Category: Geek

baald had been letting me know recently that my weblog was truncated halfway down the page in IE6. I’ve had my share of CSS frustrations, but just could not fathom what bug I might have introduced that could cause this. Yesterday I came across this Zeldman post, and another including a workaround. In a nutshell, the flagship browser used by 187% of the surfing population caches the vertical size of DIVs on pure CSS pages. So if it calculates the height of your .blogbody class on one page at 225 pixels, it may try to render it at the same height on subsequent pages, even though it contains different content. Lovely. Some small relief to know this wasn’t my bug.

The fix is a hunk of javascript I’ve stuck into all my templates. You should no longer see the truncation problem on recent birdhouse posts or on the main page – let me know if you do.

For the past few days have been working on establishing a Mac cloning system for the Greenhouse, which involved creating perfect, virginal OS9 and OSX installs packed with all the apps, drivers, and configuration we need for the mulitmedia skills classes. Once built, we’ll be using Carbon Copy Cloner to wipe the drive of Macs that tire of student abuse and reinstall the whole schmoo in 20 minutes.

What threw me was the fact that 5 of our Macs wouldn’t boot from the FireWire drive containing the clone, while the others were perfectly happy. The bad ones would see the FW volume, start to boot from it, then hang. Took half a day and several false starts to figure out that this was a Mac firmware problem. Updating firmware throughout the lab allowed all machines to boot from FW.

Our army of clones is almost complete, bwa ha ha ha ha!!!

Spent almost the entire weekend freelancing – tweaking on Matthew’s iMac (turns out that 2nd memory slot is hidden beneath the processor card – the original 32MBs isn’t soldered on, but you have to dig to find it), fixed a crashing issue on the landlord’s Mac, then setting up DSL in a client’s home — I suggested they have ethernet laid in the walls during their remodel – now we’re putting it to use… but SBC screwed up and wasted my time and theirs … there is still no signal going into the home… trouble ticket time, will finish the job during the week.

Sick of paying CompUSA’s extortionist prices for Cat5 cable every time these jobs come up — $22 for a 6′ cable! Just amazing they can get away with it. Decided it was time to learn how to make my own Cat5. Bought a crimper, terminators, and 50′ of 5e at The Shack. Looked up some sites on the subject, wasted 3 or 4 terminators getting the hang of it, and am now posting through my own homebrew cable. “The man” got nuthin’ on me, hyunh. However, making cable isn’t quite as lickety-split as I thought it would be, so have to be careful that labor time doesn’t cancel out the savings. For longer runs it will definitely be cheaper. For shorter jobs it probably would still make more sense to stock up on misc bits from cables.com.

Today attended more of the Pro Conference sessions:

Internet Security for the Rest of Us : Pretty breezing overview of firewalls (both router and local), virii, flying under the radar, common weak points in OSes, and so on. Actually hoped for more specifics, but got a lot out of this. Choice quote: “FTP is the single biggest security hole in any OS, any implementation, 2nd only to IIS as breach culprit.” That got a nice laugh, followed by a collective gulp.

QuickTime Compression Secrets : You know all those awesome movie trailers at quicktime.apple.com that always look so stellar that you wonder why your own QT stuff never looks half as good? It’s all encoded by one guy, whose job it is to encourage broader QuickTime adoption by making the content look dreamy. He ran this session, and dropped a bunch of hard-won Sorenson and Cleaner tips and arcana on us.

Advanced File Sharing with OS X Server via AFP, Samba, NFS : I don’t have an OS X Server machine, but am saving up info for the day I do. Pretty intense session. Apparently there are now organizations so impressed with XServe and OS X Server that they are buying these rigs just to serve otherwise 100% Windows clients. Ye olde user-friendly Unix. Does that rock or what? For the 2nd time today, got to hear networking gurus implore audiences not to run FTP services of any kind.

Received my free copy of Keynote on the way out of the keynote yesterday, with two hours before my presentation. Considered delivering my pres in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. Installed it on the jschool TiBook I was carrying and imported my PowerPoint presentation. Import went great, and applied a theme that had the whole thing looking ten times better than PowerPoint at its finest (which, some would argue, is not saying much). Out of curiosity, checked the filesizes – the Keynote version was more than 10x larger than the PowerPoint original! This is because Keynote uses an XML data store, rather than binary blobs. That, in turn, means that any app can read and write the Keynote file format, which is fantastic for interoperability. But XML is not known for compactness (see my iTunes gripe).