Damn, damn, damn, I hate IE6...

I finally found a way of doing the classic Slashdot style header, 3 columns, footer without tables and just with CSS. The gist is a sequence of header, left sidebar, right sidebar, content, footer. Each element has an ID. The sidebars use Float left and right, and the footer uses clear:both.

So it all works nicely in Firefox and appears to work in IE. Until there's substantial content and then IE starts rendering the content half way down the page. It turns out that the nasty kludge is to wrap the content in a dummy table. It seems that IE can work out that you can't fully render a table until the final table close, but it can't work out the same thing for a div.

Anyway, another hint that might help someone. If you define a column in IE and then embed a table with width 100%, it uses 100% of available space, not 100% of the column. The kludge here is to wrap the table in a div with width 100%. And the style info has to be in the html not in the CSS stylesheet eg <div style="width:100%">

Then there's remote Javascript content like the thumbnails of My Ecademy network on the right. IE only renders this about 1 time in 3. Firefox renders it every time.

Damn I'm sick of IE's CSS bugs. As one person recently said, 5 days to do the UI in Firefox. 5 weeks to make the UI work in IE as well.

Regular Sucking Schedule is a blog from Glenn Fleishman about the problems of RSS sucking up bandwidth.

Two data points that reflect the stupidity of users.

1) A couple of years ago I did a PHP version of Aaron Swartz' tool for generating RSS from BlogSpot and Blogger when those services didn't do RSS. http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php
I turned this off more than a year go, but I still get hits from people trying to collect it. And there are still people with Rssify in their blog templates. eg. http://snunes.blogspot.com/

2) I also wrote some PHP code to scrape Google News searches and turn it into RSS.
http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php
I had to close this down as well due to bandwidth problems. Now it
generates nothing but a new item each day saying "It's closed down, stop
asking for it". Some people either don't read or can't read. eg http://www.mortgage-blog.com/

There's some lessons here.
- Aggregators that don't do something about dead feeds are mean and nasty.
- Writing code to use a free service elsewhere on the web and then walking away is mean and nasty.
- Blogs and websites with no contact information at all are mean and nasty.

The London Meetup.com group for WiFi needs an Organizer. Could it be you? [from: JB Ecademy]

Miranda IM is a multi protocol instant messenger client. [from: del.icio.us]

I'm starting an experiment to see if I can strip out the Blog tools from the AdSense Ads on this site. We'll see. At the moment, AdSense seems pretty slow about actually using the "URL FIlter"

[from: del.icio.us]

The NPD Group: Digital Music a Prime Opportunity for Music Industry, But Challenges Remain : By comparison to CD sales, in which sales of new releases are the most crucial marketing component, catalog titles that were released more than 18 months prior are a key point of focus for consumers looking to purchase digital music. Sixty-seven percent of the content acquired from P2P is catalog, versus 33 percent for new releases. Similarly 63 percent of the content acquired via paid music services were catalog titles, versus 37 percent for new releases. "Catalog sales are a much larger part of digital music than they are in the physical-music realm," Josephson said, "For some consumers the numbers suggest that digital music is filling a content void created by the limited shelf space available to brick-and-mortar CD retailers.

More proof (if it was needed) of Long Tail effects in digital music distribution. As I've said before the music industry should be digitising and offering online their entire catalogue including deleted items as fast as possible. Since the capital costs were long since paid, there should be no problem with selling it at an extreme cut price. This is inventory that simply isn't available elsewhere (although it may be at Amazon) so isn't earning any money right now.

From a post on Ecademy.

I was wondering if anybody had advice on the best ways of tailoring the adverts being displayed via Adsense. I am running a test on my blog site at the moment where I have added in the Adsense code to display adverts on my site. However, to date, the adverts only seem to display links to other blogging software products - I would prefer them to show adverts for the things I tend to blog about, e.g. gadgets / software development / comedy etc.

You've just hit the problem with Google AdSense. It seems that either Google doesn't have enough Ads, or they are not good enough about finding context, or the blog companies are spending huge amounts of money on AdSense and so swamping the real Ads. I also have a suspicion that Google forms a view of a particular site and uses that as the context until it has indexed the specific page. Which means that the problem is that Google isn't indexing blogs fast enough. (which they don't).

