Flash annoyance

Flash reserves too many names, I'm making varibles yeah and all the sort of things you'd like to call them in an ideal world are reserved like:

• name


• icon


• item


• title

so my variable names end up being obscure like catName for a variable inside a class which may as well just be name.

project: The end

Well the project is done basically and the first feature requests are in.

Next I want to take the iTunes music library XML file and create some beautiful visualisation of that data

IE bugs

Ran into a moronic bug in IE where hovering over a link would remove the margins and padding from its containing div.
Turns out the culprit was changing the border colour on the a:hover...... how can changing a colour have anything to do with a container objects margins, just a sign of the incompetence at MS really.
The solution?
Telling IE to instead of changing the bottom border to a different colour to change it to the same as the original colour which manages to solve the problem, so IE must be asking each time "Is that the same colour which is already set? OK don't do anything then" luckily or I'd have to create a more awkward solution.

Microsoft admit IE is a pile of garbage

So you need to put some different CSS rules in because IE is such a pathetic pile of junk that has been surpassed in the less than a year by a tiny team of developers so what can you do.
Well it seems microsoft realise how pathetic IE is at CSS and created the IE conditional comments

<!--[if IE]>
<style>
div.logo {
margin-left: 10px;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->

Using that special type of comment you can pass CSS to IE and hide it from less moronic browsers.
Which is good in some ways, but unfortunately you can't include them in CSS files they have to be in the HTML so thats pretty rubbish.

The fact microsoft put a feature like this in proves they realise they are not pulling their weight in the CSS world

Opera

Downloaded Opera today and was pleastenly surprised to find that after two CSS changes my site functioned close to perfectly, the only thing missing is one fade effect which I might correct but all the AJAX and styling works great. I was worried it would totally butcher it but luckily the Opera team are on the ball, unlike Internet Explorer which rumour has it is getting pulled out of the OS in the next version of windows (currently its used to render some horrible information design around the edges of the file managers windows and do some other pointless stuff like draw the grid in add/remove programs) sounds like somebody is admitting its a big pile of garbage if I'm honest.

Pages

Pages is a word processing dream come true, I wish I had got hold of this last term, it destroys every issue I have with MS Word.

• Nice simple uncluttered interface


• Beautiful on screen font rendering and in print


• OS X Colour Picker support


• IMAGE RESIZING CONFORMS TO THE BASELINE GRID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


• 2 Clicks in the tool palette to set an image to right aligned wrap style, and it lines up properly with the text (this was around 5 clicks in a popup window before in Word

An absolutely excellent program, and very cheap too.

The PHP documentation again

Its just so terrible, it reads like a child trying to show off to you rather than trying to teach you anything.
Preg_Replace
A pretty complicated topic as regular expressions are tricky to grasp for some people at first and are like a minute scripting language in themselves, so lets start with some easy text replacing.... or not in this case:
Example 1. Convert HTML to text
OH SOMETHING NICE AND SIMPLE TO GET US STARTED THEN?

gets much worse
Example 2. Using backreferences followed by numeric literals
Absolutely no idea what that means at all, something to do with dates judging by the code.


It should be
Example 1: Simple text replace
AS THATS WHAT 70% OF PEOPLE WILL BE USING IT FOR, you want something a bit smarter than standard replace but don't want to go the whole way and convert HTML just yet.

Macbook Pro

Can't believe Apple moved away from the incredibly strong Powerbook brand, surely the only laptop name well known enough to rival it was the IBM Thinkpad and thats miles behind it. But instead of just sticking something on the end of it like they did with Powerbook G3 and G4 they went and changed it to the horrible "MacBook Pro" which sounds like the name a 14 year old would think up for a computer, absolutely pathetic Apple.

I really hope they switch it back to Powerbook when the G4 models die off.

Even the quite cringe worthy "Powerbook Core" would have been better.

Democracy

Democracy Player is a nice idea of using RSS and Bittorrent together to provide internet TV channels, shame its so badly optimised at the minute that the interface is incredibly sluggish and it takes up 60% of my processor basically doing nothing while bittorrent normally takes up below 1% and VLC about 10%.
Hopefully it will get to a state where I can actually use it.