K's cluttered loft

CSS box model hacks

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:20:34 +0100

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...

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Ubuntu Karmic workarounds

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:57:27 +0100

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.

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Stop supporting IE7?

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:07:03 +0200

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>

Using Microsoft's Browser Test VMs in Virtual Box

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:07:00 +0200

If you are a web developer like me then you most likely must test your web pages in at least three incarnations of the evil Internet Explorer. And if you are a linux user like me then you will most likely not use native windows installations to do this. And if you are a Microsoft hater like me then you may have no Windows installation CDs at all. So how are you going to test your stuff in Internet Explorer?

Fortunately Microsoft is so kind to provide some Virtual Machine Images for testing purposes. Unfortunately they are only available for Virtual PC but with some work they can be used in Virtual Box as well. In this article I will describe how to get these images running on Ubuntu Linux 9.04.

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Events in Java (Second try)

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:14:00 +0200

Well, I'm not that satisfied with the Signal/Slot system I described in a previous article. The reflection part of it makes me itch. So I gave it a second try...

First of all lets summarize the problems with the listener pattern:

Two classes (The data container for the event and the listener interface) must be created for each event.
At least three methods must be created for each event (Register, Unregister and Fire) in each class which is going to fire the event

So it's simply too much boiler-plate code and the goal is to put as much as possible of it into some library classes without losing any type-safety and without using reflection. I'm going to describe my solution in this article and again I will use the nonsense example of a citizen which drinks some beverage and a Big Brother which monitors it.

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Events in Java

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:23:00 +0200

Java has no integrated event system but most classes in the Java Runtime uses the Listener Pattern for this. This pattern is pretty powerful and (when using Generics) completely type-safe but in the end it is still pain-in-the-ass. Think of a class which wants to send five different events. You have to write five listener interfaces and write at least 15 methods (five register methods, five unregister methods and five fire-event methods) and collections for all the listener objects which are registered. Depending on the type of events you may want to write five event classes which are used as containers for the event data. Lazy programmers therefor put all five events into the same listener interface so they only need one register/unregister/fire tripplet. But this requires the event receivers to implement all five listener methods even if they are interested in only one of them. So some genius invented the Adapter classes which already provide empty listener methods which can be extended by the event receiver. The whole thing is pretty annoying because it's so complicated to implement and to use.

So lets take a look at a different approach...

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Guild Wars on Linux

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:01:08 +0200

Because I'm currently playing Guild Wars pretty often and I was too lazy to switch between Windows and Linux when I switched between playing and working I installed lots of development software on Windows so I can work there, too. But after Windows crashed and shredded some of my source files while doing this I decided to ditch Windows completely. So I installed Guild Wars on Linux (using Wine) and after some configuration changes it works well enough. It never runs as fast as on Windows but it is fully playable.

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Lazarus TActionList

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:23:47 +0100

In Delphi I used TActionList with lots of TAction items to implement the various actions in an application. These actions can then be linked to menu items and buttons. An action can have an OnUpdate event handler which is responsible for activating and deactivating the action depending on the current state of the application. This is a very useful feature which is also available in Lazarus but unfortunately it is somewhat broken in current Lazarus version (At least up to daily snapshot 20081231) because the OnUpdate event handlers are not called correctly for actions which are only linked to menu items. This bug is already reported and hopefully it will be fixed soon. But for now I have created a little workaround for it.

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I18N with Lazarus

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:36:23 +0100

It's pretty difficult to find information about how to write a multi-lingual application with Lazarus. I've been through this and I hope that this article helps others to get on the right way. I'm not 100% sure the way I found is the right way but at least it works great for me. So it can't be totally wrong.

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Lazarus

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:00:00 +0100

Currently I'm again involved in developing GUI software for Windows. In the past I always did this with Delphi so I thought it would be nice to use it again. I searched for a free version of it which was quite hard. How the hell is it called today? Borland Delphi? Code Gears Delphi? Turbo Delphi? Which is the newest version? Delphi 2006? Delphi 10? Where are the Personal Editions? Is there still a Kylix out there for cross-platform development? Wasn't there an announcement that Borland will switch to Eclipse for Delphi development? Very confusing situation...

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Nice GTK1 fonts in Ubuntu

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:05:24 +0100

I noticed that GTK1 applications have a rather large and ugly font on my system. I searched the internet for a solution and found references to files like .gtkrc-1.2-gnome and .gtkrc-mine and some font definitions I have to put in there. But none of these solutions worked out for me. I found another reference to the program xfontsel and with all these partial information I was able to find a nice working solution. I hope it will also work for others.

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Stop supporting IE6

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:08:00 +0200

Lately I came to the conclusion that it is time to stop support for IE6 on new websites. I'm getting sick of using all those CSS hacks and I finally want to use new CSS selectors everywhere. IE7 is still a bad browser but at least it supports these selectors and (in most cases) even alpha-transparent graphics. It still needs some hacks but it's acceptable for now.

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Dell firmware problems with TSSTCorp TS-L632D DVD drive

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:49:58 +0100

If you own a Dell notebook with a TS-L632D CD/DVD drive and use it with Ubuntu Linux then you may have the same problem as me: You can't select the write speed in Nautilus. After hours of research I puzzled together various information I found on the net and now I got it working.

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Disable intro in Oblivion

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:15:10 +0100

Sometimes I'm playing Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion on Linux with cedega. Unfortunately the game has many intro videos which can't be skipped for some reason under Linux. But I found a way to get rid of them. Just delete the following files from your Oblivion/Data/Video folder:

2k games.bik
Oblivion Legal.bik
Oblivion iv logo.bik
bethesda softworks HD720p.bik
game studios.bik

When you now start the game then it skips all the intro videos and starts directly with the main menu.

Back to work...

nospam@example.com (Klaus Reimer) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:01:00 +0200

Holiday is over... Time for a quick review what I have achieved in the last three weeks.

First of all I have more or less finished my new homepage. Some bits and bytes may still be missing but this is more a bug than a missed TODO.

I read the book Killer Game Programming in Java but was quite disappointed by it...

Then I spent lot of time on the Wasteland project. I started rewriting my Wasteland Suite in C (This time called wlsuite) and as a small byproduct I've written strutils (A small C library with utility functions for easier string and string list handling) and wludata which is part of the wlupatch (A Patch for Wasteland which makes editing the datafiles of Wasteland much easier).