Raible Designs

Another nice design - Phono Phunk

I'm going to have to save this one for later. It's definitely one of the cleanest and prettiest blogs I've seen in a long time. Well done! Thanks to Wouter for the link.

Happy Birthday Spam

Spam turns 10 today. I've been using my PowerBook for a week solid with no XP intervention. I have to admit, I'm really starting to get used to it - especially Mail's Junk Mail feature. Of course, using IDEA every day is quite a treat too.

Great CSS Designs

While reading the latest issue of A List Apart this morning, I got sidetracked and visited the CSS Zen Garden, finally landing on David Shea's blog. There I found his listing of Great CSS Designs. There's some very nice sites in there.

In other news, today is one of those days that sucks to work from home. I can see the snow falling out my window, and it's snowed almost 2 feet in the last 48 hours at Vail, Breckenridge and Winter Park. Urgghh, the slopes are calling, but so is my pocketbook. Note to self: get your priorities straight next year so this doesn't happen again. This is the first year in the past 5 that I haven't bought a ski pass and I won't do it again. Oh well, at least it'll be a good night for a hockey game.

Mozilla Firebird 0.8 - I'm not impressed

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Mozilla Firebird) for my Mac this morning and I'm definitely not impressed. I can't change the fonts and there's no scrollbar when I visit any sites. What a CF. As for Windows, I can't even download the installer. Too bad - this release had real potential.

apache.org won't let e-mail through from comcast.net

I don't use my comcast.net account, but I do use their SMTP server to send e-mail. I've sent a few messages to the tomcat and ant mailing lists in the past couple of days, and they've never shown up. Today, I realized why. Howard says:

...it appears that there's a disruption which is preventing mail originating at comcast.net's domain from reaching apache.org's. This may have been going on for a week (its probably related to the massive amount of e-mail from the MyDoom virus).

I guess I'll have to resend those suckers from my Yahoo account. Even with this disruption, I still think Comcast's broadband is the best in the business. Who can complain about 2 MB/sec (downloads average 250K/sec)? OK, maybe it's not that today, but usually it's pretty close.

Virus uploaded to Wiki?

At 5:44 p.m. this evening, someone from IP address 80.110.91.39 uploaded a zip file with a .exe file enclosed to my wiki. Wonder if that sucker is a virus? You could make 1/2 million (from Microsoft and SCO) if you catch the virus starter. I wonder if the IP address will help at all? I doubt it, it's probably spoofed.

Sunken/Highlighted Input Fields with CSS

One thing I really like about TheServerSide's new look is the sunken input boxes (that light up on focus) in the top right corner. I noticed that Macromedia does this on a lot of their form's too. It's good stuff. Here's how easy it is to add this "feature".

In your stylesheet, add the following class definitions:

/* for cool looking "sunken" input boxes, from www.theserverside.com */
form#searchForm input {
    padding-left: 4px;
    margin: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
    border: 1px solid black;
    color: #777;
    background-image: url(../images/input_white.gif);
}

form#searchForm input.focus {
    margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
    border-bottom: #ffdead solid 2px;
    border-right: #ffdead solid 2px;
    border-left: #c07300 solid 2px;
    border-top:  #c07300 solid 2px;
    color: #000000;
}

Of course, restricting these classes to one form (as I've done with form id="searchForm") is optional. Then in your form's input fields, add: add a couple of onfocus and onblur event handlers:

onfocus="this.className='focus'" onblur="this.className=''"

You'll also need to grab the background image and put it on your site. If you're adding this to a form in your webapp, it might be easier to add all the event handlers with JavaScript:

var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
for (i=0; i < inputs.length; i++) {
    inputs[i].onfocus=function() {this.className='focus'};
    inputs[i].onblur=function() {this.className=''};
}

Thanks to the guys at TheServerSide for showing me how to do this - I dig it.

Zeldman Blocked

They have fairly strict firewall rules at my current project, but I've been able to get to all the sites I've ever attempted. That's why this error amazed me this morning:

Forbidden by rating check

You are not permitted to access the URL http://www.zeldman.com/ due to the policy of your organization.

So much for getting any good web design tips while I'm at work... ;-)

Run Multiple versions of IE on the same Windows OS

This is HUGE in my opinion. It's always been a pain to test multiple versions of IE - you either had to install VMWare, install multiple OS's, or use a separate machine. No longer, my friends. Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs, has figured out a way to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine. Awesome - thanks Joe!

Thanks to The Scobleizer for the link. I also found these standalone downloads for IE 5.1 and 5.5 from Ryan Parman.

Apache 2.0.48 and 1.3.29 Released!

The most popular web server has some new releases for you security conscious developers. What's changed? View the release notes for Apache 2.0.48 or for 1.3.29. You can download both versions here.

I found it strange that Panther shipped with 1.3.28 rather than 2.0.47 - luckily, I was able to quickly install 2.0.47 (thanks to a backup of /usr/local) and disable 1.3.28.