Squirrel

Benny the Squirrel

This is Benny the squirrel, which I drew when doing something different from coding at work. He looks unsually happy.

However, he wasn’t the squirrel that attacked Developer Dan aka Tall Dan aka Aussie Dan aka Squirrel Dan

Firefox opacity quirk and sifr rendering woes

I found into this annoying firefox bug at work last week whilst making amends to a page using opacity, transitions and sifr. The page has a slideshow with some some javascript animations and transitions with fade effects. Amending one part of the page led to bugs in another part and it took a while to track down how to solve the problems.

First, sifr headings had to be added to a few panels that had a fading rollover effect. When you rollover, the panel darkens making the text easier to read. But when sifr was added, the heading didn’t render on the page, it just disappeared. And when you mouse over where the text should be, the cursor changed like it would if sifr was displayed properly. Very odd.

After some head scratching, poking about and googling. We found the rollover effect was causing the sifr text to stuff up as the panel had it’s opacity set. Removing the effect led to the text being rendered properly, yay!

But this led to a quirk only in firefox and gecko based browsers! arrggg! We had a hero panel, which fades images in and out to promote certain shows, and was done in jQuery. The problem was that links on other parts of the page were being rendered blurry in firefox 2 and during image changes on the hero panel, the links would flicker. Very annoying.

It took some more poking about and searching to find out what the problem was. This comment by Mark Priestap was enlightening

“I believe there is a bug in FF where if you change the opacity of one part of the page in a hover event, it effects the opacity of page elements elsewhere on the page. It is highly annoying, but is a quirk of FF as far as I can tell.”

Armed with that knowledge, and it looks like it’s a firefox 2 only bug, we set the opacity of all the links on the page to 0.99 using -moz-opacity to target firefox only. Flickering was gone. Job done. This wee bug also affects another of our sites in development.

Another problem I found with sifr was rendering links. Sifr is notorious for misbehaving with links and I have had some experience with how annoying this is.

The link text was rendering, and the rollover effect was working, but when you clicked it, nothing would happen. Searching on the interweb found this on novemberborn.net

Wow, opacity and annoying sifr issues all in a days work, fun…

Things learned:

  • Firefox 2 has problems with opacity and rendering things with a hover state.
  • Sifr can be a pain in the backside with links and font sizing.
  • Sifr and opacity don’t mix too well.
  • Fixing/amending someone else’s css code takes longer than you think.

Teenage Albino Ninja Turtle

Turtle Power!

Being watched

Grrrr

I made a paper ninja turtle, unfortunately no access to a colour printer at work means this turtle is lacking in colour.

He’s Raphael but according to Andy - “Michelangelo is the best one. Fact.” Michaelangelo does have nunchukas and they are a whole lot cooler than the two fork things Raphael has.

I found the template after being directed to http://toy-a-day.blogspot.com, which is a pretty cool wee project. This guy is going to make a new paper toy every day for a year, and his templates are downloadable and free.

Syntax highlighting .html files as php in Eclipse

I keep forgetting how to do this so writing this down so I can refer to it later

I want .html to have the .php syntax highlighting as some we get .html to parse as .php. By default Eclipse doesn’t do this which is a right pain.

  1. Go to Window > Preferences
  2. In Preferences, go to General > Content Types
  3. Select PHP Source File and add *.html as a file association
  4. Click on File Associations link or General > Editors > File Associations
  5. Select *.html and add the PHP Editor as an associated editor - make it the default
  6. Next time you open a .html file with php tags, it’ll be highlighted as a php file! yay!

Blind Light

The Anthony Gormley Blind Light exhibition was a pretty cool experience. I really do need to get out and go to more of these types of things.

There’s not that much to it, a glass box with filled with water vapour from ultrasonic humidifiers and florescent light. Nothing prepares you for how weird, surreal and disorientating it is, and makes you aware of just how much you rely on sight.

You walk in and all of a sudden, you can’t see anything more than 2 feet away from you! Stick your arm out in front of yourself and you can only just make out your hand and fingers. Being surrounded by nothing but whiteness really screws your spatial awareness and can cause you to feel claustrophic.

Wandering around trying to locate the four walls is really funny, you shuffle forwards and all of a sudden someone appears from nowhere right in front of you! As you’re shuffling about you hear all this laughter around you as people bump into each and it really makes you smile.

Luckily I was there with Hils and his mate, which made the experience more fun as you go around playing tricks on each other. I wouldn’t have fancied going into the box by myself as you could feel really alone and lost.

You get a bit damp whilst you’re in there due to the humidifers, your hair and arms pick up droplets of water which were quite pretty. It’s also quite hard to breathe at first due to the density of the water vapour.

There was also a hulking piece of metal named “space station” which was pretty impressive due to the size of it. It was precariously balanced on three points and made you wonder just how they got the thing in there!

I only had my crappy camera phone with me and only took a couple of pictures but Hils had his camera and there are more photos at his flickr photo set

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