locusmeus

My 3 year old 18inch Novita CRT started to show signs of old age – blurred letters and magnetic stripes, which started giving me headaches (literally even). So… I tried to decide between a new CRT and a new TFT, weighing the pros and cons for the last week or so.

In favour of the TFT were of course less radiation, less weight, less space needed on the desk, easier on the eyes, no problem with magnetic fields from TV and speakers, and last but not least: they’re actually available in the shops.

CRTs also have their advantages though: better colour rendition, quicker response rate, and zero chance of dead pixels. I have a fear of dead pixels – I think that if there would be even one, anywhere on my screen, this would irritate me immensely. Oh, and another thing in favour of CRT of course: winter is coming 😉

Shopping around though, I found about 3 CRTs, of which only one flat screen (like my old Novita), while seeing lots and lots of TFTs. If only my budget would have permitted, I could have bought a 23inch LG 2320a, a 24inch Syncmaster 244T, or perhaps even an Acer AL2423W. Alas, I don’t make enough money for that yet, so my final choice ended up to be between a Syncmaster 940BF and an Acer AL2017, which I liked because of the resolution and screen size. 20 inch with a resolution of 1400×1050, instead of the standard 1280×1024 on the 19inch Syncmaster. That’s 120 extra pixels sideways! (okay, it’s not that much, but 1400 sounds a whole lot larger than 1280, doesn’t it? 😉 )

So, after some debate with myself, I chose the Acer. My fear of dead pixels was taken away by an extra two week pixel warranty, meaning that if I see even one pixel or subpixel failing to do its job within the first two weeks, I can return the screen to the shop, and get a new one. Apparently, if a pixel doesn’t die within the first 24 hours of being used, the chances of it happening after that, are close to nihil. It’s been on for about 15 hours now, and so far so good. I’m now looking at a very crisp, non-blurring, magnetic stripe-free screen, with 1,470,000 working pixels 🙂

The only thing I hadn’t thought of before I actually installed the screen and connected it to my KVM switch, is that the 1400×1050 resolution is not native to my old GeForce4 MX440 video card.

Although the screen copes rather well with 1152×864, it isn’t quite as nice as I had seen in the shop. So, I surfed back and forth between the nVidia site and several forums, until I found the solution in manually editing a file in the latest downloadable drivers for the card. I just added in the 1400 and 1050 numbers, saved it, restarted the pc, and bingo – 1400×1050 is now part of my available screen resolutions in Windows XP.

Haven’t managed to do the same for my Windows Vista installation though: when trying to install the drivers for Windows Vista x86, it tells me no drivers are found, and if I try to install the WinXP ones, it says the current system isn’t a Windows system. Too bad, but I’ve for now settled with having Vista on 1152×864. Same for my Linux box btw, as installing the drivers for SuSE involves booting into runlevel 3 before running the nVidia installer, and I find that too much hassle for a better screen resolution on a system I use only sporadically.

Now, what shall I do with my old Novita…

Update

Appears I didn’t have to download any drivers for SuSE at all, as I can just go to the monitor settings and adjust everything there, for both monitor and graphics card. Custom resolution, screensize in millimeters, horizontal and vertical refresh rates… everything entirely customizable. Quite neat actually 🙂

IE7 saw a couple of betas, recently a ‘release candidate’, and now it’s finally coming for real.

I’m ready – are you? 😉

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 🙂

I’ve heard from several people that one of the signs of spending too much time online, is wanting to click on underlined words in print. Only noticeable of course, if one manages to get away from the screen enough to actually read any printed matter at all.

However, you know you *really* spend too much time using a computer, when you’re doing your paper based administration, you open a binder to force more stuff in, and all the plastic sheets start sliding off the rings, and your first thought (and physical reaction) is “Stop – don’t continue – press CTRL-Z first”….

Yesterday afternoon I thought it a clever idea to install Windows Vista Beta on a new partition, to run in dual boot with Windows XP. (No, I didn’t first check Google to see if anyone had actually survived it.)

The whole story (or cut to the chase)

Everything went suprisingly smooth, and other than one or two missing drivers for plugged in devices, all was working as should. I could surf the Internet with both IE and Firefox, send and receive mail with Windows Mail, and easily install and use the latest version of Windows Live Messenger.

