The Naked Green

2005.2.28 Monday

Training Day

Filed under: Work — Mr. Green @ 7.24 pm

My last day “on the job” was last Friday, but I spent the day today training my boss and a lesser manager. I will also spend tomorrow training another manager. Apparently, it will take three well paid managers to do my job for half days while they search for a suitable replacement. Is that an ego boost or what?

The position was great in that I had plenty of time to myself in a quiet room to play on a computer. I “owned” the position and could was very much in control of how things happened. It was also very detailed work.

I’m glad to be moving on, though. It’s hard to do something day in and day out that is losing your company money. It was a dead end job and I could feel it. The satisfaction was just not there. Working tomorrow will be good because it means I get medical insurance for March, but I need to get on to my web design work. The first phase deadline is this Friday…that’s more exciting.

2005.2.26 Saturday

PNG Transparency in IE

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 10.19 pm

It’s yet another post about long hours trying to trick Internet Exploder into working. I worked on Jamie’s blog or a while today to implement a newish design and learned some tricks, too.

Thanks to LPD, I have found a new solution (if you can call it that) to the lack of PNG transparency support in IE instead of using filter: alpha(opacity=60) which ends up washing out the colors of the PNG image.

This hack uses the horrid looking, non validating filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='75p_honey.png'); to accomplish this simple feat (simple in Firefox, that is). Of course, then you must hide the actual background-image: url(/folderto/sample.png);, so we use #content[id] to hide it from IE. Simple, isn’t it? Well, that lovely hack job makes links all but useless in IE (you see them, but they don’t work). So, for some reason only old Billy knows, you have to add position: relative to all child elements (#content *). Here is a sample:
(more…)

2005.2.24 Thursday

!important Declaration

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 10.29 am

No, I don’t have some mind-boggling, profound idea to share with you. I learned something (that may be mind-boggling) about CSS today.

I was working on some CSS for Stevish.com, I came across some strange code:


margin: 0 !important;
margin: 0 6px 0 1px;

Not knowing what it was, I promptly deleted it with no adverse effects and moved on. Then I thought better of the situation and figured I should find out what this strange “hack” is supposed to do. That was not easily done to to search engines removing the ! in !important. alltheweb was the only one I found that would keep it and even then I got plenty of importants and some hokiness. I did find what I was looking for: 6.4.2 !important rules of w3c’s CSS2 Specification:

CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet (see cascade rule 3).

However, for balance, an “!important” declaration (the keywords “!” and “important” follow the declaration) takes precedence over a normal declaration. Both author and user style sheets may contain “!important” declarations, and user “!important” rules override author “!important” rules. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.

So it’s an actual CSS declaration! It didn’t seem to make sense in context, though, because there are two margin selectors in the sample code. So, I figured it was yet another “standards compliant” hack to deal with the infamous Internet Exploder. I decided it would be quicker to mess with the code myself and found that IE will override an !important declaration with a second selector (margin), while a standards compliant browser such as Firefox will not.

Here’s an example:

Using the following CSS:

style="color: green !important; color: red;"

This sentence is green in Firefox and red in IE.

There may be people searching for the “exclamation point important” hack or the “exclamation point important” declaration and with search engines not reading !important right, I thought I would help.

2005.2.21 Monday

Don’t Forget with XHTML

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 6.41 pm

I added downloadable sermons to Life Spring’s website today and polished the site up a bit. One thing I had to ask myself was, “Why are you using HTML?” So, I switched over to XHTML 1.0 Strict which was not all that difficult.

In XHTML, you have to close all tags. So, I went through and replaced <br> with <br /> and did the same (manually) with the image tags.

Remember that all html tags have to be in lowercase when coding in XHTML due to the fact that XML is case sensitive. When I uploaded my pages, all the text was big and when I validated, I found the culprits. For some reason I had two meta tags that were capitalized.

As usual, Thanks to W3Schools for their XHTML tutorial!

New Blog with WordPress 1.5

Filed under: Blog Publishing, News — Mr. Green @ 10.37 am

I’m a little late, but I noticed yesterday that WordPress 1.5 has been officially released. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to update my blog for a little while. There is a new blogger in the blogosphere since yesterday running 1.5, though. Jamie and I gave my brother his own domain, blog and hosting yesterday for his birthday. It’s at Stevish.com where there is sure to be some great witty humor and profound thoughts to come.

In setting up his blog, I got to play around with the new WordPress some and it is cool. It will take some getting used to as a lot has changed. I would say much of the change is for the better with brand new goodies such as Themes, SPAM spam and comment controls, a user system, a “dashboard”, static pages and better plugin support. I was surprised that the installation was actually easier and smaller than 1.2! Is that even possible?

I was sold on WordPress from my first research spree and have not found anything that’s more appealing since. It just got better and I’m excited to download it and play! Good programming like this is what makes it hard to stay on task…which is what I’ll try to do now.

Have fun playing with your new toy, Stephen!

