Author Archives: ayn

How to get display:block links working over images in IE

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One of my clients at work wanted different parts of the header and footer images to link to different pages, I used a CSS trick to have transparent a links to get and image map type thing to work, it worked great in Firefox, but didn’t work in IE6/7, here’s what I had:

#header a,#footer a {
  display: block;
  text-decoration: none;
  position: absolute;
}
a#header_link{top:17px;left:481px;width:166px;height:69px;}
a#footer_link_1{top:35px;left:0;width:450px;height:51px;}
a#footer_link_2{top:35px;left:453px;width:125px;height:51px;}
a#footer_link_3{top:35px;left:577px;width:63px;height:51px;}

Notice I used position:absolute, it works fine if you wrap them inside a position:relative div. To get it to work in IE6 and IE7, I had to specify a background color and set opacity of that element to 0:

#header a,#footer a {
  opacity: 0;
  filter: alpha(opacity=0);
  -moz-opacity: 0;
  background-color: #ffffff;
  display: block;
  text-decoration: none;
  position: absolute;
}

Not a huge fan of IE.

Verizon Wireless’s ETF policy

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To prepare for the iPhone 3G I looked up Verizon’s Early Temination Fee policy, they were the first carrier to introduce a declining ETF, basically it starts at $175 and for every month you’re with them they take $5 off. My contract expires on 7/18, so if I terminate tomorrow, which is a week til end of contract, I pay $60. I guess I’ll wait a week and hope they will still have them.

I bet they’re getting a ton of calls on how ETF works today… I love the coverage and quality of service, EVDO kicks ass, but that new iPhone is just too cool to pass up.

this is cool: where the hell is Matt?

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Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Details here. I agree with hating when people ask how much shit costs, that’s the #1 question we get with our Smart car. I usually just answer MSRP. It only takes 1 google search to find out, not sure why they have to ask and then sometimes pass some kindda judgement afterwards, like, “wow, it’s only half a car and it costs this much?”

root caused my Leopard wifi problem

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Short version: disable and/or remove the JiWire dashboard widget if you have it.

Since I got my MacBook Pro with Leopard pre-installed I’ve never had a usable SSH connection. When I worked in the semi-conductor industry I worked over SSH 100% of the time, as the CAD tools only ran on company servers. Now I do local Rails development so I just avoided using SSH, like I edit files with TextMate over CyberDuck connection vs login and vi files. This works okay but I am a huge VIM user and it bothered me a little that I got a brand new Mac with unusable SSH connections. I’ve googled a lot about this and could never figure out why.

I also found out the problem was not just with SSH, but it was with my wifi. First the problem went away when I’m plugged in with an ethernet connection. Also I was not able to sustain any wifi connection without lags, all my Skype voice and video calls were getting chopped off. This really drove me crazy as I use Skype a lot. So last Friday I scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar to see if the genius could help me with this. The guy was knowledgeable with all things Macs and he could tell that I am sorta a power user by the stuff I had running, so he skipped the usual debugs and he suspected it was either that I had something running that interfered with my wifi or it was a hardware problem. He created a new account, we logged in with that account, and the SSH problem went away. I tested a Skype voice call and it worked great. I logged back into my account and the problem went away. He even said he didn’t do anything but if it comes back bring it in again and we’ll debug more.

I didn’t occur to me until this morning that the difference was that my Dashboard widgets weren’t running. With most Macs the dashboard widgets aren’t loaded until you look at them the first time after you login. This morning I got into the office and my SSH connection was slow again, I looked at all the widgets I had running, and disabled the JiWire wifi hotspot locator widget, and boom, my SSH connection was normal again. I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out earlier, the JiWire widget scans for nearby APs and it was probably scanning way too often. I had the same widget on my PowerMac running Tiger for years and everything was fine though.

Just thought I’ll post this up in case someone out there has the same problem. I had tried everything from adding a SRV record for the SSH service to my domain, to SSH’ing to IP addresses to avoid all DNS problems, nothing helped.