My mom told me this when I was a kid, and even then, I thought it was bullshit. (About the eight glasses, that is. Not the not need to.)
My mom told me this when I was a kid, and even then, I thought it was bullshit. (About the eight glasses, that is. Not the not need to.)
Dear Software GUI Programmers,
Please remember this rule when setting the colors of your user interface: if you specify a background color, you must also specify a foreground color.
In my efforts to reinstall software on my system this past weekend, I encountered a number of installer scripts and interfaces where white text was placed against a white background, or black text against a black background. Why? Because I set the default colors on my system to white-on-black, not black-on-white.
White backgrounds hurt my eyes, which is why none of my web sites have light backgrounds. So I changed my system to suit my need.
Unfortunately, most developers aren’t so vigilant. When you force your software to use white text, you can’t assume your user’s system will provide a dark background. Same goes for dark text.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to switch back and forth between schemes, just to use an application. It’s the first lesson of programming — assume your user will give bad input.
Looks like Chris Noth and Vincent D’Onofrio are splitting up the caseload on Law & Order: Criminal Intent next season. The featurette on the season two DVDs of the original series all talk around how difficult Noth is to work with. I wonder how long he lasts before he leaves again.
I was randomly browsing my Amazon Wish List when I noticed the entry for Howards End had an “Add to Cart” link next to it. The DVD has been out of print for a while now, so it made me wonder — is it back in print? And if so, is there a deluxe edition coming out?
A quick search confirmed — an expanded edition of Howards End gets released on Feb. 15.
I was about ready to get this DVD from the UK (although it looks that edition is out of print since the deluxe edition has been available there since last year). Now I won’t have to.
David James Elliott is leaving JAG at the end of this season. He’s heading to ABC with a development deal — he’s either going to get cast in an existing show or get an entirely new show.
I’d love to see him on Desperate Housewives, if only to add more eye candy to that show. (But could the show handle the sexiness of both him and James Denton?)
Perhaps the best part of this news is that I no longer have to sit through all the military bravado of JAG to oggle at DJE. I had enough military rhetoric growing up — I don’t need it in my entertainment.
Assuming, of course, his next show doesn’t suck …
I’m a dweeb for finding this amusing, but in the office, I’ll sometimes have Mozilla’s JavaScript Console open to debug scripts I’m working on.
My ALT+TAB switching occasionally brings me to the console instead of my browser, and I get a quick shock at the number of debugging errors that popped into the console just from random web surfing.
I’ll think “tsk tsk” when I see the errors but the remember the whole glass houses thing — I’m sure my sites generate their own errors. (In fact, Movable Type seems to be generating some errors itself. Hmm …)
Dreamhost sets the annoying PHP configuration value session.use_trans_sid to true by default. That means the first time you visit a site hosted on Dreamhost using PHP sessions, the session ID is appended to the links in your page as a query string.
Not only does this make URLs ugly as hell, but it makes me uneasy thinking a user’s session ID — which is used to store information usually handled by cookies — is plastered all over a page.
Since I can’t edit Dreamhost’s php.ini file, I have to handle the configuration on my end. I run PHP as a CGI, so using ini_set to configure session.use_trans_sid or editing .htaccess won’t work.
But this very helpful article suggests using ini_set("url_rewriter.tags","") instead. Well, it works! No more ugly URLs!
Although I should probably be proactive and e-mail Dreamhost support to tell to turn the damn configuration value off.
What the fuck was that? “Is it because I’m a lesbian”? Where the hell did that come from?
Sure, it was pretty cathartic to see Serena Southerlyn getting fired — because diety knows how many years Law & Order fans have wanted to say the same thing to Elisabeth Röhm — but? Lesbian? Haaah??
That was so left field, I can’t even begin to come up with all the utterances of confusion to go with it. If she were going to be a gay character, maybe perhaps some of advocacy would have come through somehow in the last few years?
What the hell.
At work today, I was testing some JavaScript code on Netscape 4.8 — yeah, I know who uses Netscape 4.x? — when it occurred to me to test the same code on old versions of Internet Explorer.
Of course, that meant a jump on Google to find “Internet Explorer 4“, which lead me to browsers.evolt.org. Oh. My.