I’m going to upgrade WordPress to the latest 2.1 version this weekend. Not that it should matter to you or the day to day business of this blog. I just want to mention it because I will not get around updating my own plugins and widgets, of which one is reported broken, until after the upgrade.
As you may notice, the site is back. No more “WordPress Error” screen. The reason it went down was a scheduled upgrade of MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1.
The blog will be down today January 19th at 15:00 due to planned maintenance. The reason is an upgrade of MySQL.
I seriously don’t know how I could lived this long and used my Gentoo installation without enabling anti-alias for the rendering of fonts. For a long time I have admired Konqueror (or KHTML to be precise) for its beautiful renditions of web pages compared to Firefox, text rendering so soft and clear, thinking it was a KHTML thing. Turns out that all I had to do was to edit some files and restart X.
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I have been playing around with the Amazon Web Services and S3 in particular over the last couple of days. It’s something I have planned to do for a long time now but never have come around till now. But I got a kick in the but to wake up and smell the Amazon Kool-Aid (ok, too many mixed metaphors and pop-cultural references) when I heard Jeff Barr’s presentation “Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship” from d.Construct 2006 about AWS, especially how easy it is to get started and play around with the services. One of the tools he mentioned, S3 Firefox Organizer, a Firefox add-on, had me up and running in matter of minutes.
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My comment over at Jeremy blog managed to get somewhat botched so here is it in its original glory:
My approach from now will be fluid layouts using max-width (or “telescoping” layouts as I like to call them) and deal with IE6 using Dean Edwards IE7 script as Eric pointed out a long time ago (at least in internet time).
That leaves us with IE6 browsers with JavaScript turned off and other non-webstandard complying browsers. My hunch is that a fluid layout will look pretty decent in these cases anyway. In terms of Yahoo Graded Browser Support: these aren’t our A-grade browsers. One can not make a web site look exactly the same for all types of browsers, but then that’s the idea behind going fluid.
I haven’t yet managed to read through all the other comments that post generated. It’s a nice concept that Jeremy has going by the way, allowing commenting on posts selectively and not display them publicly until the commenting is closed.
I can’t figure out why the PNG transparency wont apply to the artwork in my previous “Redesign Chronicle” when viewing the post in IE6 — despite the fact that I’m using Dean Edwards IE7 script and the files end in -trans.png. Arrrgh!
Update: I’ve cracked it! Turned out that it was the PNG files themselves. The illustrations were drawn with Inkscape as vector graphics (SVG to be precise) and rasterized as PNG with the softwares own bitmap exporter. However, Inkscape seem to produce PNG files that Internet Explorer doesn’t like and the transparency bugfix can’t do anything about. But the solution was simple: just open each PNG file in Gimp and re-save it. Of course, I could also have opened each SVG file in Gimp and saved the PNGs from there.