David Anderson's Unfinished Symphony

I received this from a friend a few days ago, and with my usual sense of urgency have decided to post it up here. For those of you who don't know, Great Ormond Street is a major children's hospital located in London, and the GOSH Children's Charity aims to supplement the funding provided by the NHS. Anyway, here's Marty's notice:

Over the past few months I've played a very tiny part in a VERY special auction which is now live. Some facts that might bore a few of you but:-

"In 2005 Lancasters armourie were contracted by the BBC to build a number of prop swords for the Christmas special episode of the hit revival of Doctor Who.

Used by Doctor Who actor David Tennant and the leader of the Sycorax race the swords were seen by 10 million viewers.

Now Lancasters are auctioning the prototype of the sword (above) in aid of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

And, as if owning this unique piece of television history wasn't enough Lancasters have been aided in their fundraising effort by the generosity BBC Wales and actors David Tennant and Sean Gilder who have provided their signatures for engraving on the blade.

The sword will be auctioned via ebay. Clive Lankford of Lancasters tell us they "are not shy about the fact that we want this to make as much money for GOSHCC as possible".

More information is available at Martin's "MayorWatch" website, and the charity auction can be found on Ebay. The auction is set to end on June 19, so if you want to get a bid in you still have a few days to do so.

A few months ago I asked if anyone had noticed a bug in Firefox that caused the vertical scrollbar to vanish when resizing the browser window to 800 pixels wide. I never received any answers to the question – and I never thought much more about it as it didn't affect my browsing and I could still test sites at that width, just without a scrollbar. However, after updating to Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Friday the bug mysteriously reappeared, and this time it seemed more severe. This time it was affecting my ability to test sites, and so this time I did a little more than just ask about it on here.

A screenshot of Firefox's window resize bug in action

Rather than just losing the vertical scrollbar I now lost the horizontal one too, when one should be there – which would be every time for content that wasn't fixed to fit in under 800 pixels wide as liquid layouts, such as the one on this blog, failed to resize too.

I did a search on bugzilla to see if there were any previously filed reports and found one dating back to 2003 which has identical symptoms to this one (as in it's the same bug, 3 years and several browser versions later). It turns out that the problem is a result of the browser incorrectly tying viewport width in with the status bar width, so if your status bar contains a large number of icons, or a series of longer ones, you are likely to encounter this issue. In order to temporarily fix it I've had to disable the status bar icons for a number of my browser extensions so that they all fit at an 800 pixel wide resolution. This is far from ideal and diminishes the usefulness of my browser as a development tool, not to mention affecting the single biggest factor (in my opinion) in Firefox's commercial success – it's extensibility.

How a bug with such severe outcomes as this can survive for three years and across multiple updates and upgrades I don't know – perhaps it's down to its severity being stupidly marked as minor?

On a different note, I also think that the absence of an installation rollback feature for Firefox is a major omission that should be rectified ASAP. At this moment in time the only viable (yet risky) option for repairing a failed install/update, including automatic updates, is to overwrite the existing installation. For example if the install fails due to a corrupt installer package you need to overwrite it with a different copy, or less desirably, a previous version. How come? As mentioned, there's no rollback feature and system restore often fails to correct the problem – I know, I tried it myself on Friday when the first update attempt left me with nothing more than an empty title bar:

Firefox 1.5.0.4 following automatic update using a corrupt installer package.

My less than functional copy of Firefox, consisting of an empty title bar and a non-working close window button.

Fortunately overwriting with a different installer worked, if it didn't I'd have needed some way of getting hold of an earlier version – not too easy when the Firefox download page only contains links to the latest version and Evolt's latest archive version is 0.7.1 – the average user wouldn't think to change the version number in the download URL at Mozilla. Also, I think the idea is for Firefox to not only be a first choice browser, but eventually to become the only choice for the average user? Like Internet Explorer is currently for millions of people – so what would have happened if that was the case? I'd have been left completely browserless and unable to find a way back to Mozilla to download a different copy of the installer package.

These are the kind of issues that Mozilla need to urgently address if they want to see their market share continue to rise, failure to do so could well lead to them losing it. The world is a fickle place and in my opinion the main factor keeping Firefox ahead of Opera at the moment is its extensibility, but even that has lingering flaws as is mentioned above.

Feel free to skip this if you're not interested in this kind of thing, but Toxie has meme tagged me. For revenge it seems. Anyway …

• I AM: a bit lax at posting here.
• I WANT: to get better at this web development malarky.
• I HATE: the stupid petty things that I should be able to ignore.
• I MISS: my parents.
• I FEAR: being eaten alive.
• I HEAR: a lot more than appearances indicate.
• I WONDER: for a while, then I examine.
• I REGRET: pretty much everything I did from 1978 to 1984.
• I AM NOT: able to change those things.
• I DANCE: almost as well as I sing.
• I SING: incredibly well when incredibly drunk.
• I SEE: amazing things.
• I CRY: when no one appreciates my drunken singing.
• I AM NOT ALWAYS: impatient.
• I MAKE WITH MY HANDS: clicking noises.
• I WRITE: occasionally.
• I CONFUSE: now and then.
• I NEED: motivation.
• I SHOULD: learn javascript.
• I START: with good intentions.
• I FINISH: and want to redo it.

The other poor unfortunates that I'm inflicting this upon are:

• Granty (link removed as his blog no longer exists)
• Maz
• Paul

Dustin Diaz has announced the first annual CSS naked day to take place on the 5th of April. I had wanted to announce my participation in the event prior to my CSS turning off, but I didn't get the chance to and now it's gone.