I played a bit with the gadgets (Sudoku mainly), admired the nice desktop backgrounds, and when I was done playing, I switched back to XP to get some work done.

No such luck – Windows XP did not have a working internet connection anymore, it claimed one of the cables was loose. I suspected a corrupted driver or something, so I reinstalled the ethernet controller, deleted the driver and installed it again, but no luck. “Loose cable”. Would there really be something wrong with the connection? So I rebooted into Vista, and there it was – my internet connection. Working flawlessly.
Rebooted again into XP: gone. Loose cable.

I checked the network configuration, the IP addresses, the device itself again in device manager – all was well, but there was just this one loose cable, and no connection. I think I went back and forth between Vista and XP about 4 times, but it was the same every time.

I figured something in XP must have been corrupted by Vista’s install somehow, so I decided to install a fresh version of XP on yet another new partition. This got rid of the Vista dual boot, and gave me a dual boot between two versions of XP instead, both without internet connection.

Googled for answers using my SuSE box (a back up box certainly seems vital in cases like this!), and found several mentions of problems with Vista and dual boots, but none about Vista working and XP losing its connection. I did find several instructions (all different btw) on how to get rid of Vista, and there was a lot of talk about master boot records and boot.ini files and stuff.

But.. to get rid of Vista in an appropriate way, I’d first have to log into it, so I needed my dual boot back. I figured a startup from the Vista install DVD might help with that, and it did. I chose the ‘system recovery options’ link on the opening screen, and then to repair Windows Vista. After a very short Wizard, the system rebooted, and there it was: my Vista/XP dual boot, and the connection light on my router was on again. To me, it seemed as if the repair of Vista had also repaired my XP’s loose cable, but I discovered that that wasn’t it.

I used XP for a couple of hours, then decided I wanted to risk it again, and rebooted into Vista to see if Vista also still had a connection. It had. It worked just as well as before.

The chase

So.. I did some thinking and then some testing, and discovered the following:

In Windows Vista, just like in every other Windows version, when logging off, there is a choice between ‘shut down’ and ‘restart’. When choosing ‘restart’, the internet connection gets lost immediately, and does not come back unless I boot into Vista again. When choosing ‘shut down’, the system does not just shut down, like one would expect, but erroneously also reboots, in which case the connection stays on.

If I restart from Vista (with restart option and losing connection), and boot into XP (still without connection), XP’s shutdown button responds the same as Vista’s. It will shut down the system and restart again, and also the internet connection will come back on.

When I’m in XP with internet connection on, and press the shutdown button, the system really shuts down, and does not restart again. Connection light on the router remains lit though.

I don’t know much about the structure or technical details of an operating system, but to me it looks as if Vista’s restart option does not shut down Vista completely, so the ethernet controller remains ‘linked’ to Vista, and can’t be used by other OS’s at the same time. The fact that in that situation, XP’s shutdown button reacts exactly like Vista’s, enforces my idea of Vista still being ‘alive’ somewhere.

I wonder if anyone else can confirm any of the above?

And people who have installed Windows Vista Beta on a separate machine — do they see the same behaviour on ‘shutdown’? Does their system restart too? Or is it just an option “use shutdown button to restart” that I missed somewhere? — Comments welcome!

Update 10 July:

In the meantime I found that if I shut down Vista from within a user account, the PC shuts down for real (but leaves the network card unavailable for XP), while if I try to shut it down from the intro screen (where one chooses between user accounts), the computer is shut down and rebooted, and the network card remains available.

A friend said he had seen this behaviour in the past, when there was a really unusual WOL setting, but I can’t find anything wrong there either. Still have to check the BIOS though, see what happens if I disable Wake-on-LAN entirely.

Update 13 July:

WOL was already disabled in the BIOS, so that was not it, and replacing the driver by the XP driver didn’t work either, as it didn’t want to recognize that one. It’s the same driver actually, just a newer version of it.

Anyway, unless someone else has encountered the exact same thing and found the cause, I won’t be experimenting with this anymore, as it’s quite easy to work around, and eh.. I’ve got better things to do 😉

No particular reason for this picture, other than I like poppy flowers, and they look really summery against a blue sky 🙂

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.