I’ve decided to have links appear as non underlined text until you hover over them. Once you do hover over them, they become underlined and the background colour changes so that they stand out.

In addition, if you’re using Mozilla or Firebird, the background colour will have an oval shape. This is done via the nifty stylesheet tag “-moz-border-radius”, which is an early implementation of W3C’s CSS3 border-radius directive. (As a bit of trivia, any stylesheet tag that you see in Mozilla starting with “-moz” means that it’s an early implementation of a not yet fully approved W3C tag.)

Of course, IE doesn’t know what to do with this and only displays hovered links with a regular rectangle as background – but at least it doesn’t make it appear any worse than it would be without it.

As an aside, I think I’ve now pretty much finished customizing my personal Web page and its integration with Movable Type.

The term “young man” is, technically, somewhat dubious at this stage of my life. However…

It turns out that there seems to be a lot more opportunity for IT jobs in Calgary, Alberta. Since I haven’t had much luck here in the past year and a half, I’m now starting to consider relocating. Things still haven’t fully coalesced in my mind, nor have I yet set my feet firmly on that path, but it might happen.

Right now I’m trying to deal with the fact that some drastic lifestyle changes may be in order if I wish to salvage my future. I’m still hoping that something will finally happen right here in Burlington or Toronto.

What evolutionary advantage can there be in humans having the hair on their heads grow indefinitely?

Hair on other parts of our bodies stops at a certain length. But, short of things like baldness, if we don’t cut the hair on our heads it will just keep on merrily getting longer until we eventually die. (No doubt due to tripping over it and falling in front of a car or something.)

Apes don’t go to the stylist for regular haircuts and the hair on their heads doesn’t do this – it grows to a certain length, then stops. Since we “ascended” from the apes, we’ve gradually lost the hair on our bodies that they still have. Yet, for some reason, our scalps have rebelled against this trend and gone the other way.

Any ideas?

A couple nights ago on Dog Eat Dog (I really shouldn’t be so quick to admit that I watch these shows) the following trivia question was asked: What is the given name of the British royal heir? Simple.

But it suddenly occured to me that I couldn’t think of the surname of the Royal family. I got my mother involved, and one of her work colleagues tracked down a definitive source.

It’s probably not exactly what you think it is.

I think that I’ve finally got my personal site and blog all formatted and integrated properly. No more duplicate or contradictory code, it validates as strictly standards compliant, and it looks the same in both IE and Mozilla.

But I had to laugh. I was up until very late last night (or very early this morning depending on how you look at it) getting it just right in Mozilla. When I got up and checked it in IE to see how it looked, I thought that maybe I’d have to tweak a couple of things. Well – all I saw was a couple of pixels. I spent the next 3 hours or so ripping things apart to identify the problem, then trying to reconstruct it all so that it worked properly in IE. (It turns out that IE doesn’t work properly with div height percentage statements, and overflow auto, if there is also no width definition for the div.) It also resulted not just in code changes, but also layout changes. In the end, I like it better than before so it was useful – even if extremely annoying.

In touching things up, I, again, discovered that IE was mangling things after I switched over to it once I was happy with Mozilla’s rendering. I had to spend a bit more time screwing around with some changes to correct those additional problems.

I have a feeling that I should just code and test in IE first – since it’s the most restrictive of the two – then check it in IE. What a pain.

On another humorous note, after I’d got my 2nd draft working in both IE and Mozilla, I asked Michelle to look at it from work, where she’s running IE 5. She called me almost right away to let me know that viewing it caused IE to crash and terminate. I couldn’t stop laughing for a good 10 minutes at the insanity of it all. While I’m not too concerned about IE 5 having problems, I do recognize that a fair number of people still use it so would like to solve it at some point down the road. (Only Microsoft would develop an application that can’t be installed twice, once for each version, thereby making any kind of browser version compatibility testing almost impossible.)

This is one of those reality shows that’s nothing more than mental pablum. I still, however, end up watching it in bed before going to sleep. It seems like a nice way of disconnecting your mind.

(Of course, I don’t really end up going to sleep. My wife Michelle does, then I get back up again and go through my nightly routine on the computer – checking email, MozillaZine, testing out new software, and so on.)

Yesterday I taped an episode because we were watching something else in its timeslot. It was no mystery which of the two conflicting programs was going to get taped. After watching it, Michelle said that we were hooked. I responded that I’d only taped it as “filler” and wouldn’t be at all bothered if I never saw it again. Obviously this was the wrong response, as she got a little annoyed and decided to interpret this as me saying that I’d rather watch TV than spend “quality” time together. (It’s always at this point that you start to feel as if you’re on a tightrope over some huge canyon, and the rope’s starting to fray.) Still, I can’t say that there isn’t something valid in her (unintented I think) criticism of the show over other activities.

AOL has given up the ghost on Netscape, pulling out all resources and letting staff go.

At the same time, mozilla.org has announced that they’ve created a new non-profit organization called the Mozilla Foundation. (Links to the old site are aliased to the new site/name, so if you click on the previous two links you’ll get the same thing, except for the title.)

Apparently AOL gave The Mozilla Foundation $2M in “seed” money as a kind of severance package.

Personally, I think that, while bad news for employees who got the boot (and with whom I can sympathize after having been out of work for a year and a half myself due to an unexpected layoff), it’s great news for the Mozilla browser. Finally, they won’t be pressured to answer to AOL. Despite all of their protests, it’s obvious that due to funding and political pressure, AOL was a big yoke around their necks holding them back. (They did a great job despite that.)

Happening just before the move to integrating Firebird and Thunderbird into Mozilla, this means that some exciting things are about to happen.

I’ve finally started work on tweaking the templates of this blog so that it looks half-way decent. Currently, I’m working on integrating it into my personal Web site and have been playing around with different layouts.

At present, the blog index page is simply being called as an SSI in my personal page’s main index. This is causing some badly written HTML code because of duplicate definitions, etc. Once I get the format that I want down, I’ll have to work on fixing up the resulting source file.

I’ll also have to decide if I want the blog location to be the same as my personal web page location. The only problem with this is that Movable Type requires permissions of 777 on its “home” page, which I can’t stand, and, if I must assign those perissions, I’d like to keep them sectioned off to an MT specific directory.

About 2 weeks ago, my Cogeco connection started becoming erratic. After several days of this a technician came by to adjust my signal levels. He suggested that if I saw the same symptoms again I should probably swap my cable modem for another one. It worked fine up until last night when it started happening again.

I went to the retail office and got a new cable modem. The one I’d been using had been 4 years old and they’d updated their model. I took this one home and plugged it in. Everything was great – except that I wasn’t receiving any email because incoming IP traffic on port 25 was being blocked. (As, apparently, were some other ports which I didn’t care about.)

It seems as if Cogeco (and Sympatico) have both implemented policies in the past year and a half, whereby residential accounts have various ports blocked for incoming traffic. It’s not clear why they’re doing this. If it’s to prevent spammers, they should be blocking outgoing port 25, not incoming. Alternatively, if it’s to prevent services from being run by home users, there’s no rationale behind not also blocking other ports – like 80, 443, and 23.

Ironically, this port filtering is based on the cable modem unit you have – so if my old unit hadn’t given up the ghost, I’d still be happily receiving port 25 traffic. (A good friend of mine thinks that this is all a consipiracy to get older customers to bring in their “broken” units and force anybody who gets a new unit, with port filtering, to upgrade to a business account.)

In any case, I had to “immediately” upgrade to a business account, which doesn’t block any ports. All of this for an extra $60/month. (I do, however, get some higher bandwidth and a static IP out of the “deal”, so all is not negative.)