Computing

2007-08-23: site updated to Newsflash 0.12 : the Helvetica selector is gone, which means some of the content of this post no longer applies.

I've just given this blog a facelist using the Roople NewsFlash theme, and I'm somehow dubitative about it:

• on the plus side
  • the 3 "user" blocks above content and the 3 other ones below content are a neat feature
  • the color balance feels good to me, in either of the 3 predefined colors
  • overall, it works way better than my "nested" theme a few months ago
• on the minus side
  • although I tried various content layouts using the 3 user blocks, I couldn't get anything fit properly in them: it seems these will be specifically useful when a site has snippets of equivalent size to fill in them. This could probably be news (the theme isn't called Newsflash for nothing) or ads
  • on my screen at least, the text appears blurry, especially in Firefox
  • generally speaking, it seems bold font is used too much, with essentially the same character sizes for title, tags, and various links. I think some more gradation in font effects would be welcome
  • the site slogan is incorrectly positioned in MSIE
  • in Opera and Firefox, the site slogan ascenders collides with the site name descenders
  • the logo display code is wrong (relative URLs); I had to tweak it in page.tpl.php to accomodate the site folder structure
  • the logo setting doesn't apply properly

The google_gadget module is now available directly from my sandbox on drupal.org, at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/fgm/google_gadget/.

It should make it simpler to use than having to gather the pieces from my post explaining the module.

It's 2007, people ! Rejecting Opera for its lack of standards compliance and advocating MSIE and Netscape Navigator instead is just ... well, you know what.

Can't but wonder whether they heard about the Acid test, or about that small, relatively unknown browser named Firefox.

Earlier today, I just happened to go check an article on the PHP-GTK community site using MSIE, which is a fairly infrequent occurrence considering how I spend most of the day in Opera, and noticed the PageRank green bar, which had until now remained at zero as the site was still too recent to be ranked, now had an alluring value...

After drowning my faithful old keyboard with my morning coffee, I had to replace it and, after taking some time to find a corded keyboard without a zillion useless keys, without shiny platic, with cursor keys in their standard location, and a reasonable touch feeling, I bought an OEM version of the Logitech Internet Keyboard 350 USB and am indeed quite satisfied with the keyboard look and touch.

No driver

Now, minimal though that keyboard is, it still has these small multimedia keys on top, and under XP they're handled by default. Most choices were just fine, but the media player defaulting to RealPlayer didn't fit my wishes: I'd rather run VLC in these cases to show FreeTV. But the keyboard isn't supplied with a driver, and installing Logitech's setpoint™ actually removes functionality to these keys when compared with the XP default driver. So exit SetPoint and back to the default driver.

The Paradox form system has an interesting peculiarity: any field which happens to be constrained by a foreign key within a native .DB Paradox data model automatically gets lookup values available for the user, but this is not available other database formats, whether they be natively supported within the BDE, or accessed using ODBC, so lookups have to be added in code.

A few days ago, I was glad to learn that this blog had been included in the Planet PHP blogroll. And today, when checking the news, what did I see ?

A few days ago, the designer working on our sites asked me stats about the browsers visiting the sites. She already had the general data available, but this time what she wanted was the info about the "other" browsers.

Which is quite true: once a site has been designed to standards and the quirks of the two or three major choices, work has to be spent on the non-standard non-mainstream ones. But to what extent ? Here are the data.

As I've been working with Drupal since last august, a recent discussion with the designer for our new sites made me wonder how the cost of time was distributed during a project like this one. What portion of the time has been spent getting up to speed on Drupal itself, on developing/maintaining Open Source modules, on creating the value-added private code, on miscellaneous tools and integration tasks, and eventually on the content itself. Here are the results: