in file versioning system?

There’s also a special folder for Photos that will automatically generate an online picture album of any pictures / folders placed into here. Of all the features, while I like some of the other ones a whole lot more, I use this one the most. Its great when working on web sites with clients and being able to save screen shots directly to this folder and show them what I’m seeing.

When I first found out about Dropbox, I was so excited about it, I went on a big kick about how everyone should be using it, but after time this excitement died down. Well now, Dropbox is giving away an extra 256MB of storage space (up to 3GB) (on top of the 2GB you get just for signing up) for every user you refer to the site, and so I’m back at it. Check it out: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTM0OTg4Njk!

About 3 weeks ago I filled out a form on New Balance’s Website for their Wear Test program. Shortly there after I received an email back from them stating:

Matthew Farmer, your application has been received and will be reviewed by the New Balance Wear Test Team. It is possible that all positions in the Activity you indicated are currently filled, so we thank you for your patience as we look for testing opportunities that suit you.

Once you have been selected for a test, you will receive an email notification of your acceptance into the program. This email will also confirm your User ID and provide a temporary Password allowing you to log in to the site and manage your account.

Sincerely,
The New Balance Wear Test Team

http://weartest.newbalance.com

And that was that. I kind of forgot that I even applied and hadn’t heard from them since.

Then this morning I found a package on my front doorstep. At first I looked at it expecting to see my room mate’s name on it, but when I saw mine I quickly scanned the return address expecting to see it coming from my family, but was excited to see that it was from New Balance!

This last week I really started to gear up on my training for the LA marathon. I ran a 5 mile run at my goal marathon pace of 7:15 minutes / mile on Saturday and followed that up with a 8 mile run on Sunday, each of which left my knees feeling a little soggy.

I really thought a new pair of shoes might help with that, but didn’t want to drop the $80-100 that entailed on it just yet, and was thinking that maybe I’d ask for a pair for my birthday, though my family already do so much for me I didn’t want to. Last night I even had a dream about it. So these couldn’t have come at a better time. I can’t wait to get out there and put some miles on them!

The first week was pretty much tied up with Gosslin, a holiday my friends here made up about 6 years ago. Celebrated at the end of January every year, there are 17 points that must be completed during the night. This year a few of them were: Martina has to sneak in (which he did), Jess had to lead everyone in a song of dance, the Ramones were the only band listened to, Bowser and Banshe got married, and Noah had a Translyvanian BBQ.

During all of that, me and Noah also got a dog, Girl. She was found under a car in Eagle Rock a few months ago when this really nice lady took her in. She took care of her for a few months until we heard about her through a friend of a friend of a friend of Noah’s boss… or something like that. Since we’ve got her we’ve gotten her spayed, dealt with her with a cone on her head for a week, and I started taking her on runs.

As for work, I’ve started giving the freelance thing a try. Mostly doing websites. Its slow getting work, but looks some what promising. I think I’m also going to put my skills from EMC to work and start doing some Hard Drive Data recovery. Dave’s Mac hard drive went last week (due to some nasty file system corruption that DiskUtility couldn’t fix), and I was able to get everything back for him, so I figured I’d see if I couldn’t make some money there.

I’ve also started officially training for the LA Marathon. This will be my first time training with an official schedule, instead of just running as I see fit. I didn’t look around too too much, but decided to go with Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 1 Training Schedule. It’s an 18 week program, but the race is only 15 away, so I’m going to start at Week 1 and skip one week of the schedule until I’m on track. Given I finished Boston in 3:53, with my haphazard training for 6 weeks, I think I’ll be ok with this.

Enough side tracking for now. Back to work!

I wanted to take this as an opportunity to try out a few different web frameworks to see which I like the most and which I wanted to learn more. The first two I looked at were django and CodeIgniter.

After running through the tutorial for django, I was totally sold! Everything about it seemed amazing and worked like a charm! But when I tried to load it up on my 1&1 account, it was a no go situation. django is a Python package that has to be installed by a privileged user. There are other hosts out there at comparable prices that have django pre-installed, but they do not offer the amount of space that 1&1 does (which I use to back up my personal files). Also, a lot of the work that I do is adding functionality to already existing sites, where I have no input into where the site is hosted, and so again, it doesn’t look like django will work for me.

Next up was CodeIgniter, and while its not quite as impressive as django (I actually had to create a database table myself… *sarcastic sigh*), it seems like it will do the job.

Next up, time to work on this site. One problem. I don’t have any cPannel type login information or know any credentials for a database I can use… No worries though: sqlite to the rescue!

I setup CodeIgniter to work and all is looking great. I created some sample data with the command line sqlite interface and Select statements are working perfectly. I’m not pretty far into this project, too far to back out now. The client side of things are all done, and I’m now working on the admin interface. Time to setup some DELETE and INSERT queries.

“Unable to open database…”. WHAT? What do you mean unable to open database? If i changed any of these queries to a SELECT, they work fine, so its obviously able to open it. I chmod the file to 777, still nothing.

After what felt like, and probably was, hours of searching, I finally came across this article at mediakey.dk.

As it turns out, to be able to write to a sqlite file, the folder that it resides in must also be writable. So simple, but so frusterating. I’m going to post this hint in as many spots as I can find now, so hopefully other user’s won’t have to go through as much trouble finding it as I did.