RasterWeb!

I recently solved a CSS problem that was causing me to repeatedly pound my head against the desk, and honestly the desk has already sustained quite a bit of damage from previous head banging incidents.

I was surprised to learn that I got completely different behavior between Internet Explorer 5.00.2920.0000 on Windows 2000 and
Internet Explorer 5.00.2919.6307 on Windows 98. Ok, I wasn’t exactly surprised, more like annoyed by the CSS bugs in MSIE. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the differences between Windows 2000 and Windows 98, or was fully the result of the 0.00.0001.3693 revision. Perhaps they fixed a single bug and release a new version.

Anyway, the next time MSIE 5.xx.xxxx.xxxx is giving you CSS problems, curse a bit, bang your head against the desk, and then try rearranging the elements in your CSS file… And if that doesn’t work, just repeat the process until it does.

(Of course it’s always a good time to switch to a Gecko-based browser like Mozilla…)

In Mac OS X there exists a command named pbcopy which according to my notes, copies standard input to the GUI‘s copy buffer, or pasteboard for the technical among you. Which, in english, means you can pipe stuff into pbcopy, and then use the old ‘Command-V’ to paste it where you like.

So in the Terminal you type:

uname -a | pbcopy

and back in your standard Mac OS X application you you can paste the result, which in this case is:

Darwin MacOSX.local. 6.5 
Darwin Kernel Version 6.5: 
Mon Apr  7 17:05:38 PDT 2003; 
root:xnu/xnu-344.32.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC 
Power Macintosh powerpc

Of course you can find more interesting things to pipe into pbcopy I’m sure, here’s some ideas:

• perl -V
• sw_vers
• hostinfo

Oh, there’s also pbpaste, basically the reverse of pbcopy, for when you want some command line pasting action that comes from the GUI’s pasteboard…

Whew, it’s a good thing I remain under the radar and no one pays attention to me.

On 04.03.2003 I posted a bit about what I called the Goophabet, which involves searching Google for each single letter of the alphabet.

Then on 04.14.2003 I noticed Ward Cunningham also did a Google Alphabet thingy. Ward said that Great minds think alike, which, coming from Ward, I took as a compliment.

I completely missed Docs mention of the ‘O’ incident…

Now Search Engine Watch does a bit on something called the Google Alphabet, which points you to ChangeMedia’s Google Alphabet.

So ChangeMedia took things a step further, resulting in zillions of hits and popularity going through the roof via the slashdot-effect. Luckily I’ve managed to avoid all of that, but it was a close call!

Anyway, you’re all welcome…

From the Switchers Department:

Richard Stallman best known for the creation and relentless advocacy of the Gnu Project Licence, has for many years run his own site using software produced under the more generous BSD licence. www.stallman.org switched from FreeBSD to Linux during April

This InfoWorld article on open-source has the following statement from Brian Behlendorf:

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn’t just a Web server, it’s a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition.

I heartily agree. I think some of the strongest points for many open-source projects are that they are so open – not just in the code – but in the development process, and in the interaction of the people involved. Through mailing lists, newsgroups, bug trackers, and now weblogs – you can really cut through the crap and see what a piece of software is really about.

And of course without people being involved in these projects, leveraging the work of other people, things wouldn’t be where they are today.

I’ll add my disclaimer here: I’m not against commercial software, heck, I even use commercial software,
but I hate to think of how dismal the software world would be without the contributions of open-source. If we
took all the open-source code out of Mac OS X or even out of Windows, well, things wouldn’t quite work
as well. (Mac OS X wouldn’t even exist!) Of course we wouldn’t even have the internet here to discuss this now, would we?