Some months ago I published the first version of a little open source game called Destroids for webOS (The OS of the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi smartphones) and I'm still improving it weekly. It's a simple Asteroid-like game where you fly a spaceship through an asteroid field and shoot asteroids and UFOs.

At the same time Palm started the Palm Hot Apps contest where app developers can win $100,000 (For the first rank), $10,000 (for rank 2-21) or $1,000 (for rank 22-221) in two categories (Free apps and paid apps). For the time the contest is running I placed a widget on the right side of my blog which shows the current position of Destroids. If you own a Palm Pre or Palm Pixi and you like the original Asteroids game then download Destroids now and make me rich.

More information about Destroids can be found on pre|central.net

Again and again I forget how to import the StartSSL CA certificates into Java. Everytime when I switch to a different workstation or install a new Linux distribution I can no longer access my StartSSL secured server with Maven. Then I have to search for a tutorial and for the download locations of the CA certs. Very time-consuming. This must stop once and for all. So I wrote a small script which imports the certs into the currently active Java installation.

Steps to install the certs:

• Download import-startssl script.
• Make sure JAVA_HOME environment variable is set correctly.
• Run the import-startssl script.

The script runs the keytool program of Java with sudo so you have to enter your password to give it root access. If you have JSSE installed then the StartSSL CA certs are also added to the jssecacerts keystore. The script imports the root CA certificate and the four sub CA certs (Class 1-4).

If the script does not work for you (Maybe because you are using Windows or Mac OS X instead of a real operating system) then you can at least read it for instructions how to do it manually.

Consider that you want to display some DIV inside another DIV where the inner DIV always fills out the outer DIV completely:

<style type="text/javascript">
  #outer { width: 256px; height: 256px; }
  #inner { background: red; height: 100%; }
</style>
<div id="outer">
  <div id="inner"></div>
</div>

Width is already correct because the default value of auto keeps the inner DIV at maximum width. So only the height:100% style is needed for this scenario. But what if the inner DIV also has some padding or a border? Then the percent values will not work because according to the W3C box model the border and the padding is added to the width and height. So the inner DIV gets too large. In standard compliant browsers (Even in IE7) this can be solved pretty easy. IE6 needs a little hack. Read on...

Ubuntu 9.10 Koala Karmic is released and I immediately installed it. May be this was too early because it has lots of issues. So I'm going to collect some workarounds here which were necessary on my notebook to get Karmic running smoothly.

As already written in my Stop supporting IE6 article I hoped for IE8 supporting media specifiers in CSS @import statements. The benefit would be to lock out IE6 and IE7 from seeing the CSS definitions without using proprietary IE conditional comments. Fortunately Microsoft really did it, they support this syntax in IE8!

So if a website is going to drop support for IE7 (which may be a good idea because IE7 is still a pain-in-the-ass when it comes to web standards) then it can be done like this:

<style type="text/css">
  @import "common.css" screen;
</style>