Jeremy Visser

When you stumble across this site, you may be wondering what the “narnia” in narnia.bounceme.net is.

Well, back when Dad got our first computer, it was a 486DX 33MHz. He named it Narnia. I’m not exactly sure why, but he did. The next computer we got was called Reepy. Reepy is short for Reepicheep, the mouse character in Prince Caspian, a book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis.

I named the next few computers, following the convention. We got a laptop, which I named Aslan. The next laptop was named Caspian. When Dad reformatted the hard drive on his work laptop we named it Bree. The next two desktop computers we got were called Miraz and Puddleglum, and when I got my computer I named it Rillian.

All these computers used the workgroup Narnia and when I was mucking around with domains I also called it NARNIA. Our wireless network is also called Narnia. When I registered a free No-IP subdomain for our website, what better name to call it than narnia.bounceme.net?

Update: I now have a real domain named sunriseroad.net and will not use the Narnia domain for anything much anymore.

I’ve just discovered the use of negative margins in CSS.

On Friday night I decided to trash the YBSC WordPress theme that I was currently working on and port it to Sandbox. Before, I was basing the HTML code on Kubrick and it was a real mess. It just felt very…unclean working with it and I felt guilty writing CSS for it.

I’d been hearing about the goodness of Sandbox and I got most of my theme ported in less than half an hour. Seriously. It’s Saturday evening now and I’m nearing a “release candidate”, if you can call a theme that. In other words, it’s attractive and usable and I have been able to do everything I required with just CSS.

Why on Earth did I title this post Negative Margins? Oh yeah, while writing the post I discovered a nifty trick with overlapping elements. In Sandbox, in the main page, you have the post title you have a h2 classed entry-title followed by a div classed entry-date. I wanted to have the entry-title fill the available space (i.e. display: block and width: 100%) and have the following entry-date on the same line but aligned right.

At first, I thought of using a CSS-based tabular design but threw that thought out after about two seconds of consideration. Then, I tried float: left‘ing the entry-title but that caused all sorts of alignment problems. I then tried the position: relative attribute in the entry-date, also with a top: -2.7em. That worked but it left a gap where the former location of the entry-date was.

That’s where negative margins helped. I simply added a margin-bottom: -2.7em and it shifted all the other text up. Magic! It even worked in IE.

Speaking of IE, my sidebars keep dissappearing. I have no idea why. They’re just blank. I hate IE.

The word “learned” is not actually a word in Australian English. The Americans are confusing the world with their propietary algorithims custom words. The correct word in Australian English is “learnt”.

I’ve been using the Ubuntu Customization Customisation Kit (UCK) to muck around with customising Ubuntu Live CDs.

It works, and I can do nifty stuff like add MP3 support out-of-the-box but more complex stuff like enabling NVIDIA drivers to run on the Live CD is a bit tricky. Speaking of NVIDIA, they’ve got a new logo.

I’ve been trying to modify the UCK scripts so I can do a bit of manual dpkg‘ing but in order to do that I’ve needed to know some bash. I ‘ve been asking Dad questions about bash scripting, as that’s what UCK is written in, but it’s not very easy getting the hang of it. I still haven’t got the hang of it, if that’s the impression you just got.

Don’t nobody go nowheres. I’ll be back with more news of what I accomplished.