Jeremy Visser

The other day I just learned some CSS that was completely new to me, yet so blinking obvious.

First of all, I didn’t know what static positioning was. That’s very hard to believe that I didn’t pick that up, considering I have been doing heaps of CSS coding for the last 6 months. I had simply thought that all elements were positioned with relative by default, absolute for exact positioning and fixed for when it stays in the same place when you scroll the page.

I came across the problem in ZilchMail when I was trying to get an absolutely positioned element to stretch from its default top position to the bottom of the page. My first problem was that I didn’t know that absolutely positioned elements are positioned relative to their parents. I fixed the problem by setting the parent to static. I can’t believe I hadn’t come across it before.

My next problem, which is still unresolved, is that I haven’t yet found out how to tell CSS to stretch the div from its default top position to the bottom of the page.

My ZilchMail CSS is starting to get very messy and quirky. Maybe I should rewrite it again.

I’ve just implemented the first prototype of an Ajax-powered inbox in ZilchMail! It’s not exactly XML-based at the moment, but then again, it’s been in the ZilchMail code for less than 24 hours!

This is the first step into creating a smoother user-experience. And, I promise, if I ever get this into a useable stage (probably after I implement a delete button) I will be making this available for general use.

I just upgraded WordPress to version 2.0.2. Sometimes I wish my blog was located at WordPress.com so I wouldn’t have to do these painful upgrades, but they don’t have an RSS import feature, so it’s not really feasible.

You might have read about me reinstalling Linux on my computer due to the fact that it was unstable while the 3D driver was in use.

Anyway, like I said, I tried SuSE next. I downloaded the ISO off iiNet’s really cool mirror and bunged it on last Saturday. (Actually, I ended up downloading it with BitTorrent after iiNet’s webserver started giving me a negative value for the size of the file and it corrupted or something while downloading, but that’s a different story.)

Installation went smoothly, all my hardware appeared to be supported except for my sound card (nVidia nForce), video card (can’t include 3D driver in the OS due to legal reasons), and USB Wireless LAN.

When I booted up, it wanted me to download about 200MB worth of updates. (Which is pretty unfair on those on dialup connections – lucky I’m not) I downloaded the extra video driver in the “optional” section and ran the standard procedures for installing nVidia video drivers on Linux.

Well, that worked. Mostly. The system was slightly more stable than the previous Breezy install, anyway. However, after a a few hours of “testing” my setup by playing TrueCombat, Q3 and the like, I noticed that my worst fears were realised. The programs were segfaulting again.

Well, there was nothing for it but to upgrade to the latest, unsupplied by SuSE, driver from nVidia. Gulp. I’d had trouble installing the driver manually on SuSE before and never actually succeded. Well, I thought I’d give it a shot this time and I’ll spoil the ending by telling you I did get installed. With a bit lot of help from Dad, we figured out we needed to install the kernel-source, gcc, and make packages. Also, we needed to copy some config folder from /boot/2.6.whatever into /usr/src/2.6.10-15/. Next, we had to run nvidia-installer with the command-line parameter of -e, so we could manually specify the source path of the kernel. (RPM stupidly put it somewhere where only a very handy locate could find it.)

Anyway, the kernel interface was compiled and it started working. The system hasn’t crashed yet, since installing the driver 24 hours ago, which is a very good sign. Next to go is the sound driver. I’ll keep you posted (pun (that you won’t get anyway) was intended) on the next time it crashes.

Well well well.

I’ve seen the Origami Project web page which is some “unknown” project from Microsoft to be revealed on the 9th of march.

Well, on the Week 2 page, I viewed the source of the page and…well this…

Origami Project: the Mobile PC running Windows XP

…kind of speaks for itself.

Good job Microsoft! You did well in keeping the secret until the 9th, seeing as though today’s the 3rd!