Saturday, August 28, 2004

RiverFire

Got back from Riverfire for another year. I can't believe that we're already at this stage of the year. Time does fly sometimes.

I did have a good time there, although am I the only one who goes along to this thing and sees the fireworks and feels a little let down? I don't know if it just wasn't as good as last year, or if it just is me expecting too much. I don't know.

Well, best get back to my friends and the post-fireworks drinks. Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Friday, August 27, 2004

Live from the Qld Seafood Festival

Well I'm out & about so I thought I'd try out this email submission feature.

Just a little while ago I was listening to Stringmansassy who are an INCREDIBLE Brisbane guitar & vocal duo. If you ever get the chance to experience them (and it is an experience) jump at the chance.

There aren't as many people here as I thought there would be. Perhaps everyone is saving it up for RiverFire tomorrow night.

Well I'll best be off to locate some food now. :)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

aydsman at gmail.com!!!

Ok - it's official.

I have a GMail account. This is thanks to, and with encouragement of, my fantastic friend Joseph Cooney.

I had already passed on the offer of one invite from him, which he gave to Robin - a mutual friend of ours. This was because I really didn't see a huge need for 1 GB of webmail. I had thought myself quite happy with my current email software

Upon reflection though I thought about it. Exposing my email online would be more difficult while using a thick client, and I did enjoy the idea of being able to have access to my emails from work and while on holiday etc.

I only have two problems with it so far:

  1. my inbox is empty (save the welcome message) so 1 GB of space really looks funny
  2. it doesn't work from my phone

However - the first point should be cleared up pretty quickly and the second - well - perhaps someone out there has a workaround?

Friday, August 13, 2004

Hmmm...

Nothing wacky to post here (yet - just sat down in front of my monitors) but I was thinking before I wandered up to the computer...

I've posted three (count 'em below - 1, 2 3) times and have got no comments (nada, zip, none). Now I'm quite fine with this - AFAIK only one person knows about this blog right now - but it got me thinking about the strange "place" the internet is. I was thinking about how you float something out there on the web and then people - who you'll never, ever meet or talk to - will wander along and take a look.

Some of the time you don't even know it has happened. 6000 people could have read my blog since I created it last night. They could even have enjoyed it. However, I won't ever know that they've been.

It's a strange feeling. I can only liken it to giving a speech while standing blindfolded in the middle of a room - which might or might not have people in it. Since I've started thinking about it it sorta wierded me out.

Hmmmmm...

Ah well, new places on the internet await.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Firefox + MSDN = Garbled Code

If you've looked at MSDN through Firefox (or any Mozilla browser) you may have noticed that the code samples aren't displaying properly (they're all run together).

I pulled out the DOM Inspector - great tool, love it - and found it is a problem caused by one of their stylesheets setting the CSS "white-space" property to "normal" which tells the browser to collapse all white-space characters into one space. Obviously this ruins the formatting of the code blocks.

If you don't believe me head on over to a sample MSDN article - such as the String.GetEnumerator() method. See what I mean?

To fix this problem we can apply a user stylesheet to override their CSS white-space setting. Here is the fix...

  1. Locate your profile directory. This should be at the following location on Windows with Firefox 0.9.x: "%home%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile name].[something]"
  2. Open the "Chrome" sub-directory of your profile
  3. Create or open the file "userContent.css"
  4. Cut and paste the following CSS rule:
    /*
    * Microsoft seem to have stuffed the MSDN stylesheets by adding "white-space: normal;"
    * to "pre" elements.  Undo that here.
    */
    pre
    {
     white-space: pre !important;
    }
  5. Restart Firefox and browse to your favourite MSDN code snippet!
There you are! Easy when you know how. :)

It's new! It's shiny!

Oooohhh!!! Aaaahhhh!!! Anyway - well I've made myself a little place to put down some thoughts. I've seen other blogs and sorta liked the idea and thought "well... why not?". I hope that I can write some interesting stuff. Failing that, I just hope I can write some stuff. Hope anyone who reads this enjoys it. :)