Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
I was looking at the source code of the Twitter Status blog, mainly out of curiosity to see how Tumblr was put together, and the first thing I noticed was this odd block of meta tags at the very top of the header:
[sourcecode language=’html’]
[/sourcecode]
Can someone tell me what the hell that accomplishes?
I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.
Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.
After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links1.
Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.
In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.
- Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩
“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.” - Woodrow Wilson
That’s how I feel in politics…
When I originally installed Ubuntu on my DecTOP, I didn’t have any problem booting from a USB flash drive or an external CD drive. Reinstalling Debian on the same box, however, was not quite so easy.
For my own future reference, plus anyone else who may run into the problem, the key is to hold down ESC while the DecTOP POSTs to get it to boot from an external USB drive (at least for a CD drive, presumably a flash drive as well). Shortly you should see a CD-ROM check box appear next to the memory test box and you can let go.