...more recent posts
I basically do three different jobs for my work. I'm a linux system admin; a PHP/MySQL developer; and an HTML/CSS designer (not sure if 'designer' is the right word there.) Of the three the later has always been my weakest spot.
I first started all this back in 1999 during the dark ages of Netscape Navigator 4. Back then you just built every page out of tables and tried to accept that you didn't really have too much control over exactly how the page was going to look. Over the years this has slowly been changing. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) came into vogue, and they allow you to separate a lot of the visual formatting of the page out from the more structural HTML. CSS also, in theory at least, gives you a lot more control. The problem has always been that different browsers implement the HTML and CSS specifications in wildly different ways, so most of your effort as a designer go not into getting a page to look the way you want, but into getting a page to look the way you want in all different browsers. And just to make matters worse, the most popular browser, Internet Explorer, is by far the least standard compliant.
Anyway, like I said, this has all been improving, but the improvement is frustratingly slow. Still, IE 7 is much better, and Gecko (Firefox and Mozilla et al) and Safari and Opera pretty much have it all together. So lately I have really been digging into CSS and trying to get fully up to speed. It's still a mess due to browser inconsistencies, but it's at least good enough now that it seems worth the effort to me.
To that end I've been doing a lot of reading, and so I'm going to start linking - for my own memory at least - some of the better resources I have come across. I'll start with CSS guru Eric Meyer's work on style reset. What he has done is to create a baseline CSS file that declares a bunch of rules that are all meant to zero out the different assumptions made by different browsers about how to render a page. It's an effort to create a level playing field, or a common starting point, for making things look the same across browsers.
Yahoo has a similar style sheet that they promote in their UI toolkit (which is really sweet btw,) but I think I like Meyer's a bit better. This is really great work that is invaluable to people like me.
I've been having some problems with a new external USB hard drive freezing the Finder when I try to copy a very large file (or group of files) to it. The copy will start out okay, but then freeze after some time. I think the problem is that the drive is spinning down (during the copy!) That seems very weird but really does seem like what is happening. I need to get to the bottom of this, or at least get a better solution in place, but for now I added this to my crontab:
*/5 * * * * ls /Volumes/BigMusic > /dev/null
and everything appears to be okay. What this does is query the external drive ("BigMusic") for a top level directory listing every 5 minutes (and then it sends the output of this query into oblivion, so I don't notice this is happening.) So there is no point to this command, but it just forces the drive to stay spun up by making the query every 5 minutes. That is a total hack though, so I'm not really happy with it, but at least I can copy files now.