Some of you may be wondering why I started early – well I haven't really. You see I used the PHP function provided by Luke Wertz to disable my CSS automatically and, as mentioned by Dustin, this will turn the CSS off as soon as it is the 5th of April anywhere in the World, and keep it turned off until it's no longer the 5th anywhere. In other words it's an annual CSS 2 naked days.

To find out what it's all about have a read of the announcement, however it's summed up quite well here by Håkon Wium Lie, the creator of CSS:

This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.

Håkon has pledged to take part, along with several hundred other mental people

In a little under 48 hours my CSS will return in a blaze of glory, in the meantime you get to see a more attractive ap4a.

Earlier this week I spent a few minutes tidying up the CSS, removing unnecessary selector duplications, combining identical rule sets, arranging the rule sets more logically, and removing excess white space, and removing whole style sheets that I'd either made obsolete by eliminating the markup they styled, or by including the contents within others that more logically related to their purpose. Basically making the CSS more easy to manage and more logically structured for the way that I work. The reason this was necessary was simply because I was working from someone else's original CSS; CSS that was arranged in a way that they considered logical but to me was haphazard, and only became more haphazard as changes were made, and extra rule sets added. In essence this is only a modified version of the default Kubrick theme for WordPress.

When I first began to create my own theme for this blog I began by modifying the default which, at the time, seemed like a good idea considering how clean and simple it appeared to be. Looking back it probably wasn't the best idea considering that Kubrick is a very feature rich theme which has a lot of associated template files. What I should have done was either read up on the designing WordPress themes for public release documentation in order to learn how to do it from scratch, or chosen a simpler theme to develop the basic look from and then added features to that as necessary. That aside I've still managed to learn a fair bit about how the back end of WordPress works as a result of my tinkering with Kubrick, so it's all good in the long term.

Anyway, as mentioned, a few changes have been made to the CSS. Overall this hasn't had much impact on how the site works in modern browsers, I've tested it and am happy that it looks as intended in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, Opera 8.52 and Opera 7.23 for Windows, and Firefox 1.5.0.1 for Windows. According to iCapture it also looks right in Safari 2.0.3, so I'm happy with that too. There are a couple of issues on Internet Explorer 5x for Windows however, and possibly IE for Mac – but I have no way of checking that.

In IE 5x for Windows there were, previously, a couple of very minor issues whereby the column side borders didn't quite meet the column headers, being separated by a one or two pixel gap. It was never something that I had bothered to correct as I chose not to use hacks for those browsers to fix a very minor issue in them – considering that they are very old, and very obsolete browsers, and this is a personal site. After the CSS alterations, however, there was slightly more of an issue. In IE 5.5 the third column on the front page dropped down beneath the second column – not something that would cause me any worry by itself, as the site is still fully functional and the drop doesn't detract to much for me to need to fix it for less than 1.5% of the visitors (sorry). In IE 5.01, however, the right-hand column borders were separated by 10 to 20 pixels from the column headers (ie. they were positioned 10 to 20 pixels too far to the right). This was an effect that I'd seen early on in IE 6, and was one that wasn't acceptable. So I've made a couple of minor changes, and even an IE5 stylesheet, to fix the worst of the issues – and after testing in both IE 5.01 and IE 5.5 it seems I've achieved that, with the only outstanding problems being:

1. The Google ads aren't centred. This is easy to fix by using text-align: center; to align them, but I would have to realign anything else that is affected by that and there's a lot that would be affected. All in all it's not enough of an issue to worry about bloating my style sheets in order to fix it.
2. A slight issue with the column headers in IE 5.01 only. If I get the time I may do something to fix that, but it isn't any kind of a priority for me as less than 1% of my visitors use that browser (and those that do could well be me using it for testing, not something that I care to go looking through my raw log files to check on).

Beyond the reorganising of the site's CSS there have been a few other minor changes. A little while ago it was mentioned that the stark black and white colour scheme was a little hard on the eyes, so I softened that with shades of grey. I've also responded to comments by Sarah and Paul, that the site lacked colour, by using colourful versions of new elements that have been added to the site rather than imposing the greyscale colour scheme on them.

I've also overtly linked, using nice colourful icons, to the different versions of the site's feeds to make subscribing easier. I've also included links to various social bookmarking services to the archived version of each post, to make linking individual posts via those services easier on the odd occasion that someone chooses to do so. I will at some stage revise the selection to better target what I consider useful services – which may also include the addition of new services as they become available to the plugin used. I've also expanded the metadata aspects of the site by the inclusion of links to aspects of the Technorati service that apply to this site, as well as the inclusion of a Friend of a Friend profile.

Finally there's also the addition of a couple of features to benefit commentors, such as the inclusion of gravatars on the site to enable them to have a more personalised/branded look to their comments. Also to benefit commentors with their own blogs/sites, I've removed rel="nofollow" from links to their homepage. This is in response to the YesFollow Project that I first read about on Barefoot Boo's blog earlier today. I haven't, however, implemented fully. Firstly, all new comments will have rel="nofollow" in place for the first 3 days in order for me to have time to review the linked site if I feel it necessary, after that initial period it will automagically remove the nofollow from the rel attribute. Second, I have a plugin that adds rel="nofollow" to all links located within the body of comments. I'm leaving this in place as I'd rather not provide endorsements by proxy to third party sites. If I think a site has value to my readership then it's likely to be found in the sidebar links at some point in time – which I'm currently in the process of updating.

So that's pretty much it. Hopefully the changes will prove to be of benefit to some and I'll continue to make changes as I see fit and when time permits, and as the above, hopefully, demonstrates in response to visitor feedback too.