Rob Eberhardt

Busy?  Oh yeah.

• TRAFFIC WAVE EXPERIMENTS -- I've been wanting to write this article for a very long time.  Someone finally did it for me (tho' at much greater length).
  
• You can improve IE.next - The Web Standards Project -- cool this is being done, uh, again.
  
• And interesting variations on a theme -- also interesting is that you'll never see anything like this on Slashdot or Digg (which is their fanboyism):
  • Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox (from a developer's point of view)
  • Firefox Myths
  • Firefox - A New Religion
    

For those in a similar tight place...

Alright, I shouldn't have experimented with the BIOS settings so flippantly, but all my other current hardware either has an internal "reset" jumper, or it automatically detects problems and resets itself, so I assumed I was safe...

Well imagine my surprise that powering on gave me an utterly blank screen, and no combination of keys would fix it.  Opening the case showed no reset mechanism either.  And Sager's website showed no support options except an RMA form...

Fortunately I found (elsewhere) an email address for support: websupport@sagernotebook.com.  I emailed and got a response within 24 hours asking for a serial number.  Knowing it was out of warranty (and expecting a "sorry about your luck" response), I gritted my teeth & answered.

Glory be, 12 hours later I received these instructions from Daniel on how to reset the BIOS to factory settings:

Bob,

If you feel comfortable, Try this, 1st unplug all the power remove the AC Adapter and the Battery. And open the bottom cover(see attachment picture) and unplug the Cmos-Battery’s wire(red&black crop by Green Color) for like 15sec. Then reconnect it back the wire then everything ACA and the Big Battery. See that will help.

*** We don't hold any responsibility ***

Daniel
Sager computer
18005 Cortney Ct
City of Industry, CA 91748
Tel# 1-800-741-2219 626 964 4849
Fax# 626-964-2381

Despite Bob-ifying me, it made enough sense that I was booting normally in 5 minutes (and mostly time for the tiny screws).

It's good info, Sager just needs to share it more easily.  I wrote back to thank Daniel, and suggested they put this kind of info in a public knowledgebase.

IE7 was supposed to have supported min-width in CSS.  It doesn't work right. 

Their spec says it applies to "floating block-level elements", but they don't mention that it also requires an explicit width -- "auto" won't work.  While that's fine for "stretchy" layouts, it's useless for what I want: a flexible, tableless form layout (with elements which can expand to their contents' sizes).

In fact, my previous IE6 hacks to force it with CSS expressions now don't work, because while the min-width attribute is valid in IE7, the feature is not actually implemented.  SO, while I previously could pick it up in IE6 with something like this:
SELECT {
min-width:11em;
_width:expression(this.currentStyle.getAttribute('min-width'));
}

IE7 now requires the same trick to be like so:
SELECT {
min-width:11em;
_width:expression(this.currentStyle.getAttribute('minWidth'));
}

Unfortunately, forking logic inside CSS expressions is a bit of a pain.  That, combined with the limitations of this technique (IE6 treats width as min-width only when the contained elements can't be wrapped), prompted me to write a solution script.  Here it is:

/*
author: Rob Eberhardt
desc: fix MinWidth for IE6 & IE7
params: none
returns: nothing
notes: cannot yet fix childless elements like INPUT or SELECT
history:
   2006-11-20 revised for standards-mode compatibility
   2006-11-17 first version
*/
function fixMinWidthForIE(){
   try{
      if(!document.body.currentStyle){return} //IE only
   }catch(e){return}
   var elems=document.getElementsByTagName("*");
   for(e=0; e<elems.length; e++){
      var eCurStyle = elems[e].currentStyle;
      var l_minWidth = (eCurStyle.minWidth) ? eCurStyle.minWidth : eCurStyle.getAttribute("min-width"); //IE7 : IE6
      if(l_minWidth && l_minWidth != 'auto'){
         var shim = document.createElement("DIV");
         shim.style.cssText = 'margin:0 !important; padding:0 !important; border:0 !important; line-height:0 !important; height:0 !important; BACKGROUND:RED;';
         shim.style.width = l_minWidth;
         shim.appendChild(document.createElement("&nbsp;"));
         if(elems[e].canHaveChildren){
            elems[e].appendChild(shim);
         }else{
            //??
         }
      }
   }
}

It uses a shim technique to fix it only for IE (other browsers don't support currentStyle).  The remaining limitation here is that it only works on elements which canHaveChildren, so it does not work on childless elements, like form INPUTs or SELECTs.  Any suggestions for this case are welcome!

To use it, just call fixMinWidthForIE() in the window.onload, or better yet when the DOM has loaded, and you're set.

2006-11-20: I updated the script for better standards-mode compatibility (it was causing extra blank lines).  I had missed the doctype switch in my current project.  The good news is that IE7 in standards mode does do min-width.  (I wish I'd noticed that sooner!)  However, I still have a lot of IE6 miles to go before I can put it to sleep...

 

Windows XP Professional?  Check.

But what about 64-bit?  Apparently it's actually not supported on 64-bit Windows XP Professional.

It took ages, but I'm on dasBlog now.  Good riddance to dotText!  -- I bid it lovingly, though, since it served well for a 1st generation blog engine -- Somehow a couple hundred legitimate posts + comments garnered many thousands of comment spams.  I expect dasBlog will handle that all better; captchas are a tad annoying but effective, I hear.

That dasBlog is still under active development is a good sign.  I find that quality much more  important these days.  For reference, dotText was last updated almost 2yrs ago (and wasn't even really released).

So in other news (in the sense that no news is its own news), I haven't posted much of anything in a couple months, and even then there wasn't much meat.  I plan to start writing/posting with something like BlogJet.  (Yes, I actually used dotText's web-based editor, which was text-only in Firefox -- I'm entirely too comfortable with code for my own good).  Hopefully this ease will lubricate the writing process.

Regarding the transition: I used two great tools.  One was Aaron Junod's great dotText to dasBlog converter to migrate the content.  This would have done the trick many moons ago, except that I didn't want to orphan all my incoming links (a big no-no to a web dev like me).  Fortunately, Scott Hanselman published a Regex to remap URLs from dotText's format to dasBlog's (If only I hadn't fat-fingered that one the first time I tried it way back, it'd actually have worked). 

Finally, some outstanding meta-throbs junk:

1. Comments were probably lost.  Sorry.  I noticed spammers were usually changing the subject from the default "re: whatever", so I killed most of the rest. 
   
2. Search is gone for the moment.  I'll add it back in Real Soon Now.
3. Images and other locally-hosted junk is probably all broken.  I'll fix that slightly sooner.
4. Comments are screwy (dotText saved as HTML.  dasBlog doesn't.)
5. Layout is messed in IE6.