Category Archives: Software

Download IE7.

One of the things that can drive you crazy is aiming for cross-browser compatibility. Usually the problem is that things look wrong.

But sometimes the problem is that something you can see fine in one browser is simply invisible in the next. Looking at source confirms that both browsers are seeing the same code — one is just not doing anything with it. Drives me nuts.

So it’s very good to at last have an answer that I’ve found a known bug: IE just can’t handle some .png images. It was hard to debug because it can handle others. But IE cannot handle all .png images. Sometimes IE does not display .png images at all. Yes, there is a bug in Internet Explorer and it does not display some .png (‘portable network graphics’) files.

(I’m saying this very pedantically so that the next poor guy who has to hunt for this on Google has an easier time of it.)

NVu is a pretty good lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor. It produces nice clean output without all that cruft that commercial products seem to insist on. But it lacks support for the BLOCKQUOTE tag. Which makes it a pain for me to use. [Yes, yes, I know that blockquote is deprecated in favor of style sheets. But it’s easy, and does exactly what I want to do when insetting quotes. And ‘deprecated’ doesn’t mean obsolete!]

Update: And I wish it had a spell checker too….

In the course of an informative account of his efforts to install MythTV (open-source TiVo), David Weinberger perfectly describes what Unix feels like to many people:

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that’s about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you’ve given your sister boils for seven years.

Indeed. I’ve had days like that…and I first used Unix circa 1984.

While we wait for super-fast Firefox 2.0, here are updates hot off the press: Firefox 1.5.0.4 and Thunderbird 1.5.0.4.

Firefox 1.5.0.2 is out. Probably a big deal if you use a Mac. For the rest of us, here’s the (somewhat paltry?) list of bugfixes.