Author: Tim Jarrett

Two columns it is!

I’m reverting the page to a two column CSS layout. I hope this helps some of the issues that people had with the three column layout. While I think one day it would be nice to have the three column version, as long as I don’t have fine control over the formatting of every element of the page (fixed width form elements, the calendar, etc.) it will have to be set up this way.

On the plus side, this makes the calendar much more prominent, which I think is a good thing. On the minus side, I think it’s broken again on NS 4.x. Sorry folks. But if you want to read the page, you can either click the print friendly link at the bottom of the page or subscribe to my RSS feed (XML icon in the navigation bar).

La Naomh Padraig, courtesy Niall

Our friend Niall had us all over to his place last night to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (aka La Naomh Padraig). This was the first time he’s had a party since Dubhfeasa went back to run her big hospital division in the old country, and he was in rare form. He served everyone home-colored green beer (making some concessions to American observances!) and Black Velvets (half Guinness, half champagne), among other fine beverages. It was a really great time.

OmniOutliner2OPML bug fix coming

Thanks to those who downloaded the script yesterday. Bruce D’Arcus pointed out that I made a stupid error before I published it yesterday that made it, um, inoperable. I will find a way to post the fix shortly–I seem to be having trouble getting to my iDisk over our dial-up line.

HP, Gelato, OSDL, Linux: coincidence or conspiracy?

Infoworld: HP scoops Gelato into Linux:

“HEWLETT-PACKARD ON Monday announced the formation of the Gelato Federation, advancing its agenda to develop Intel’s 64-bit Itanium processor family as a commodity chip platform for the Linux operating system….HP’s hope for the Gelato Federation is that it will blend ingredients from the research community, the Linux open-source community, and Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chip family to solve problem of scalability, grid computing, and other architectures based on those three ingredients.

Dig deeper: www.gelato.org: focus on “real world problems in academic, government and industrial research.” Dig still deeper: Open Source Development Labs, of whom HP is also a sponsor. Mission: carrier class and data center Linux.

What’s going on? HP invests in two Linux based consortiums aimed at different market segments, unified around the idea of improving the performance of Linux especially on very high end hardware. Thought: they’re fighting other competitors at both ends of the server market by developing a high quality scalable operating system that is open and essentially commoditized.

Can they capture value? Right now, I think their issue is mostly getting back in the game.
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Growing pains with CSS and Manila…

David Donald raises some interesting issues with the new design. Namely, a lot of the edit forms that Manila puts up if you want to post a comment are wider than my center column on most resolutions. As I don’t have much control over how wide those forms are, I may have to rethink how I’m doing the page layout. I think another issue was my design environment—I designed on a 1024×768 monitor, but readers like David are likely reading at 800×600. Maybe the best thing to do is to take everything back to two columns? What are people’s thoughts?

Scripting OPML for OmniOutliner

I got tired of complaining about OmniOutliner not having OPML capability, so I hacked a quick AppleScript to make it happen. It’s very beta right now, but it works for outlines that aren’t too deep. Currently it’s choking on my outline for the sitePref documentation, so I’m trying to go back and figure out why. You can download OmniOutliner2OPML from my scripts page.
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Going nuts with IE 6

Here’s a sneak peek of a problem I’m having with the site redesign in IE 6 on Windows. It works fine on the other browsers I’ve tried (mostly readable in NS 4, ugly in Mac iCab but that’s OK), but on IE 6 it starts doing funky things with border and text position. I’ve been over the stylesheet lots of times and can’t find the issue…. Interestingly it only does it on the second and subsequent news items.

More killer CSS resources

I’m very taken with A List Apart. They really have the sweet spot between coding and development—and between what the CSS spec says and how it is implemented. One complaint: there’s a lot of value in their series on transitioning to CSS from older forms of design (tables), but it was written in 1999 and a lot of the practical issues they mention have evolved with Netscape and IE 6 on the table.

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Yesterday: Heads down in CSS

I spent all yesterday (when I wasn’t in class) working on the CSS redesign of the site. I was about ready to give up on being able to view it in Netscape 4 until I found this site, which offers a free stylesheet for a fluid three-column layout (fluid meaning it resizes to fill the available browser width).

I had to tweak it a bit because of the Manila calendar. Manila automatically renders the calendar as a table, so it doesn’t resize. This is a problem with small browser width as it extends past the edge of the navigation div. I had to make the left navigation fixed width to solve the problem. This in turn meant the middle and right divs overlap at some smaller browser widths. I’ll do some work in 800×600 today to see if I can isolate the problem.

But most of the structural work is done. Now I can move on to aesthetics — colors, border widths, font leading — oh yeah, you can do leading, aka line height, in CSS. This old digital typographer is thrilled.

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New Applescript Studio in beta

A new version of AppleScript Studio appears to be available for developers at the Apple Developer Connection (register free). Still in beta, but it appears to address some really significant issues, including native support for the User Defaults framework in Cocoa and some other stuff…

Today’s CSS learnings

Working on the redesign in earnest today. I’m teaching myself CSS from trial and error and the specs, so I don’t have a lot of authority, but I thought I’d share what I’m learning anyway.

CSS Learning #1: When trying to display a border around a <div>, you must specify the border color, size, and style (or have specified them as a default somewhere) or the border will not display.

CSS Learning #2: CSS allows you to specify dimensions of elements in a number of ways, including ems (an em is approximately equal to the width of a capital letter M in the font being used). Distance measurements in ems are great when you’re just working with type. However, when mixing images (fixed size in pixels) and type, ems may cause problems. The cause: slightly differing type dimensions across platforms, or different fonts installed in the user’s system.

CSS Learning #3: Float is your friend. The float attribute of a <div> around an image allows you to wrap text around that image.