Keith's Web Blog RSS Feed

BlogSpot Bug

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:58:12 -0600

I was checking Google Japan's blog and noticed an annoying bug: if you use the pagination features, click on an image, and then click the back button, you'll start from the beginning. If you've travelled down 10 pages, and want to resume the 11th page, this would be tremendously annoying. I'll see if this occurs for other BlogSpot blogs or if this is specific.

Internet Explorer Bug Fix For Margins, Floats and Disappearing Backgrounds

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:20:02 -0700

One of my fears about Yahoo losing the shareholder battle to M$ is that MSIE will become even more dominant, despite the fact that it's a crappy browser and hard to program (well at least for a linux dude like myself :p). But the main thing I want to share is a few tips on some of the horrible excursions I dealt with in MSIE:

Float and the Double Margin Bug

Apparently, MSIE suffers from a nasty little bug where if you float an element and provide a margin, MSIE will double the size of the margin either left or right. To counter it, you need to add:

display: inline (or block)

for your class that you're employing the float. There's a lot of resources on the web for why this occurs as well as more details on this.

Next, there's another annoying bug that I encountered and spent hours knocking my head against my table (okay, not literally). It's where backgrounds disappear if you have numerous div tags and use the background-color attribute. The quick fix is to trick MSIE into redrawing the section, so you add a height attribute of say 1%. The code would look like this:

height: 1%;

Put that in the class that has the background-color attribute and these should disappear.

Messed Up, Frustrating MSIE Quirk With Lists

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:03:21 -0600

If you manage to login to my site (highly recommended!) and check out my list application, you'll see that I'm using html's ul and li tags to build my lists (well, gee!). I found a weird MSIE bug where if you use CSS and designate the list as being inline, then you potentially might get some overflow problem (looks terrible especially if you use floats). Firefox is pretty much smarter than MSIE, so you don't face this problem. To fix this issue, you need to add a space before the closing li tag. That's it! Then MSIE will know how to wrap the list correctly. I labored for a few days over this bug. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the page linked at the bottom. So credit due to this guy for saving my rear!

php5 with ImageMagick Broken in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:52:58 -0600

My faith in the ubuntu name is quickly falling. This time I found an error with php5 and the ImageMagick extension. Running php on the command line, you'll see the following error message:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/imagick.so' - libWand.so.9: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Apparently, there's a quick and dirty workaround:

ln -s /usr/lib/libMagick.so.10 /usr/lib/libMagick.so.9
ln -s /usr/lib/libWand.so.10 /usr/lib/libWand.so.9

A conversation about this problem is shown in the link.

Nonetheless, this is pretty disturbing. The biggest issue here is that the ubuntu community once again had made a political decision to move ImageMagick off and is no longer in the main repository. Reading the discussion, you'd have several options like using the gutsy repository or even recompiling php5/ImageMagick. All of these solutions are unacceptable to me. The two things that could've easily addressed this situation in the first place are:

Keep ImageMagick 9 in the Hardy repository
More testing!!!!!

I vote on the later. Matter of fact, I think the Ubuntu community ought to perform more tests before releasing these distributions. I can see for minor packages how this type of bug might have little impact. However, I've had stability issues and now major libraries with irresponsible bugs attached. You just can't call a distribution "stable" when things are messed up.

I'm all for progress and pushing the envelope, but this things ought to be balanced with stability in a highly reputable distribution. Having made the switch from Windows to Linux years ago, I made a clear decision to use something that I felt had more stability. Now, I'm seeing all types of faults in the delivery of this system in favor of marketing and attempting to be cutting edge through sticking with a deadline of 6 month periodic releases.

The thing is that for most of us, we just want something that works, is virus free, doesn't crash and stops giving us headaches. At this point, I'm starting to get tempted to pick up a Macintosh, despite my long time prejudice against their hardware. It seems like the last system left that truly is stable.