Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Firefox not so <strong>?

I haven’t had the chance to test things extensively yet, but the last few Firefox nightly builds (currently using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060227 Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2006022704) just haven’t been behaving properly.

For one, <strong> and <b> tags don’t seem to be rendering at all. Let’s test.

This is inside <strong> tags. This isn’t.

This is inside <b> tags. This isn’t.

This is a level 3 header

A quick look in IE shows things being rendered properly, but except for the H3 line, none of the strong or bold text gets rendered in this build of Firefox.

Here’s a screen shot of what it looks like in IE:

Bold and strong properly rendered in IE

But in Firefox, this is what it looks like:

No bold or strong in FF

Also, in text areas the cursor seems to advance a little further than it should as text is entered so that after a little bit of typing, the cursor winds up being a few character widths ahead of where characters are actually being typed.

As I said, I haven’t done any extensive testing on this yet. Haven’t gotten around to testing on other machines or other browsers to see if it’s just this installation or this particular nightly build. A quick search of Mozilla’s Bugzilla revealed this bug that was filed last July.

Perhaps I should head off and go file a couple of bug reports. Feel free to chime in and let me know what you see.

Update: Of course, now that I’ve gone and commented on that bug and attached some screenshots, I download and install the latest nightly (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060228 Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2006022804) and discover it seems to have fixed the bold and strong rendering issues. I suppose checking the latest nightly should have been the first thing I did.

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Great archive, not so great search capabilities

Ok, so I finally got around to redoing my Medical Physics virtual CD jukebox properly so I’m not limited by the number of loopback devices. Works fabulously.
Now I have to figure out how to make it more convenient to search besides opening up the index page for each month’s issue. Since they’re all online now, there should be some way of crawling through the directory structure and indexing each of the PDF files. Googling returns a few possible solutions, but mostly for PDF files contained inside a webspace somewhere, which these are not. I suppose I could make them web accessible and index them using something like ht://dig or even have GoogleBot crawl it, but then I’d probably be violating some copyright rules. PDFSearch looks like it might have some potential, but looks a little cumbersome.
Guess I’ll just keep on looking.

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Blog archive ordering

Ok, so I’ve been blogging for a few years now, and reading a bunch of them in the meantime. This is something I’ve always wondered about: Why do people always sort their blog archives in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest)? For the main blog page it makes perfect sense to have the most recent post at the top. You don’t want to make readers have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find the most recent entry. But for archives, IMO it makes very little sense. Think about it…sorting in reverse chronological order means the reader has to read through your blogging history from the bottom of the browser and scroll upwards. If an entry is longer than a screen length, then the reader has to scroll down to read the full entry, then scroll back up to find the next one.

Makes for lots of senseless scrolling. A much more logical way of reading blog archives would be sorted in chronological order (oldest to newest).

So why do people leave their blog archives like this? Just something they’ve never thought about? Because that’s the way it’s always been done? Something they can’t change? I can’t imagine any blogging software worth the bits it’s made from not giving the user at least that capability.

Bloggers, think about what you’re doing to your fellow readers!

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Preventing image hotlinking

Just a post to note an interesting method of keeping image hotlinkers out

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention

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Digital camera artifact

A strange looking artifact started showing up on the wife’s digital camera (a Sony DSC-W5) yesterday. In regular non-zoom mode, it just shows up as a small dark fuzzy patch in the lower left corner of the image. At full optical zoom it becomes a slightly more defined small rectangular patch:
Digital camera artifact at full optical zoom
It’s not anything on the surface of the lens, and it doesn’t move when the optical zoom is adjusted so I’m thinking it must be something on the CCD. With a flashlight and some image enhancement using GIMP I managed to get these images:
Image enhanced artifact
Image enhanced artifact
Not entirely sure what to make of it. The striations possibly suggest something spring-like. A few hours later, it migrated a little bit higher to the left middle of the screen (perhaps in response to some soft thumping I gave it). Looks like I’ll have to send it in to have it looked at.