I think I may have sunk to new lows of geekiness.

Webmonkey stopped producing new content in the early 2000s and was sold by Wired to Lycos, I think, but much of the old content remained, such as the special characters reference, which I consult occasionally. Now the site has been re-purchased by Wired, which has decided to re-publish the tutorials on a wiki. That’s probably the best approach if you can’t spare the staff to manage the old content, but the historian in me is bothered that Thau’s JavaScript tutorial is gone, replaced by something generic. Why couldn’t Webmonkey have kept the old articles intact, perhaps with a notice suggesting that a piece might be outdated and a link to the new wiki? That’s sort of what PPK does at Quirksmode; he separates articles into “active” and “archived.” I’m sure we can live without knowing how to code for Netscape Navigator 4, but it’s good to remember where we’ve come from, to remember how and why things have changed since then.

However, Webmonkey promises to start creating new content relevant to today’s web, and that will be good news for those starting into web development.

to

sed cycles through each line of input one line at a time, so the most obvious way to match a pattern that extends over several lines is to concatenate all the lines into what is called sed‘s “hold space,” then look for the pattern in that (long) string. That’s what I do in the following lines:

A more compact version:

As far as I can tell, that’s the most efficient way to match general multi-line patterns. I initially thought it might be more efficient not to keep the complete input in the hold buffer, so I modified the algorithm to print out the string whenever a match is found:

In the last example, sed concatenates lines only until it finds a match, and then it prints the line (after substituting the text). Then, it starts again to concatenate the following lines.

However, that approach is usually massively inefficient, as the regex work increases logarithmically. Unless a sed guru can point out a better way, I’m going to continue using the first approach.

I’ve put the following script, which I call “sedml,” for sed multi-line, in my bash path.

So I can replace multi-line patterns in multiple files like so:

PPK’s contest itself ended up falling flat, as even the winner, John Resig (who later created the jQuery library), later repudiated it himself. That’s probably because PPK’s contest requirements were like asking for all three of good, fast, and cheap.

So seven years later, there’s no widely-adopted replacement to the original addEvent that:

1. Is short
2. Maintains the this scope in IE
3. Has a corresponding removeEvent

The various libraries do a good job of 2 and 3, but not 1, and since I often find myself needing 1 and 2 but not 3, I came up with my own good-enough version of addEvent:

It’s short, which is just what I need when I’m trying to keep the JavaScript size low. (Whenever size isn’t so much of an issue, such as on the administrative side of a website, I’m more likely to use a library which will have a much more robust way of assigning events to objects.) And my addEvent also makes this refer to object in question, even for IE.

First, I rip from the CDROM to a wav file.

cdparanoia 1 prokofiev1.wav

cdparanoia lets me specify the input device, but I don’t need to, since the default—/dev/cdrom—is what I want. The line above just says to rip the first track to a wav file named prokofiev1.wav.

lame -h prokofiev1.wav prokofiev1.mp3

Encode the wav file to a mp3 file, in high quality (128 kb).

lltag --cddb prokofiev1.mp3

lltag helps me look up the CDDB data about the track and then add it to the mp3. I’m first prompted to make a CDDB query:

Enter CDDB query [q] (no default, h for help) ?

I’ve tried entering the hexadecimal strings I get from cd-discid, but I’ve never gotten it to return any results. Instead, I enter “prokofiev violinsonaten” verbatim from the CD’s title. I get one matching result, which I select, and then I choose the appropriate track and save the CDDB data.

id3ed -i prokofiev1.mp3 and id3v2 -l prokofiev1.mp3 let me verify that the data has been saved.

Now I’m all set to import the mp3 to Banshee and then to my iPod.

The idea is to emphasize that styling on the web–particularly, that done with CSS, or “cascading style sheets”–should be separate from the structure, or markup. In part, one should separate style from content because a number of people and services read your site without styling: people who have disabilities, search engine spiders, etc. It’s also much easier to change styling if it’s not mixed up with the structure of the content.

Even better would be if my phone could just switch to Wi-Fi and make VoIP calls whenever possible.

But all these things involve involve giving the customer more and better choices, something cellular phone manufacturers and service providers seem reluctant to do.

“In Austria, they are saying that mobile broadband will pass fixed broadband this year. It’s already growing faster, and in Sweden, the most popular phone is a USB modem,” said Bergendahl, who was the keynote speaker at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

As more people start using mobile broadband, hot spots will no longer be needed. “Hot spots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era,” said Bergendahl.

The last couple of weeks I was doing a lot of traveling, and I ended up needing to connect to the Internet where there wasn’t any broadband available. So for the first time I tethered my phone to the laptop as a USB modem and “dialed” in to my cellular company’s data network using PPP. It was surprisingly fast (near DSL speeds), and also very reliable, staying up for hours. It won’t replace WiFi for large bandwidth uses, but it turned out to be a great supplement when I needed it.

The first image shows a screenshot of the problem: the title of the post is drooping into the post. Usually when you see something like this, it means that the containing element has not been cleared. There are a number of ways to clear an element: a popular fix these days uses a pseudo class; the classic approach has been to put a cleared element within the same element as the floating element, but after it. Neither fix works for this bug.

Thankfully, I found a demonstration of a similar problem with IE 7. Apparently if the element containing the floating element has a set height or a maximum height, it confuses IE 7. According to the standard, a browser should obey the CSS height of the element (and IE 7 does—good job!—unlike IE 6). But every cleared element after the floater should be pushed down, not overlapped, by the floater.

The solution is to remove the height assignment from the container element, if you can. In my case, for another part of the site experiencing the same problem, I needed the element to have enough height to show a background image. The solution was to use the min-height property, which doesn’t trigger the bug.

The final image shows what it should look like, as rendered by Firefox.