Whatever, the net result is the same, AdSense doesn't seem to work very well on blogs. I have exactly the same problem. I write about all sorts of things, but all I ever seem to get is Ads for Blogging Systems. And just because it's a blog doesn't mean that every person viewing it is looking for a way of building their own blog. Quite the reverse in fact.

Here's an example. I wrote about Win XP being 0wn3d in 200secs a week ago. If I use the Google preview adsense tool (IE6 only, yuck!) on that page, Google is suggesting 12 Ads of which 11 are for blogging systems. Bizarrely, I go back to the same page, 5 minutes later and the ads have changed and now 7 out of 12 are for blogging systems. WTF?

Secrets of Firefox 1.0 is a good starting point if you want to try hacking Firefox defaults and making subtle changes to the way it behaves.

Haven't tried Firefox yet? Download it now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Essential [from: del.icio.us]

Not so much, "Hed Phone Sex", as "Tiki For Sex Heds" [from: del.icio.us]

I thought that wasn't possible.. [from: del.icio.us]

A good list of the Best Firefox Extensions Haven't tried Firefox yet? Well do yourself a favour and try it now. [from: JB Ecademy]

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. [from: del.icio.us]

iPodder.org : Adam is a high profile blogger actively involved in PodCasting. He's recently moved to the UK and is on the Epsom road near Guildford. Broadband is absolutely essential to what he does.

He's being given the run around by BT who claim that the equipement in his local exchange is full and the best he can do is wait for one of the current customers to cancel and free up a port. This sounds pretty strange.

Right now he's broadcasting his daily radio show, via PodCast from the Starbucks in Guildford centre, 2pm every day.

So can anyone in Ecademy help Adam get broadband? [from: JB Ecademy]

Lots of interesting integration between MSN Spaces and the new Messenger V7.

Now why doesn't Messenger respect the default internet browser? Sometimes it launches it for some activities but for others it always uses IE6. [from: JB Ecademy]

0wn3d in 200 seconds | The Register : An unprotected Windows XP machine was breached within four minutes, and became a zombie in less than ten hours, tests conducted by USA Today show. The paper set up six honeypot PCs and monitored the results.

An XP PC running SP1 was breached by an intruder through a hole that the Sasser worm used, only four minutes into the test. Within fifteen minutes two intrusions took place, one using the MS Blaster hole. Within ten hours hackers had established an irc channel and the machine was broadcasting its vulnerabilities to the world at large. A Windows Small Business Server was similarly compromised, with the intruder uploading a program which gave full control of the machine.

Never, never, plug a brand new PC onto the internet without a firewall between it and the net. If you've already got a network and router in place this is all fairly easy. What worries me though is the average home user this christmas who finally splashes out on Broadband and a PC. Most of them will just plug it in, find it works and go and get a cup of tea. The machine may well start automatically downloading and installing SP2, but the machine will be attacked and 0wn3d well before they ever get to installing it.

This problem is solvable. Just not this year and not the way PCs currently start up from being taken out of the box for the first time.

I was checking my incoming logs a week ago, and I'm getting attacked 2 or 3 times a minute. I wondered why the cable modem light was on pretty much continuously these days. This is not going to get better any time soon. [from: JB Ecademy]

http://p2pnet.net/story/3180

I love it!

Comes pre-loaded with classic Negativland
# Points (1981)
# Free (1993)
# Fair Use (1995)
# Dispepsi (1997)
# Happy Heroes (1998)
# The ABCs of Anarchism (1999, with Chumbawamba)
# Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak (2002)

Somebody just sent me a message saying they'd screwed up a club home page and could I retrieve a backup. So I did a Google search for that page, and Google had a copy of the old page in the Google cache. It's comparatively easy to then cut and paste it back in.

Occasionally somebody manages the same thing on their profile. This is a good line of first defence.

Lovely, Google is your friend! [from: JB Ecademy]

Have you got a Microsoft Passport? If you use hotmail or MSN Messenger, you have. Well now you can have your own Blog run by Microsoft.

Here's my test one. It took all of 5 minutes to build. VoidStar

The whole service is cut down and you definitely won't have the flexibility of running Movable type or wordpress or even Blogger but it's not bad and quite full featured.

[from: JB Ecademy]