bucketFountain

I took the plunge (again) last week and installed Linux on the Thinkpad. I first used Linux back in 1998, and every couple of years do an experimental install to see how it’s changed. I’ve never really stuck with it though, as I find myself forced back to Windows because of my reliance on Notes. A couple of years ago I tired to get Notes 5 running on Mandrake Linux (with Wine) but it never got through the installation. With my usual determination I gave up after two attempts….

This time I would like to stick with Linux for a little longer, and may attempt to get Notes running (which would mean no more Windows). I figure that if I was not forced back to Windows all the time by running a dual boot system I would be Linux ‘power-user’ in no time.

And another reason to stick with Linux, I’ve just seen one of my sites in Konqueror – oh shite.

Here’s an IE bug I’ve just found out about… if you create a div, assign it a margin: and then assign float:left; to the div, IE gives you a bonus DOUBLE MARGIN WIDTH! Oh, yes, I feel like the big winner here today.

Fortunately there is an answer. It looks as though all(?) versions of IE can be fooled (in much the same way as that clever bastard Tantek Celik’s ol’ box model hack ).

The answer, and other goodies, at CSS hub.

Undercrank is where I found the first reference to the problem, and again, there is some other good stuff on this site.

Here is a list of browsers that it works with from centricle.com

A curse on virgin.net “broadband”! It has been incredibly slllloooooowwww for weeks now. It may take, say, 10 minutes (while I make the tea and watch a bit of telly) to download just the top graphic on a page. They have promised that come the 14th of November all will be well, but I will believe it when I see it. To celebrate I will download Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Notes 6.5 so I can have a poke around.

The worst thing about virgin is that they still haven’t replied to my email asking for an explanation – I have had to try and check their web site, which is an odyssey in human patience. However, when I spoke to a friend who’s also on virgin he said he was having no problems….

I go to a film course on a Tuesday night – on my way home tonight a guy had finished with his newspaper and offered it to the bloke next to him. The simple act of generosity made them both very happy.

You wait ages for a Concorde and then three come at once!

I haven’t used Internet Explorer at home for a few months and I see today that it doesn’t render bucketFountain 100% since I changed the default font-size a few weeks back. It had occurred to me that in making the text resizable, it was quite possible that certain, hmm, shall we say, ‘inexperienced users’ would find the site unreadable and not realise that they had accidentally resized the text size in IE (using their scroll wheel and the ctrl key).

To solve the problem I immediately went to Ben Poole’s most excellent site, and, as I suspected, found that he didn’t suffer from the problem. I also remember Ben writing that he had based his style sheets on those from bluerobot.com , a good, solid option.

The solution was simple – the font was set to 97%, and that’s what I did here. Although there are only so many screen sizes/resolutions that I can test on, it has not broken on any that I have tried so far.

And perhaps Microsoft could take a leaf out of Mozilla’s superlative book, and let the user choose if they enable those slightly unusual key/mouse combo’s (Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Mouse Wheel) that you are likely to be using without even knowing it.