Schinckel.net

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I often use Apple’s Character Palette - it allows for the insertion of every character from every font into the current document. You can open it by choosing Show Character Palette from the Input Menu. It usually shows the flag of your country, although you may need to activate it using the International Preference Pane. I won’t go into how to use it, but I will talk about the little utility menu down in the bottom left. That’s right, you can select a character, and get it shown in the Character Palette. It doesn’t work in every application - FireFox is an example, but it’s possible to copy and paste from these applications into one that does work: SubEthaEdit for example. Finally, I can replace the CJK Unicode characters in my Template with their &#x0b5d (hex) equivalent:

老虎油漆

老虎油漆 Actually, I could also have used SubEthaEdit’s Copy As XHTML… menu item, which gives another representation:

老虎油漆

老虎油漆

I received four interesting Trackback Spams today, on two seperate posts. Often, when I’ve been hit by a trackback Spammer there is one Spam with a heap of links, which gets picked up by the Spam Filter, and then a couple that have one or two of the same links, which gets through. These ones weren’t like that - the only link was the URL value, and they all had to do with MP3 files - although neither of the posts did. The most interesting thing is that they appeared to be legit comments - if you didn’t read the post, you could believe they were responding to it. I’ve left them there for now, after removing the URL value.

• Blog Post Page Breaks
• Blog Novels

I didn’t realise that PNG file sizes could vary so much. I was taking a screenshot using Windows, and initially, saving it in Paint, and then using Microsoft Office Image Manager to convert it to a PNG. Then I discovered the machine I was on had Fireworks, so I pasted directly into that, and saved as a PNG. The Fireworks PNG was around 3-5 times as large as the other one. I would have pegged it as being the other way around. I actually came across a program I had downloaded the other day that is a one-trick pony - it compresses PNG images. This made a similar difference in sizes.

It’s amazing how much and how quickly one can change their attitude towards things. Take the following comment (by me), posted on the Blogsome Forums on Sun Aug 07, 2005 10:28 am.

I try and avoid JavaScript where possible , and cannot tell you if that is valid code or not. What I would suggest is that that code does not belong in the StyleSheet - put it in the Main page template, and see how that goes.

I have become a full convert to the greatness that is JavaScript. Since that point in time I’ve developed quite a library of functions that control various features on this blog, from disallowing Spam comments, to making checkboxes appear as lovely images instead of the ugly normal checkbox. Perhaps my favourite component is my floating window. I’ve mentioned it briefly, but it basically allows for <div> tags to float over the top of other items on the page. They can also remain fixed while the page scrolls, yet be moved to another position, and stay on that point, relative to the window. (This is broken under IE, and others that do not support position="fixed"). I think the irony is that I was very opposed to JavaScript, but had to use it as there was no other way to really control stuff under Blogsome. But, as chance would have it, I discovered just how powerful a language it really is, and now most of my coding is done in JavaScript, with the remainer being PHP Smarty Tags. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a python script. In all honesty, I’d love to be able to supplant all of my JavaScript with python, but I don’t think that will happen. Browsers will always support JavaScript, and XMLHttpRequest() really is pretty cool, but I don’t think they’ll start inlcuding python any time soon.

I’m feeling a bit venomous today, so my comments are somewhat nasty-ish. I’m an athiest, and I’m not afraid to say so. We are lucky you didn’t sign up. You probably couldn’t tell the difference between Iraq and Iran. Perhaps staying in school was a better move…or would have been if you’d paid attention.

Apparently, the following command changes the scroll speed under MacOS X when using a scroll wheel mouse: write -globalDomain com.apple.scrollwheel.scaling _x.x_ Where x.x is replaced by a float, I use 2.5 I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes, but I’ll keep playing with it. Maybe it only changes it after a login.

For some reason, the character I use as a spacer, ☆, doesn’t seem to want to display in Safari. It works fine in FireFox, Opera, and possibly IE, but not in Safari: This surprises me, since this is one browser I would have thought it would work in. As it turns out, Safari may actually be doing the right thing here. To include Unicode characters in the CSS :before pseudoselector, you must escape them. Instead of using: #topnav li:before {content:"☆ ";} I’ve used: #topnav li:before {content:"\2729  ";} Thanks to a great post over on mezzoblue.

Got this popup while browsing today (Firefox, you are getting sloppy!): Needles to say, I didn’t click on it!

It seems like the ABC is having some sort of an issue with media files: no new files have been added to the server, nor have podcast feeds been updated. The old media files are still there, but even in cases where the links to the files have been put on pages, the media files themselves aren’t available. Saturday’s programs were all updated (All In The Mind, By Design, Radio Eye and The Science Show, for instance), as was Ockham’s Razor at around lunchtime, but nothing since them has been. The feeds that should be there are: Background Briefing, National Interest, Rear Vision, Street Stories and The Night Air.