Category: WWW things

Got a laugh out of this one. Marvin meets httpd.

http://www.bac.ro/txts/ftp.txt

Found via Blogus Maximus

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:

But in Firefox, this is what it looks like:

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.

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

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention

Yesterday, I finally got around to upgrading the department photo gallery from Gallery 1.5 to 2.0. I’d upgraded my own photo gallery about a month ago with no problems, and wasn’t expecting too many issues with this one.

Installation went fine, and importing the photos from the old version went fine. Can’t seem to get the URL rewriting to work though. It works fine in my personal gallery, but doesn’t work right in the department gallery. The mod_rewrite directives in the .htaccess file don’t seem to be getting processed or something. I’m suspecting some strange interaction/non-interaction with some directive in httpd.conf and the Gallery-generated .htaccess, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. No doubt it’s probably something simple that I’m overlooking.

In the meantime, there’s another mystery: why is httpd always giving me SegFaults when an error occurs. It started happening after the upgrade to PHP 4.4.1? Yet another thing to dig into.

Update: Figured out the mod_rewrite oddness. Turned out to be an AllowOveride None directive that was messing things up. Once I moved the .htaccess contents into the main httpd.conf, everything started working properly. Knew it was something simple.

Looks like my next project (whether I want to do it or not) is to work on making our department websites accessible by everyone. Something called Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The hospital is also going with W3C‘s Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

It doesn’t look like it will be too bad. I think I should be able to accomodate the requirements with a few style sheet and template changes without too much pain. I suppose I should go ahead and run it all through the Validator while I’m at it.