locusmeus

Many trees have been full with green leaves for some time now, but this walnut tree is only just starting to catch up with the temperatures.

walnut catkins

Took this pic from my balcony last night, al little before sundown.

Michiel van der Blonk wrote this nice little script to reveal the margins of an element by simply clicking on it. Just tried it out in Firefox (it’s JavaScript and I have that switched off in IE), and I think I like it 🙂

Quite handy when trying to figure out where spaces come from when developing a page, and certainly a nice addition to the developer toolbars I already have installed.

I’ve seen a lot of IE bugs and even more fixes for them, but what I read this morning on the CSS-d list in a post by Ingo Chao, went beyond my imagination.

Using sibling selectors (“h1+h2” should style an h2 that comes right after an h1), Ingo proved that IE7beta (not the preview anymore btw) erroneously styles comments. They even react on hover!

Here’s a link to Ingo’s post, with example links included: http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/73950.

As we say in Dutch: “Het moet niet gekker worden!”

Okay, so it’s just a link I found on Joe Ponkey’s blog, but I still have to share it – such great images!

Especially the 3rd and 5th from the top look like fantasy, but it’s not – look for yourself: www.missouriskies.org/rainbow/february_rainbow_2006.html

At 7.30 am, this was the view from our window:

Today I discovered that Internet Explorer 7 has a beta preview out, which is available to the public since two days already. Obviously I couldn’t wait, downloaded it, installed it, and checked a bunch of my sites.

Yup – discovered bugs!

One bug had to do with the method I used to get IE to encompass floats, and although it was easy to mend, I haven’t yet checked all the consequences of the change I made, but I will surely test that further.

There was also a brand new weird bug, to do with CSS rollovers using the a:hover pseudo-class. I’ve explained all about it in my new CSS section on Locus Optimus, it’s called the IE7 CSS rollover bug. Go look! 😉

Last Saturday we had a church outing, which included an afternoon walk through the woods. It wasn’t just your ordinary regular walk though; it was an actual geocaching trip.

We were split in 10 groups, each with one of these GPS devices, and a piece of paper with the first set of coordinates written on them. Before we left, leaders of each group received an explanation on how to use the device, and then the groups were sent on their way, a couple of minutes apart.

Not everybody picked up the information that fast though, so when our group’s leader kept looking puzzled on receiving the information, I asked if I could help…

The instruction was short and simple: “this is where and how you enter the coordinates, and then you follow that arrow”. Well, up till we found the first location, this worked very well, and I thought it would be a breeze.

The purpose was to find a box on each location, in which there’d be a piece of paper with a multiple choice question. Each possible answer was linked to a set of GPS coordinates, so it was important to get the question answered correctly, in order to end up in the right spot for the next box.

The first question was easy too, and I entered the new coordinates into the GPS device. The route went North East, about 2 kilometers. We didn’t have a map, so we just had to find whichever path we thought would get us closest to the spot, and when we were only 200 meters from the second destination, we saw the box. Or so we thought.

When arriving at the box, the device still said North East, 140 meters. Obviously, that wasn’t our box. Soon another group arrived, and indeed, it was their box. So, I reckoned we should go another 140 meter North East, but that would be right across the river. As the river seemed to run from East to West, we started walking East, thinking we’d cross a bridge, walk back West, and find our box on the other side. As we walked, the arrow kept pointing North East, but the distance got greater with every step. Something seemed wrong, but I thought it was because the box was on the other side of the river.

Long story short: we walked 1 km to the first bridge, crossed it, walked 1 km in the opposite direction, only to find out that our box was indeed 140 meters from the other group’s box, but on the same river bank, in Western direction. Somehow, this GPS device didn’t do what it should have done: turn the arrow arround when we started walking in the wrong direction. I’m still not sure if that’s really what should have happened though, as there was another indication of direction on the device, that hadn’t been explained to me: the arrow was ‘broken’. The middle bit of it moves sideways when you’re off the right track. Had I known what this broken arrow meant, we would probably have found the second box much quicker 🙂

Anyway, looking at our box from the wrong side of the river, knowing it would be another 2km extra to get there and having tired children with us (mine) and a couple more tired people (not me), we decided to forget that second box and just go straight for the third (and final) one. We called the ‘cop out phone number’ and got the coords for the third box. GPS device said “South West, 2km”. Right across the river again. One of the brighter people among us decided to ask a passing cyclist whether the bridge in the Western direction would be closer than the one we just came from, and while it appeared to be the same distance, it would bring us closer to the third box than the other bridge, so we kept on walking West.

After we crossed that bridge, the device was pointing in the right direction, the road was straight, and all went fine. Until we got to 500 meters from the third box’ location: the lake. A big lake between us and the last box. The same lake also between us and the dinner that would be served after the walk. In the mean time it had gotten dark already, and some of us weren’t quite comfortable walking through the woods in the dark.

In the end we walked a couple hundred meters alongside the lake, until basically through miscommunication (too long a story to write down), we had to walk back to the road where we got picked up by a van, only to get back just in time for the leftovers from dinner — we were over an hour late!

Conclusion on geocaching: a fun thing to do, once you understand what the display on the GPS device really is saying 😉

Another good move in the development of the new IE7 — no popup windows without address bars anymore, making it more difficult to trick people into using a fake website.

This change, combined with the visibility of the lock (indicating a secure website) and colour coding in the address bar, is an extra help against phishing websites. The IE7 programmers even thought of the colourblind, as each colour is accompanied by an icon and a line of text that clearly shows the status of the website: red for phishing, yellow for suspicious, and green for secure websites.

For some time now, the kids have been nagging me to let them bake something. Preferably cookies, but pizza wouldn’t be bad either.

Today I finally gave in, and they made a nice set of lovely apple muffins:

October 30th — almost a month and a half into autumn. The weather was much like summer though, as there was plenty of sunshine and the temperature rose to over 20 degrees Celcius.

I thought I’d better cease this last "summer’s day", so I took the kids for a walk along the river and to the park, where we stayed till the sun went down.

Of course I took my camera with me, and this is one of the pics I took before it got dark:

Cyclist on the dyke