All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

I switched to Firefox several years ago after having used the Mozilla suite. Considering I'm lazy & that's why I like computers... I like having the inline autocomplete turned on so I don't have to type very much of a URL I've previously been to. I keep forgetting that Firefox doesn't yet have this built in as an easy option because I tend to set it & forget.

Or better yet, McAfee does it again!?

Holy Crap Batman! Apparently, according to McAfee, open source development methods are responsible for helping malware authors create better malware... Therefore, I'm assuming, we should then blame open source for all of our malware? That's like almost like blaming everyone that uses the USA's interstate system (or at least those responsible for it's construction) for drug trafficking... So does that mean we need to charge Hitler with drug trafficking?

I have saved the world yet again... Ok, maybe not the world, but I did help a friend out.

MinceR over @ irc.psionics.net#dnd3e was having issues with some shell scripts used in a C program. After asking a bunch of questions & debating various possibilities there was only 1 last thing that I could think of. I suggested that if the code had been extracted from a compressed file there's a possibility that the compression utility doesn't understand how to deal w/ soft links.

It's funny when you come across songs where the lyrics are sometimes really hard to understand or people just add their own... I hadn't heard of Nightwish until after I'd been listening to EVE-Radio for a while. From what I've seen I'm guessing they're a european band that likes the gothic look. Other than that I don't know except that I like some of the tunes.

Anywho, somebody put together a video displaying what they thought they heard... the lyrics are somewhat hard to understand.

One of the biggest issues for web designers is having to deal with multiple browsers, the worste of course being IE. One of the biggest problems with IE is the fact that there are lots of people still using the version that came with their computer & they've never bothered to upgrade! This could mean that some people are running IE 3, but I think the percentage of people actually using IE 3 is not worth worrying about.

Most standards based designers would prefer to be able to toss IE requirements out the window. Unfortunately IE still holds a major share & so most projects require IE compatibility of some sort. Be glad if your requirements only require IE6 (or better yet IE7 or IE8).

Considering past projects I've worked on & reading about projects others have worked on I've come to the conclusion that there's 5 "versions" of IE that designers can lump stuff into - pre 5.01, 5.01, 5.5, 6, & 7 (currently only beta is available). Most people don't even bother with pre 5.01 except to make sure that it's readable (a text browser should work just fine). Trying to test a website with multiple versions of IE causes problems because windows only lets you install 1 version. Before somebody figured out how to install multiple versions on the same computer you had to have multiple physical computers - each with it's own different version of IE installed (or a multi-boot system with different versions of windows installed.. rebooting to see what each browser looked like).

I got an e-mail from my dad the other day asking about website stuff -

What is the procedure for putting data from Excel into HTML? Do I copy it and paste onto a Word document, that I then convert to HTML? Or can it be handled like a picture (PDF file)?

and then this came as a separate e-mail -

Old news, but I seem to need some place to keep track of all the various links for this.