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Been battling with IE7 and a JS error I have been getting. We are using Modalbox for modal windows to display relogin information inside TYPO3 starting with version 4.3. In IE7 I have been getting the error “object doesn’t support this property or method” when loading content into the Modalbox.

After lots of trial and error I figured out that it didn’t like the name attribute on an input tag. Removing that, everything works fine now. Hope this will save someone a lot of trouble.

Christoph, who has high hopes in IE8 standards compliancy.

Tags: Technology by Christoph
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The ultimate in total connectivity: posting a blog from my iPhone and broadcasting that to twitter and facebook at the same time. Wow…

Tags: Personal, Technology by Christoph
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This will demonstrate not one but TWO neat technologies. This post is written on my iPhone with the new wordpress app and should be sent to twitter as well! Let’s see if it works…

By the way, my Twitter username is ckoehler if you’re interested in what I am doing.

Tags: Personal, Technology by Christoph
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This is more a reminder for me than anything, but maybe someone else will benefit from this:

• Print queue: postqueue -p
• Delete all messages from the queue: postsuper -d ALL
• Read a message: postcat -q <queue file id>
• See what shape the queue is in: qshape

I am sure the man pages for each command will give you more info on what you can do with them.

Tags: Technology by Christoph
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With git being the awesome version control system that it is, I switched to using git-svn for all our Web-Empowered Church extensions. That way I get the easy branching and merging while still being compatible with Subversion and everyone else who’s using it (and who hasn’t seen the light yet…).

Now I have a directory that contains all our wec_* extensions. With Subversion, I could do a simple “svn up *” and it would update all the working copies inside the subdirectories. Unfortunately, git doesn’t do that.

Ruby to the rescue:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
def rebase(dir)
  Dir.chdir(dir) do |path|
      puts "Rebasing #{path}...."
      `git svn rebase`
      puts "done!\n\n"
  end
end

if ARGV[0].nil?
  dirs = Dir["*/"]
  dirs.each do |dir|
    rebase(dir)
  end
else
  rebase ARGV[0]
end

Just stuck this into the directory above all the extensions. Now I can rebase all extensions automatically with one little command, or just one by giving an optional argument.

Tags: Ruby, Technology by Christoph
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Just got an email from Opera talking about their new product, Opera Dragonfly. Dragonfly will be a suite of developer tools aimed at, well, web developers. That’s all I know for now, but I sure am excited. They have a countdown on their site counting down to May 6, 2008. I am very excited and will check it out ASAP.

Developer tools have been the only thing still keeping me with Firefox and its Firebug extension. Webkit is shipping with dev tools that are not half bad and beautifully designed, but I have high hopes for Opera dev tools so I can do all my development in one browser.

You can find more info at the launch manager’s blog.

Tags: Technology by Christoph
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As many of you know I work for the Web-Empowered Church and develop the WEC Map extension, I have been working on version 2.0 and was about ready to release, until in one of our QA passes discovered the whole map disappearing in IE7 when anyone clicks on a marker.

Not unfamiliar with IE7’s less than stellar standards support, I suspected Javascript errors, although IE7 didn’t show any. After a few hours of testing it turns out that it was a problem with the template we were using, not anything that I did. Phew! There were two styles that somehow conflicted. I say “somehow” because there is no telling why in the world they should conflict. These were the two styles:

#footer {
  position:relative;
  top:1px;
  background-color: #336699;
  width:100%;
  clear:both;
  margin:0;
  padding:1% 0;
  text-align:center;
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: .75em;
  color: #FFFFFF;
} 

#right-col {
  position:relative;
  top:-10px;
  right:-10px;
  float:right;
  width:220px;
  voice-family: "\"}\"";
  voice-family:inherit;
  width:180px;
  margin:0 0 -10px 0;
  padding:10px;
  background:#efefef;
  font-size: .75em;
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  z-index:99;
}

I removed the position: relative stuff from the right-col, especially since we already float it, as well as the width from the footer. Then I just had to adjust the margins on the right column to make everything work as expected again:

#footer {
  position:relative;
  top:1px;
  background-color: #336699;
  clear:both;
  margin:0;
  padding:1% 0;
  text-align:center;
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: .75em;
  color: #FFFFFF;
}   

#right-col {
  float:right;
  width:220px;
  voice-family: "\"}\"";
  voice-family:inherit;
  width:180px;
  margin:-10px -10px -10px 0;
  padding:10px;
  background:#efefef;
  font-size: .75em;
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  z-index:99;
}

Don’t ask me why or how. That’s Internet Explorer for you. If you at all can, please do not use it. Use Safari or Opera or Firefox instead. The only reason us web guys still wrestle with IE is because the majority of people still uses it. That, and Microsoft is apparently incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. IE8 looks hopeful, but to really get up to par I think we will have to wait a few more years.

Tags: Technology by Christoph
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Looks like Opera now gets 100/100 on the Acid3 test, as does WebKit.

Opera’s rendering still has a few bugs and the WebKit guys are still working out the performance, but this is a great step in the right directions. Unlike Opera, which only achieved this in an internal, non-public build, you can actually download a WebKit nightly and try the test for yourself.

For those unfamiliar with the test, there is a great Wikipedia page about it. In short, it’s a test that makes sure browser are standard compliant with the latest technology in order to assure the same functionality for all the cool new stuff on all browsers. Unfortunately Internet Explorer is very very very bad about that, and Firefox isn’t that great either, so for now it’s Safari/Webkit and Opera leading the pack!

Update: Opera now has a public build out that passes Acid3 scorewise, see the two new screenshots attached above. There are still more performance problems in the Opera build than the WebKit one, so for now WebKit is ahead!

Tags: Technology by Christoph
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I stopped using Bittorrent a long time ago and for the few things that I have been downloading (mainly Gamersyde trailers and Neooffice) I have been using Azureus. After some kind of network hiccup at home and NAT problems with Azureus, I tried to find another client and found Transmission. I am pretty blown away! It doesn’t have as many features, but a beautiful interface and everything you could possibly need! I especially like that it monitors a folder for new torrent files and automatically adds those. Sweet!

Tags: Personal, Technology by Christoph
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I found this nice open source barcode scanner that uses any webcam to scan barcodes off books, DVDs, CDs, etc. They link to several apps that implement it, including one called Books. You scan your book’s barcode, do a quick lookup, and it fetches the info from several places and fills it in. It features keeping track of checkouts, which should come in handy if you friends keep all your books. I will check it out and see if I want to spend the time to catalog my library.

Tags: Personal, Technology by Christoph
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