i summon one kim

The recent Microsot Internet Explorer (IE) problem was bothering me, because it meant the pages were not usable with IE. I wouldn’t mind a cosmetic problem as much (even though they tend to get to me, too) but links not working and pictures not being visible is just too annoying.

I was playing with the CSS, experimenting with the “floating dt” that I had avoided in the last workaround due to it “disappearing” on IE. When I made the dd element floating as well, I saw that IE was rendering the contents below and outside the white box (#envelope) that holds the main content on each page. In the past this has been a giveaway for IE miscalculating the size of the containing element, and sure enough — the “fix” was an added width: 100% property for the misbehaving container.

The “invisible images” were restored to visibility with the same fix on the appropriate container. I’m glad it didn’t need another couple of hours of CSS tweaking in the dark.

It’s nice to have the site working again, but I’d rather not spend my free time on something stupid like inventing workarounds for a buggy browser. (Not that I expect Microsoft to pick up any hints from here.)

Enjoy!

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)

David Sasaki (oso) wrote to the wp-polyglots mailing list with some questions for an article he is working on about “multilingual, multicultural, and transnational blogs.” I answered him and I also wanted to post here about blogging in two languages.

As you may have seen my blog now respects the language settings of your browser. You will not see posts in languages that you have not enabled in your browser (unless your settings would rule out all posts). If you want to see all posts, just make sure your browser is configured to requests both English and Finnish content. To exclude a language, check that your browser settings include all the languages you do want to see.

As an example, if your browser is configured to only prefer content in German (de), you would currently see all posts (since I don’t have any in German). If you’d rather not see the Finnish content, you can add English (en) to the list of preferred languages. This would result in the Finnish ones to be excluded (just force a reload of the page).

Read on for the questions and answers… (more…)

Well, the moving has started: I’ve relocated these pages to a server in Finland. The timestamps are now in Finnish (East European) time, although I’m still in the New York area for a couple more months. In a couple of weeks I expect to be able to start powering down servers in the USA, and in a couple of weeks more the movers should be here packing everything.

When experts say moving is one of the most stressful events of your life, believe them! It certainly is: even while you know exactly what needs to be done to get ready for the move, it seems like either there is too much to do or you feel like you are not doing enough. Either way, losing sleep is the result…

I’m having trouble deciding what to do immediately after June 30th. I think I only have a couple of days to decide, and then I should be busy ordering tickets for the flights.

I just hate it when I test a new version of NetBSD on a couple of machines successfully, and only run into trouble when I push the ugprade to a busy server. After upgrading the server where these pages live to 3.99.1 the machine paniced in the TCP/SACK routines roughly once every 36 hours (really has to do with the traffic, not time). I tried upgrading again, to 3.99.3, but that was worse: the machine would hang within 2 hours. Now I’ve downgraded back to 3.99.1 and disabled SACK, hoping to get a stable environment.

I’m still running 2.99.15 on other busy machines, and it has been very solid — I cannot recall a single panic, hang or crash. It’s just that a) somebody needs to test the new stuff, b) I keep hearing things like “it only happens on your machine” (ugh) and c) holding off from upgrading for too long tends to make for painful upgrades. However, it might still be possible to convince me to run the netbsd-3 stable branch…

So if you can’t read this, please check back soon — I’m just recovering from a panic. :-)

Frequent visitors (if there are any) have noticed that the colors on the site have kept changing. The rest of you must have just been wondering why the SSH Tutorial is in a different color each day.

I was really taken by the visual impact of the Borderline Chaos template submitted to the WordPress 1.5 Themes competition. It has nice strong colors, and its layout was begging to be implemented with CSS only. I didn’t want to use a background image, which means the sidebar background does not reach to the bottom of the page, but I don’t think it has to. I wanted better contrast in the sidebar boxes, which led to rather bright backgrounds that caused me to abandon the colors (especially after some feedback from my friends). I also wanted to have the main content (the articles) appear first in the output, and while that doesn’t require the sidebar to be on the right, I just like it better that way.

I think the current colors are here to stay for a while now. I should look up whose flag is white, blue and green.

There are (at least) a couple of things I didn’t do carefully enough in the past when it came to maintaining this website: I didn’t always preserve old URL’s (I try hard now), and when the basis for the current look was established, many documents were pushed aside to an “old” folder for later evaluation. Of course, “later” tends to become “never.”

I was looking at the referrers again (warning, slow link^*) and I’m always curious when there is a link to the front page of the site. This one was from Rob Jenson’s site, on a page about system administration. There was not only one link but two, one of them broken!

I dug up the old anonymous document called Computer Administration Vocabulary for Computer Users, polished it up to XHTML and gave it a new home on my site. I still find it quite funny, but I remember putting it aside before, thinking that someone might actually think it reflects my real attitude towards my work. Stranger things have happened…

* Viewing the referrers page causes a number of database updates (relatively fast) and DNS lookups (sometimes extremely slow), which is why the page may take anywhere between 2 and 25 seconds to load.

After 10 years of NNTP access to mailing lists through news.gw.com, I have decided to discontinue the service. The HTTP access was consuming a lot of resources and not working reliably. Some people were abusing the NNTP access with constant polling for new messages. The basic gateway functionality didn’t handle cross-posting. I would need to migrate the gateway to a new server this year.

Given that I don’t see any opportunities for me to fix any of these problems, and that there are public services already at a much grander scale that do everything but just much better, there don’t seem to be any good reasons to keep news.gw.com running.

Personally I think I’ll be doing casual browsing of mailing lists via gmane.org. I recommend taking a look at it. They offer two different HTTP interfaces as well as NNTP (including posting, if I understand correctly).

I’ve been wanting to change the colors on this site a bit, and I finally got started by adding the header background. The photo is courtesy of Laura Selonen, a very good friend of mine. Looking at her pictures from her walks around the neighborhood has made me want to use my camera more.