locusmeus

My friend Rachel had won 4 tickets to “Land van Ooit” (English: Land of Ever), a kids’ theme park, and invited me and the kids to go with her.

The weather forecast wasn’t too good: showers and occasional thunder, getting worse in the course of the day. But since the park has many indoor theatre shows as well as outdoor fun, we decided to risk it. In the end we only caught rain once, and we went inside where a puppet show was just about to start. The shows are short in Land van Ooit, but the rain had gone when we got outside.

After we got back and had dinner, we went to the funfair that was going on right around the corner from Rachel’s place, so the kids were really spoilt Saturday. They had never before been to a funfair, so this was their very first time:

This is what kids look like during their first ride ever in a funfair attraction

Sunday we had plans for the cinema and for another visit to the funfair (to finish the unused tickets we had bought Saturday), but the day started with heavy rain & thunder. It was still like that in the afternoon, and we needed our raincoats and umbrellas to get to the cinema remotely dry. Luckily though, when we got outside after seeing the film, the rain had gone, the sun was shining, and it seemed everybody was going to the funfair.

The kids wanted to try the haunted mansion (even Gabriël, who is generally chicken ), so in we went. Didn’t take long before both kids got their eyes covered till the end of the ride though – haunted mansions aren’t what they used to be :

They enjoyed all the other attractions though, and Tiago even went into the Octopus with me for a second time. He’s a little daredevil, and only his lack of height (he’s about 120cm/4ft now) is keeping him from testing the big scary attractions that go high up in the air, upside down, inside out and round in circles, all at the same time

Last night saw the release of the latest version of IE7. Since it doesn’t seem to be available for my Vista beta version, I downloaded it in Windows XP, to see what bugs would really be fixed, and which wouldn’t be.

Checking my own sites first, I found everything was fine, and even the position relative bug I documented on Locus Optimus appeared to have been fixed.

So then I decided to check P.I.E‘s list of IE bugs, and most of them have been fixed indeed. No more 3px jog bug, no more Italic bug, no duplicate characters, nor guillotine or border chaos.

However, while the demo for the peek-a-boo bug showed no bug at all, I still found a peek-a-boo bug — in the demos for the creeping text bug; if you look at the series of links and texts in the lower part of the sidebar on the left, then cover your window and come back to it (the usual way of discovering peek-a-boos), you may find several lines in those little boxes to be disappearing. (experiment with scrolling, covering and uncovering, and reloading the page, as the effect is quite intermittent).

Another one that has not been fixed, is the escaping floats bug. Not only has it not been fixed, but now also the Holly hack doesn’t solve it anymore. I’m sure we’ll find a new fix for it soon though.

An old bug with a new effect: the phantom box bug. While the phantom boxes have disappeared, the demo now shows the list to extend outside the box, as in the screenshot of Opera 7.1′s rendering (at P.I.E.).

This is all I found in about 15 minutes – who knows what will be next…

Just read this post on the IEBlog, and it seems things are looking up in the IE7 department. They claim to have fixed all the bugs (but one) on Position Is Everything, and a substantial list of other bugs too, including “many relative positioning issues”. I wonder if that would include the “position relative vertical value bug I described.

They also mention the fix of a couple of parser bugs, including this one: _property. If this means that IE7 will ignore that property, just like any other browser, this would give at least one useful method to distinguish between IE6 (which honours the property) and IE7.

:hover on all elements in IE

The best one though, is that now :hover will be supported on all elements, meaning we can all make drop down sub sub sub sub menus without the use of extra scripts!

Other changes include background-position:fixed on all elements, various CSS2.1 selectors (first-child, adjacent, attribute…) and even some CSS3 selectors. All this, plus proper PNG alpha transparency support.

I think the future may just be brighter than I thought it would be

Following a link in the Usenet group alt.internet.search-engines, I checked my sites in Copyscape, thinking I would perhaps find people quoting pieces of my text somewhere. Instead I found this:

302 words copied from my LocusOptimus.com homepage!

I’m now torn between publicly defaming them, and writing them an email telling them to take the page down immediately.

Hmm.. could do both? — ideas welcome!

Update

I decided on the ‘non-threatening’ approach that Andrew suggested, and sent him just this line, after addressing him with his first name: “How about you take down the page you copied from my website?”. I even added “Thanks” with a smiley. How non-threatening is that?

Update 2

Result! The copied content is gone