Joey’s Crappy Day

For those of you who don’t “believe” in evolution I suggest you check out this blog entry about Podarcis sicula. It’s no Crocoduck, but it’s a great illustration of what evolution is really all about. Take a population, isolate it, change the environment, et voila, something new and different. I wonder what will happen if they introduce some of the new lizard variants back into their original environment. Will they interbreed with the old population? Will they change back to their insect eating ways? Will they revert back to their original configuration? An interesting scenario no matter how you look at it.

Now it comes down to finding out if this is “true” evolution, meaning actual genetic variation. That’s the next step. Hopefully there will be a followup article to let us know the results of that research. Here’s a link to the original article.

Here’s an update on what is going on with my life for those of you who might be taking notes. I now work for Ozburn-Hessey Logistics. Currently I am working on their Starbucks account doing inventory control. So far it seems to be a good job and something I want to do for a while.

I also finally found a place to live in Antioch, TN. It’s a small one bedroom apartment. So far it seems like it is a nice place to live, but I’ve only been here about a week. I still don’t have anything put away, so I’m just living out of boxes right now. I’ll get it pulled together eventually.

Avatars are the little pictures next to your posts on forums and blogs. Most forums or blogs require you to upload your own avatar each time you sign up. But there is a free service out there that allows you to upload an avatar that can be used on any site. It’s call Gravatar, or Globally Recognized Avatar.

The service works like this. You sign up with Gravatar using your email address, then whenever you post a message on a forum or blog that is Gravatar enabled, your picture will automatically appear. My blog is Gravatar enabled. So if you post a comment and you are using Gravatar, your picture will automatically appear next to your comment. The key is to use the same email address to sign up for Gravatar as you do to make posts and comments.

Here’s a link to a comment to give you an idea:

http://josephbales.com/2008/04/10/ie7-hacks/#comment-83

You may or may not have heard me moaning and complaining about Internet Explorer (IE) when it comes to web development. IE is the default web browser that comes with Microsoft Windows. About half of you are using IE to view this post. If you don’t know what you are using to view this post, then it is probably IE. There are several versions of IE that are still in use, from version 5 to version 8 which is still in beta. Most people use 6 or 7 with the majority using 7. Version 7 is the default version in Windows Vista, version 6 is the default in Windows XP, and version 5 is the default in Windows 2000.

The reason I moan and complain about IE is that it’s a hot mess of rendering bugs, specifically IE6 which is still used by a large number of people. It was written about 8 years ago when the web was very different. Now there are all sorts of new technologies and standards, but IE6 doesn’t support many of them, and never will. You see, when IE6 was released Microsoft essentially had a monopoly on the browser industry. About 95% of internet users used IE, so they decided they didn’t need to devote any time or money to making it better. They let it languish for about 6 years, an eternity in the software business. While it was languishing, new technologies and standards were developed and new browsers started popping up that were more compliant with the new standards.

Finally, after losing about 15% of their market share, Microsoft decided to release a new IE, IE7. IE7 is much better than IE6 as far as standards compliance, but it still has some of the same bugs. Previous to IE7, developers had used special hacks to make their web pages work in IE6, but now those hacks no longer worked. This was fine except that some of the bugs that the hacks fixed were still in IE7. Now new hacks had to be developed just for IE7. What a pain in my ass!

So now whenever I am developing a new theme for my site, I have to look at IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari to make sure everything is rendering correctly. Thankfully Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE8 render everything about the same and I only have to really worry about IE6 and to a much lesser extent IE7 and to an even lesser extent Firefox Mac (which doesn’t render the same as Firefox for Windows or Linux for some strange reason) when it comes to rendering bugs.

That’s the problem, now you can be part of the solution! The best thing to do is to download the latest version of Firefox or Opera immediately. Both of these browsers work great, are quick, and work on the three major platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac). Mac users can also use any browser based on Webkit (like Safari or Omniweb) or Camino which is based on the same rendering engine as Firefox. If you are on a Mac and still using IE/Mac, remember that it’s down the street, not across the road. If you are a Linux user, you should already know what you are doing and should be using a modern browser.

And now for you Windows users. If you are using a version of Windows prior to 98, you need to take that computer to a recycling center and buy a new one. Pay someone to haul it away if you have to. If you are using Netscape, stop… just stop. If you are using Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows 2000, you should be able to "upgrade" to IE6 at the very least. To be honest, if you are using one of these operating systems, you should just go ahead and send your computer to the recycling center as well if you can’t get a copy of XP or Vista (or some version of Linux). If you are using XP or Vista you should be using Firefox or IE7 or 8. If you are viewing this on IE6 on XP and cannot upgrade, that means you are viewing this from work and your boss just called and told me to tell you to STOP SURFING THE WEB AND GET BACK TO WORK!

If you ever wanted to know why the world wide web is called a web, check out this scenario. I got an email from an anonymous person yesterday telling me that they had found my website through “the MSN lottery story.” She said she really enjoyed one of the articles on my site (link probably not safe for work).

I appreciated the feedback and wrote her back asking what this MSN lottery story thing was. It turns out that there is a money blog at MSN and that blogger wrote about another blog that I regularly read and occasionally comment on called All Financial Matters. JLP at AFM had written a post about winning the lottery and asked his readers what they would do. I posted a comment stating what I’d do. In the comment was a link to my website.

So when Karen at MSN wrote about the post she mentioned my comment and linked to me. That means that I am now blogging about a blog post that was blogging about a blog post. What a twisted web we weave. Now I just need someone else to blog about this post and then someone to blog about that post ad infinitum.

I love open source software. One reason is that it is almost always free of charge. The second reason is that you can offer suggestions and fixes and sometimes the programmer will listen and implement changes.

I have started using a Wordpress plug-in called All in one Adsense and YPN. It allows me to add advertising to my blog entries without having to mess with the theme. The plug-in worked well except one important feature did not work. It was the feature that allows you to insert code before and after the advertisement. This was important to me because I was unable to style the ads like I wanted unless this feature worked.

The problem was that when you entered the before and after HTML, the plug-in inserted backslashes into my code before each quote mark. This results from a "feature" of PHP 4 and 5 that automatically escapes quote marks. This is to prevent newbies from writing easily exploitable code. The "feature" was removed in PHP 6 and I suspect that the author is using PHP 6 for development because he never could reproduce the bug in his plug-in (If it is the case that he is using PHP 6 for development, he should be smacked a few times. PHP 6 is still in development itself and most servers still run PHP 4 and only a few have even upgraded to PHP 5. He should test on PHP 4 to make sure he has maximum compatibility or just state that his program is PHP 6 only).

Anyway, the problem was easy to fix. PHP provides a function called stripslashes() that essentially stops the automatic escaping of quotes. I added the function in the appropriate places, tested the fix, upped the changes to my own server, posted a message about the fix to the developer’s forum (check my post under the nickname deadgoon), emailed the developer to let him know of the fix, and sat back and waited. I also suggested that he make the 3px of margin around the ad an option instead of a fixed feature so that those who wanted to do their own styling could.

Two days later I received an email thanking me for the fix. One day later — today — I saw that the developer had released a new version. In it was my fix and my suggestion was also implemented. I was given no credit, but you my loyal readers know the real story.

The moral of the story is, don’t just whine about it. Fix it!

So the new theme is finally here. I can tell you right now it needs a lot of tweaking, but it is complete enough to start using it. I’m dissatisfied with the sidebar and the pages, archives, and other stuff were just thrown together this morning. I’ll keep working on it though. I’ve kept it sufficiently generic that I should be able to release it as a theme that anyone can install on their Wordpress blog. You know… when it’s finished.