Homemaking Practice

Filed under: Personal, Work — Mr. Green @ 10.19 am

I’m home from work today for President’s Day, but instead of vacationing, I decided to do some other work. It’s in preparation of my last day at my job this Friday when I’ll be free from the “nine to five” and will have to cajole myself into the self-discipline of the foreboding “freelance” work.

I’m working today on our church website as well as cooking, cleaning, and preparing for guests tonight. Of course I have to do some obligatory “work time” blogging as well.

2005.2.17 Thursday

Tulsa World Losing

Filed under: News — Mr. Green @ 9.59 am

The saga continues and Michael Bates has more about Tulsa Whirled’s utter stupidity on his blog. Tulsa World has a confusing web editor, a wacky owner and even bullies web hosts. What I can’t get over is the continual stupidity. You would think they would just cut their losses and go back to “reporting news” not making it. Instead, Robert Lorton, the president of Tulsa World, spoke to ktul, Oklahoma’s News Channel 8 about some PDF nonsense.

Tulsa World’s policy is that you may only copy an article with their permission, and you have to copy the entire article. Apparently you can link to their website, but too many people are doing it and they want it to stop…right now! I think they need to figure out what their policy is, realize what century it is and just shut up.

2005.2.16 Wednesday

Media Mafia

Filed under: News — Mr. Green @ 2.07 pm

Michael of BatesLine has been sent a “nasty-gram” by a local newspaper called Tulsa Whirled (I mean, World) to stop quoting their articles or linking to their website or get sued. He happens to be “the opposition” of many of their apparently opinionated articles and occasionally mentions his disagreements with full credit to their stupidity and a complimentary link to their website. Michael says:

… The threat is empty, an attempt at using intimidation to silence my criticism of their editorials and news coverage.

Why would a big ol’ daily paper, with over 100,000 daily circulation, send a nastygram like this to someone who gets about 1,000 visits a day? And why now? Here’s a little background, especially for you out-of-towners:
–more–

That they are stupid I take for granted based on their lengthy “cease and desist” letter that Michael received stating their “demand that you immediately remove any Tulsa World material from your website, to include unauthorized links to our website”. What they hoped to accomplish by their bullying of a local “insignificant” objector I don’t know, but they have gained the blogosphere’s scorn and derision and have given Tulsa World’s foe a much larger audience.

It does bring up an interesting point about copyrights, though. I remember some talk related to the Napster saga that spoke of linking as possible copyright infringement. The reasoning behind it was that by viewing a web page, you are essentially copying it to your hard drive. Thus in linking to it, you are aiding and encouraging copyright infringement. Of course that reasoning doesn’t really mean much seeing as that’s what the internet is and how it functions. Apparently, that’s what a Federal Judge, Harry L. Hupp, decided: Hypertext Linking does not violate Copyright
. Michael notes this as he comments on another Tulsa World attack over linking rights.

For my obligatory quote of the newspaper, I turn to Tulsa Whirled’s Copyright Statement where they inform us that we may not “display or store any part of its Material for purposes other than the User’s personal, noncommercial use.” They said it themselves! It’s not copyright infringement if used as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” as stated in Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use of Title 17 of the United States Code. Of course there is limits to “fair use”, but I think that this case is a clear case of MSM bullying.

Update:
With all the reading, I forgot where I got there from. Thanks to Eric at The Fire Ant Gazette!

Return of the Green Cite

Filed under: Green Cite — Mr. Green @ 9.26 am

It’s time again for that award ceremony that touches your heart and tickles your knees. The award that plucks a blog from obscurity (or even fame) to…even more obscurity! Yes, it’s the not-so-famous-but-still-really-cool- because-it-wisely-uses-the- best-color-ever Green Cite. Bloggers the world over unknowingly compete for this honor and it’s time to bestow the second virtual trophy of wise color usage.

Once again, without further ado (except of course for the obligatory parenthesis to annoy the reader, belabor the point and work up suspense…again), I announce the winner: Ourgreenroom, “an interactive community of spiritual seekers”! Congratulations, Chris!

Ourgreenroom led me to Real Live Preacher who led me to the next nominee for the illustrious Green Cite…which you will have to wait for, of course.

Brought to you by Mr. Green. All contestants will receive “really cool points” just for qualifying. Stay tuned for more wonderful greenery right here on The Naked Green.

2005.2.15 Tuesday

The Naked Orchestra

Filed under: Obsessions — Mr. Green @ 3.49 pm

The Naked Orchestra:

Do you know what it’s like to be able to see through someone? To see them naked in a sense, not in the sense of having no clothes and of seeing their naked body, but in a much deeper sense as if you can see right inside their flesh, the movement of their soul, the ebb and flow, the light and shade of their inner self.
–more–

It’s a sad story, but any author that can use the word naked so many times and not once hint at sex has got something to say as far as I’m concerned. He would understand “The Naked Green” perhaps. He talks of it, actually, which is how I found his sad story:

Now, there’s talent, there’s originality! Not a fiddle player anywhere to be seen on the naked green

It reminds me of the movie, Kolya.

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