Binary Expressions

I’m a huge fan of Mozilla Foundation and their products. So it’ not unusual for me to immediately have the latest stable version of Firefox and Thunderbird not to mention alpha/beta versions. Unfortunately Firefox v1.5 is the first version I’ve installed and immediately afterwards down graded to the previously stable final release (v1.07). Don’t get me wrong the bug fixes, new features and other imrpovements are great. However more then 50% of my Mozilla Firefox extensions and themes are no longer compatible nor could it find updates to fix the incompatibility problem. There was a few exceptions of extensions that did work, which I have listed below. I even went out to search for updates manually for Firefox v1.5 for my extensions and themes and I came up empty. I realize these extensions and themes are independant however I use a lot of them on a daily bases and can not go without them. In my case I could have survived if Chatzilla and Zhluk.com DevBoi extensions worked.

I was very impressed with the seemless and trouble fee upgrade to Firefox v1.5. Unfortunatly when I down graded something messed up causing user control popups and links not to function normally. I ended up having to uninstall Firefox (excluding my profile) and re-install from scratch. I hope to see the extesions updated soon so I can enjoy the benefits of Firefox v1.5.

At this point I would recommend to all users thinking of upgrading to Firefox v1.5 to check to see if the extensions and themes important to you work in Firefox v1.5 before upgrading. If you do upgrade of course make sure to do a backup of your critical files including creating a list of extensions/themes/plugins/search engines. I’m not aware of an extension that will create a list of all of those but there is one extension that can handle creating a list of extensions and themes, InfoLister.

My Installed Compatible Firefox v1.5 Extensions

• All-In-One Sidebar 0.5.6
• BugMeNot 0.8
• Forecastfox 0.8.2.4
• Html Validator 0.7.6
• IE Tab 1.0.6
• IE View 1.2.7
• Image Zoom 0.2.1
• InfoLister 0.8.2 (was fixed by updating)
• Sage 1.3.6
• SpellBound 0.7.3
• Web Developer 0.9.4

My Installed Incompatible Firefox v1.5 Extensions

• Afterglow ToolbarAdjuster 0.3
• ChatZilla 0.9.68a
• fireFTP 0.88.3
• jybe 2.0
• Live HTTP Headers 0.10
• Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries 0.9.1.0
• SpoofStick 1.05
• Tab Mix 0.2.2.3
• Zend Studio Toolbar 1.0.7
• DevBoi 0.2.6

My Installed Incompatible Firefox v1.5 Themes

• Afterglow FF 1280 0.80
• Brushed 0.9.9.5

This is the best description of the new Nintendo Revolution console controller I have seen yet.

read more | digg story

News about the new Spiderman 3 and talking about the game.

read more | digg story

As you may have discovered that currently IE does not support the pseudo-class :hover on non anchor element tag(s). However there is two solutions to this problem. The Suckerfish:hover or Whatever:hover. In my case I wanted to apply pseudo-class :hover onto multiple div element tags. I chose to use the Suckerfish:hover solution as it’s simple and very little code required to solve the problem. Whatever:hover has quite a bit of code and apparently has issues that might not make it work even in IE. I’m sure Whatever:hover has it’s place but in my mind either use JavaScript to solve the problem. I would prefer not to use JavaScript but what can you do :-). Here’s the Suckerfish:hover solution with my modifications (not much). I will not go much into this as the two source I have given are more then enough. I just wanted to show my modifications and to get more exposure to this problem.

CSS
I just add div.sfhover to my existing style.

div.float:hover, div.sfhover
{
background-color: #dde5f7;
}

JavaScript
I only modified this line var sfEls = document.getElementById(”nav”).getElementsByTagName(”LI”); to the following so it would be applied to an id called hover and to only div element tags enclosed in with in the hover id.

sfHover = function()
{
var sfEls = document.getElementById("hover").getElementsByTagName("div");
for (var i=0; i {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function()
{
this.className+=" sfhover";
}
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function()
{
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(" sfhover\\b"), "");
}
}
}
if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", sfHover);

Source: Suckerfish:hover
Source: Whatever:hover

For awhile now Sony BMG, has been under a bright spot light of criticism for protecting their music CDs with an XCP Rootkit. I WARN everyone stay clear of these discs. The protection is a violation of your rights and it physically changes the way your Windows operating system acts, makes the system unstable and opens the door to huge security risks. Not to mention the software goes back to Sony BMG’s site to report what content you are viewing/listening to.

For further details on the XCP Rootkit and how to remove it, use the below resources. I’ll leave this up to the experts. A complete and well explained coverage of this is in the podcast Security Now, episode #12. Listen to the show it’s great and in words anyone can understand.

Source: Security Now - Episode #12 - Sony’s “Rootkit Technology” DRM (copy protection gone bad)
Source: Finally! Full List of CDs Infected with XCP Rootkit
Source: Rootkit
Source: Boycott Sony

SANS has released/updated there Top 20 Vulnerabilities. I would advise everyone to at least glance as this report and try to implement some of the recommendations. This report is quite technical but it’s vital that we start looking out for ourselves and protecting our computers and property. Fight back and stand up for what we work hard for.

For those not familiar, SANS is a world wide trusted institute for computer security, training, certification and research. They know what they are talking about and it’s all backed by facts and examples on how the vulnerabilities are exploited.

