Jeremy Visser

I’m writing this in the car (with Dad’s iPAQ) waiting to leave. We’re going to be on holidays for a week, so I won’t be blogging during that time, unless I “find” an access point!

Update Oct 7: We’re back. Phew. I didn’t find an access point, though, so I didn’t have an internet connection. I did, however, use SVK to “buffer” my SVN commits and I’ve sent them off to the repository now.

I hate horizontal link lists with pipe separators. This | is | an | example

The reason I hate them is because they’re inflexible for use with CSS. I also hate to think how a screen reader would say it. Perhaps “this pipe is pipe an pipe example”?

I discovered with a bit of CSS voodoo magic I could put the links in a UL, get them to display: inline; (i.e. make them horizontal) and do a ul li + li:before { content: " | "; } to get it to display the pipe with CSS. The li + li:before is to stop it from doing it to the first one.

That sort of works, but there is an uneven gap between the items. I tried a bit of tweaking with the margins and padding, but it didn’t play along nicely with font scaling. It does work, actually. I discovered I just had some legacy left-overs in my CSS.

I don’t understand why it’s so trendy to use a pipe. Even the W3C do it. For once, I think they’re wrong.

I’ve just come across a handy tutorial for a jump start on SVK.

While we’re going to be away for a week and probably without an internet connection, I wanted to have a local mirror of my SVN repository that was hosted on Google Code. It looks like SVK is going to fit the job nicely.

I can’t stand going more than a few hours without having access to a repository while I’m coding. It is very refreshing just to send off lots of small changes that are easy to keep track of. Inversely, it is hard to keep track of mountainous amounts of code. While offline, I would generally work on one part of the code, run out of ideas, work on another part of the code, forget what I did in the first part and leave it broken, do a commit when next online, do several more commits to fix the bugs I created.

SVK is going to be handy.

Hey every peoples. On Sunday, we lost power due to the heavy winds. Our August winds, which are normally spread throughout August came all at once on Sunday the 24th of September. Obviously, since we lost power, my website was down and I’ve probably lost most of my Google Juice by now.

Anyway, it’s back up now as of about two hours ago. We would have actually got our power back on Sunday night, had they noticed that the problem was just a blown fuse in the transformer. Their priority was, of course, to fix the lines that had actually fallen a few blocks up, so we were the least important on their minds.

I whipped this up during lunch: an HTML Task Dialog.

It’s based on the Windows Vista Task Dialogs and is valid HTML and CSS. IE6 even works with it, although I use an alpha-blended PNG (from Tango) which doesn’t look all that pretty.

It is a license agreement dialog which gives you two options: “Yes”, or “Maybe”. I hope you’ll get the humour. Ha ha.
I also created a “Take over the world” variant which I’ve been doing for all my Hello World stuff while experimenting with various user interfaces. I always do those variants because I read the book Beginning Programming for Dummies by Wallace Wang (it was on QBASIC) and he used a lot of examples in that style. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it funny.