Over the weekend we had some unexpected visitors in the backyard, ducks! I was walking towards our back sliding door, when what should I see, but a pair of wild ducks waddling along in our back yard, happily quacking away. I took a couple of very quick photos before they continued to the neighbours yard.
All posts by Alistair Lattimore
IE7, CSS & Web Standards
Following on from IE7 Beta 1 receiving its first public beta release, comes more fantastic news. On the 29th July, the IE team posted again, outlining what has already been fixed in IE7 but is not present in the release they made available. For those that don’t feel like clicking through:
- Peekaboo bug
- Guillotine bug
- Duplicate Character bug
- Border Chaos
- No Scroll bug
- 3 Pixel Text Jog
- Magic Creeping Text bug
- Bottom Margin bug on Hover
- Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
- IE/Win Line-height bug
- Double Float Margin Bug
- Quirky Percentages in IE
- Duplicate indent
- Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
- 1 px border style
- Disappearing List-background
- Fix width:auto
- HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
- Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
- CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
- CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
- Alpha channel in PNG images
- Fix :hover on all elements
- Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
These are the sorts of fixes that the standards based development community have been screaming about for the last five years. I’m very excited to hear that in the coming months, we might be able to see the first stable release of IE7 with a vast portion of fixes in place. Lets keep those wheels rolling and squish the bugs that have plagued Internet Explorer for years.
IE7 Beta 1 Available
On Wednesday 27th July, the Microsoft IE team announced the public release of IE7 Beta 1.
In April, I commented on IE7 Beta 1 initially being announced and had some serious reservations about it. I felt IE7, in general, was going to be nothing but a patch job and a half arsed attempt at fixing an old and out of date browser. Microsoft have aimed to fix IE many times before, however it has always fallen by the roadside. So, it is easy to see how most people were quite cynical that this time would be any different.
With the initial announcement, the IE team made it clear that the first release of IE7 would be quite limited. Their primary concern was fixing and increasing security, which has plagued all versions of IE. They did mention that they were fixing a couple CSS errors and a couple of general improvements, like PNG support.
Now that it is out, they haven’t disappointed. Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has put together a fairly critical article describing what has and hasn’t been fixed, pointing out that most of the common CSS problems still exist. I’m not quite sure why the tone of that article is so harsh, well I think it is pretty harsh. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, the IE team said that they weren’t aiming to fix those problems in the first release.
Personally, I think that the developer community should be more happy than sad. The IE team said they were going to release a public beta this summer (ie: the Australian winter) and they have. They have fixed the things they said they would and have committed to adding and fixing plenty more in the future. The wheels of big business often turn slowly, this case is no different. The good news is that they are turning, which is a requirement for them improving the rather dire position that Internet Explorer is in.
Round-abouts & Road Rules
It amazes me the number of people that don’t know the road rules. Near where I live there is large round about, two lanes, that serves as a junction point between four busy roads. Each entry to the round-about is marked where you can and cannot go.
Let’s revise the rules for a second:
- The outside lane can indicate left to exit the round-about at any exit, so long as the car doesn’t pass the opposite point on the round-about. So in the case of a standard four entry round-about setup in a cross configuration, if you are in the outside lane when you enter, you can take your immediate exit or go straight.
- If we use the standard configuration again, the inside lane can exit at the opposite exit (ie: going straight through) or turn right and subsequently exit at any exit on the round about as they are on the inside lane.
- You may not enter in the left lane and turn right at the round about. This would conflict with point two where the inside lane can go straight through.
- You may not enter in the inside lane and take the immediate exit on your left. This would conflict with point one, where the outside lane can go straight through.
The above rules are very simple and are there to avoid accidents. However, without fail there is an accident every fortnight on our round-about. The most common cause is people breaking rule number three. Visualise this, two cars enter the round-about side by side. The inside car intends to go straight (within his rights) and the outside lane intends to turn right (breaking the rules). The inside car indicates to exit and go straight through however suddenly there is a car on his left turning right, smash boom bang.
The “problem” is caused by lazy and impatient drivers. In the afternoon, there is a huge amount of traffic turning right at this round about so the traffic does back up a little, maybe 100m or so. With that said, it does flow through very quickly – so if people had more than the patience of a gnat, everything would be ok. Instead, the impatient drivers will zoom up to the front of the queue in the left lane (where there is far less traffic) and just turn right, irrespective of the road rules.
Any person that lives near that round-about no doubt curses every time an impatient driver does this. Low and behold, yesterday on the way home from work, who should do it but a Police Officer! I just about couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the very person who is meant to enforce the law and road rules, breaking the very thing he is meant to be enforcing.
Slackers.
Microwaving Adversaries
The U.S Military have a new weapon, the Active Denial System which they intend to deploy in Iraq next year.
This new weapon shoots out a 95 Gigahertz microwave beam and is intended to be used for “crowd control”. The idea is that the rioters will do anything they can to get out of the road the weapon, as it creates an intense heating and burning sensation to the target.
In short, they’ve created a mobile microwave with a focused beam of energy to super-heat/cook humans. I wonder how they are going to know if they are over exposing a person to microwaves? They won’t worry about that, those people will just be casualties of war with melted skin and cancer. What if the person being hit with it can’t move? Remember what happens when you put metal into a microwave? I do, its very bad. What do they think is going to happen when the target has a metal belt on or say, a titanium plate in their leg?
Next, the U.S Military will use a normal rifle for crowd control. They’ll say that the rioters will only get hurt if they don’t get our of the road of the bullets.
Image shamelessly stolen from ABC News.