Chris Meller

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:

<![CDATA[ <!-- DEFAULT COLORS --> <meta name="color:Background" content="#fff"/> <meta name="color:Title" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Description" content="#777"/> <meta name="color:Post Title" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Inline Link" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote" content="#888"/> <meta name="color:Quote Border" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote Source" content="#555"/> <meta name="color:Link Post" content="#c00"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 1" content="#f4f4f4"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 2" content="#e8e8e8"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Border" content="#bbb"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Date" content="#ccc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block Text" content="#bbd5f1"/> <!-- END DEFAULT COLORS --> ]]>

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.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩

I imagine many people have been confused with the differences between all the myriad open source licenses available. I did a quick Google, and found a very nice basic table listing some of the more popular licenses you might encounter and their key points.

Check out the comparison here, thanks to the KDE project.

The Open Source Initiative also includes a large index of licenses here, albeit comparison is left up to you.

I had the opportunity to do some quick WordPress plugin hacking tonight¹ for Jim Whimpey. As a “payment” of sorts, he gave me a coupon code for the site he was working on: Panedia Desktop Wallpaper.

Being an Aussie company, obviously, most of their wallpapers are from Australia. Boy do they have some absolutely beautiful scenery down under. Check out the two I selected for my machines:

For my desktop, I got a huge 3200 x 1200 pixel version of Brisbane’s beautiful night skyline:

And for my MacBook Pro, I got a beautiful 1680 x 1050 pixel copy of the Robe Coastline:

Stunning wallpapers. Totally worth $25/year to constantly get new beautiful scenes in this kind of quality. I also love the interface that auto-picks the best format for your OS and resolution. Very well done.

1. I added an additional search option to the Search Everything plugin, enabling it to return all posts in a matching category. ↩

I’m considering snagging a cheap refurbished Dell from HCDI Trading to use as an IPCop or m0n0wall firewall / router.

Both Belkin and Linksys have gotten on my ho-hum list for consumer grade routers recently with some poor performance overall. Two different Linksys WRT54G models (the early ones, pre-WRT54G-L branch-off) seem to freak out every few days to a week and die, requiring a power cycle to fix. The Belkin wants to restart itself every time you change absolutely anything in the admin interface, and its wireless seems to phase in and out of quality, even sitting 6 feet away.

I’m hoping that if I move the router / AP out of the ‘central’ role to a more peripheral AP role on the network, things will improve. I also miss some of the flexibility having a real OS and real hardware brings to the table¹.

Another option I’m considering, although a bit more pricey (yet more ideal as well), is a small “appliance” device, similar to the Linksys and Belkin offerings, yet more flexible and powerful.

Due to the increased shipping costs associated with overseas orders, the company I would prefer to deal with, Linitx, is kicked out. Instead, I would probably go for something very similar to the Logic Supply box George Ou at ZDNet talked about in this exact scenario.

Anyone have any opinions? Other great small devices that would make ideal (preferably cheap) solutions? What do you use at home?

1. No, DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, et al are not real OSes, they just play one on TV. ↩