Grr! Another reason that more people need to stop using Internet Explorer: it can’t even interpret “width: 100%” right all the time.

I encountered this particular bug in one of my own web design projects today; in one of my pages, a table with the aforementioned width was contained within a fluidly-sized DIV that didn’t span the full window. Any sane browser would size the table to fill the DIV, but not Internet Explorer… no, it sizes the table to take up the full width of the window. Gah! And even worse, the fix suggested at the link above doesn’t work for all page layouts; I couldn’t get it to work with the particular way I had the sidebar set up on the site in question (which is still in the testing phase and hasn’t been rolled out, for the curious).

At least in the layout I was having difficulty with, the problem wasn’t unique to tables, either; even a paragraph with a style of “width: 100%” would flow over into the sidebar!

And people wonder why IE is such a headache for web designers these days…

Why you should dump Internet Explorer. I did so several years back, and other than having to fire it up for the occasional site designed by a completely clueless designer, I honestly haven’t missed it… suffice it to say, there’s a reason I often refer to it by the nickname “Internet Exploiter”. Oh, and it doesn’t help that its support for web standards is the worst I’ve seen since Netscape 4.7.

The author of the article linked above is an MCSE, so he’s not your typical Microsoft-basher… honestly, it’s really worth reading and considering.

(via Lockergnome)

Mozilla’s Firefox browser is now at version 0.9. Grab it today… and grab some of the recently-updated extensions while you’re at it.

It’s taken some getting used to, but the new Winstripe theme has started to grow on me, though it does have its flaws… however, those who want to go back to the old theme are still in luck, as it’s available via Mozilla Update.

In the same vein as the Nickelback song mashup I linked on my blog a month ago… here’s proof that all Linkin Park songs sound exactly the same. (via this comment thread on Fark)

Thanks to Kat, I now am amongst the few, the proud, the Gmail account holders… Username’s the same as always (that’s codeman38 at gmail dot com, for the record), if you feel like spamming me with pointless ramblings. 🙂

Eh, this one’s been making the rounds on various blogs, so I’m going to go ahead and blog it as well:
Abi-Station Icon Maker

Basically, it’s yet another of those sites that can be used to generate personal avatars for forums, instant messaging software, LiveJournals, and the like. It’s based in Japan, so the icons have an anime-inspired look that’s reminiscent of many old-school video games.

Here’s my attempt at trying to create an avatar for myself using the site. Those of you who actually know what I look like, feel free to comment on its accuracy… 🙂

Grr. Lately I’ve been working on a new site design for a non-profit organization, and I’ve decided to go the CSS route rather than using tabular layouts and other such kludges. Overall, it seems to have been a good idea so far, but I really wish Microsoft would fix these very broken CSS rendering bugs in Internet Explorer; it would make the development task so much easier.

Then again, I suppose it would be a bit amusing, given the typical design issues I’ve encountered around the web, if we ended up having a site that rendered perfectly well in Mozilla and Safari but was horribly broken in IE. :-p

OK, so I knew that the song in the first Mitsubishi “See What Happens” ad was “Ballroom Blitz” by the Sweet. That was all fine and dandy. But Mitsubishi recently released a second ad in that same series, this one set to a different tune.

And worse, there wasn’t exactly much to go by in the ad as it aired on TV; all that was played was the intro, with a guitar riff and some “yeah-yeah-yeah”-ing. Not very good for a lyric search, you’ve gotta admit. And Mitsubishi’s site offered no song ID either.

However, more of the song in question is played in the commercial on the site, and I managed to make out a few lyrics, namely “scream and shout” and “out of control”. (Cursed auditory processing disorder…) Anyway, that seems to have been enough; Googling for those relatively common phrases, coupled with “lyrics”, led me to a lyric transcription that seemed to fit– namely, Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge”. I thought it sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it…

And thus, we have another mystery solved for all those people out there in Google-land searching for Mitsubishi commercial music. Woohoo. 😉

If you were having some trouble accessing this blog last night or this morning, there’s a reason: the server on which Zone38 is hosted was running so low on disk space that it was unable to fetch the blog entries from the database in order to display them. The problem’s been fixed now, and the site’s back online once again.

For those of you looking for a web host, I highly recommend JaguarPC (www.jaguarpc.com); I’ve been using them since I started my site, and I’ve been quite pleased with the experience.

Here’s the actual text of a spam that I’ve received several times over the past several days:

We supply high quality medications by mail order at very competitive prices and provide a professional, convenient and affordable means of purchasing your prescription medicines online %RND\_AD\_2 Plus: %RND\_ALL\_OTHER\_MEDS No waiting rooms to increase your chances of getting sick. No waiting rooms. Here.. Use Microsoft Internet Explorer to view the following website: www.%RND\_HOST. Please copy and paste the URL on your browser's address field. %RND\_PHRASE %RND\_PHRASE %RND\_PHRASE %RND\_PHRASE

I wonder if they’ve realized yet why they aren’t getting any hits? 🙂