Source: SANS Top 20 Vulnerabilities

I was searching for some technical information one day and ran across this flash movie someone created about 9/11. I know this is old but it’s a very well done flash that in my opinion reminds us all how fragile our lives are. The flash is quite sad and freaked me out thinking of my own daughter and how she would feel. Oh man it hurts even thinking about it. But I had to pass this on as I think it’s important that we don’t forget the past so we can make sure never to repeat our mistakes.

Source: I miss you daddy (Shockwave Flash)

The sweetest game ever I’ve owned. I’ve had it for about 4 weeks and its great, but they only thing is I still haven’t seen some stuff I saw on Gamespots interview with the makes of Age Of Empires III Heaven. This site will tell you basically all you wanna know and maybe more.

read more | digg story

I came into work one morning and found out that my database server running OpenBSD with MySQL was no longer running and would not boot up. With a little bit of research I determined that the server went down two days before (over the weekend) and that the file system appeared to be corrupted on two partitions. A co-worker found out that the server’s primary channel on the motherboard was damage. So switched the hard drive over to the secondary channel. This I thought was odd but appeared to be true. I looked at the server and tried to get it to boot up myself. No luck as I was receiving two similar error messages as shown below. I apologize for it not being exact I was in a hurry and panicking to get the server back up and running.

Error Messages - (approximate message)

/dev/rwd0e (/var/): incorrect block count I=36484 (6 should be 0) (corr.) 15025024 DUP I=3515543.
/dev/rwd0g (/usr/): incorrect block count I=36484 (6 should be 0) (corr.) 15025024 DUP I=3515543.
Run fsck_ffs manually.

Solution

After moving the hard drive over to the secondary channel I was prompted at boot “Enter pathname of shell or RETURN for Sh:”. Now due to the fact that my CLI was in the damanged partition (/usr/local/bin/bash) I entered at the prompt “/bin/csh” without quotes and pressed enter. Now that I was into the system I ran “fsck_ffs /dev/rwd0e” and “fsck_ffs /dev/rwd0g” without quotes multiple times. It took me roughly 4 hours to resolve the problem. There was a lot of damage but nothing major or anything that was important. The database data was not affected except for a one log file.

As for how to use fsck_ffs after you run the command I just answered each questions it prompted me for. It’s quite interactive. I do ad might that I wasn’t sure what to say on some of them and wish I had a better understand of it. If anyone knows of good material that explains the fsck_ffs better and how the whole BSD file system works, please let me know.

Thanks to users in the IRC channels for OpenBSD

Saying all this I have to say thanks to all the people on IRC EFNet and Freenode in the channel #OpenBSD. Thanks to a few comments I was able to understand how to use fsck_ffs. Prior to this event I never have worked with fsck_ffs before. Again thanks everyone!

Centering a table in css is quite simple to achieve however how one would think to center a table is not always the correct way to do so.

Common Mistakes

• Table align attribute (deprecated)
• • One may say why not just use the table element attribute align? Well this attribute is deprecated and not recommended to be used. This is why we have CSS to separate styling and structuring.
• Table style text-align: center;
• • One might think to just apply a style on to a table by using text-align: center;. However text-align can only be applied on non-block level element. A table is a block level element.

Solutions

• Method 1 - Using Margins
• • To center a table one must apply a style with margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;. This can be done like so:

    table.center { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

    Then apply the class style like so:

      <table class="center">
        ...
      </table>
      

• Method 2 - Using Percentages
• • If you desire to have a table with a specific width, you can do this:

    table.center { width: 70%; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }

    Then apply the class style like so:

      <table class="center">
        ...
      </table>
      

• Method 3 - Using Fixed Width
• • If one desires to have a table with a fixed width you can do this:

    div.tablecontainer { width: 98%; margin: 1%; }
    table.center { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 200px; }

    Then apply the class style like so:

      <div class="tablecontainer">
      <table class="center">
        ...
      </table>
      </div>
      

    You can set the “width: 200px” to whatever width you desire.

Notes / IE Exception To The Rule

These methods worked perfectly in Mozilla Suite/Firefox, Opera and IE 6. However these methods did not work in IE 5.5 or IE 5.01. You can over come this problem by doing a couple additional styles and the use of a div or span element tag.

• IE 5.01 & IE 5.5 Additional Solution
• • For these methods to work in IE 5.01 & IE 5.5 one must add some additional styles. First enclose your table with a div or span element tag with a css class such as tablecontainer and then create an additional style to your tr and td element tags like so:

    div.tablecontainer { text-align: center; width: 98%; margin: 1%; }
    div.tablecontainer tr, div.tablecontainer td { text-align: left; }
    table.center { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

      <div class="tablecontainer">
      <table class="center">
        ...
      </table>
      </div>
    

    The “text-align: center;” is what will cause the table to center in these versions of the IE browser. The tables will not center without it. The draw back of having “text-align: center” is it will center all the text inside your table cells. This is counter acted by applying a style to “tr” and “td” to align left. If you have th element tags, make sure to set a style so it aligns the text entered back to the default behaviour if desired (i.e. table.tablecontainer th { text-align: center; }).

Source: Center a table with CSS by Scott Granneman
Source: Centring using CSS