Christopher Mackay’s Blog

When deploying Macromedia Contribute for a client recently, I ran into an issue with Contribute not displaying CSS in edit mode (it displays just fine in browse mode). This wasn’t a purely aesthetic problem, either, since it meant site editors would be unable to apply custom styles (anything beyond generic HTML tags) to their content.

While there are lots of people on Macromedia’s Contribute forums having related issues, they were mostly using SSI to insert their CSS into pages. I was using @import (mostly to hide styles from Netscape 4.x). The results were the same, however, which isn’t too surprising since @import is essentially an include.

In this case, we decided to not worry about the tiny percentage of Netscape 4.x users the site had logged recently, and placed links to the CSS files directly in the pages, eliminating the need for @import. Contribute now plays nicely with the site’s CSS.

Macromedia tech support was helpful, and in the end suggested making relative links to the included CSS (we had been using root-relative links). It’s still a work-around, but maybe this will help someone…

After not being able to find my iPod headphones for a while, they turned up.

At the bottom of the washing-machine.

And they still work! How cool is that?

I took notice when Microsoft chose Apple’s traditional processor — the G5 — for their new Xbox2.

My jaw dropped when Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be switching to Microsoft’s traditional processor — the Intel Pentium line — in favour of the G5.

But with the recent announcement that Roger Waters will be joining Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright on-stage at Live8, I damn near fell off my chair.

Black is white. Day is night. If this continues, maybe Roger will even release a new album… Nah.

According to a story at TechNewsWorld.com, Microsoft is planning to drop the “my” prefix from many of the folder names in the forthcoming Longhorn version of Windows.

The “my” prefix was apparently added to make computers seem friendlier to users frightened of technology, it’s always struck me as condescending at best, childish at worst (not that, ironically, children would even need this kind of flimsy crutch).

This change is described as doing away with something that’s no longer necessary. I have another theory: it’s no longer “my computer”…

I can’t tell you how annoying it is to have paid good money to HP for my Pavillion, yet I have to suffer from periodic but very intrusive HP advertising — on top — of all other content, taking up nearly one-quarter of my screen! If it’s “my” PC, why does the manufacturer have the right to intrude on my work day with unwanted advertising??

Since it’s normal to pay for advertising placement, be that on a billboard, in a newspaper or in a TV show, where do I send my invoice to HP? And how much is that space worth?

Anyone who remembers the famous Microsoft EULA for Windows Media Player a few years ago knows that the trend is towards MS having the right to remotely enter and modify the contents on our PCs without your consent or knowledge.

My computer, indeed.

One of the notable updates that came with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was QuickTime 7. It offers significant improvements by way of H.264, a codec that offers radically-improved video quality at lower data-rates than Sorenson 3, the old stand-by that’s getting, well, old.

However:

• Some editing functionality in the Pro version doesn’t work. This seems to be a result of bugs in QuickTime Player.app, as opposed to QuickTime itself, as using a copy of QuickTime Player 6.5 restores this functionality.
• Multi-node QuickTime VR panoramas still function properly, unless you need to be able to tell where hotspots (links between nodes) are. Then you have to rely on clairvoyance.
• While most of the bugs primarily affect QuickTime Player (as opposed to the arguably more-important browser plug-in) and are mostly related to authoring functions rather than playback issues, few (if any) of them were addressed by the recent release of QuickTime 7.0.1. This release seems aimed more at users of Final Cut Pro.
• There’s still no sign of QuickTime 7 for Windows. Normally this would be quite annoying, but with these outstanding bugs, this is a good thing.