Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Well, at least until the entire world uses high DPI screens. Lets see an example:

Pulsing button (video)

This is a “call to action” effect on a button – it pulses slightly to get attention. This has proven to be really effective at improving “conversion” (web term to “getting you to do that thing I want you to do”). But even if you are not a designer at heart its easy to see that the text in the button is pulsing at different speeds and this creates a really jarring effect.

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One of the most annoying issues with Linux’s graphical system (and any UN*X), is that if you have some keys setup for switching the keyboard layout – when using two or more keyboard layouts, such as for writing English and Hebrew – then that key combination cannot be used in any other keyboard shortcut.

Its most annoyingly present when setting the keyboard layout switching command to ALT+SHIFT (like in MS-Windows), then you can’t do any keyboard shortcut that has ALT+SHIFT in it – such as ALT+SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous window.

Well, finally there is a solution! As detailed in FreeDesktop.org’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad , and thanks to Ilya Murav’jov we now have a patch to solve this ancient X11 problem.

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[Update: initially I thought this problem was limited to IE7 and earlier, I was wrong and it also happens in Internet Explorer 8. Kind of destroys what ever expectations I’ve had remaining for IE8]

Although Internet Explorer 8 was already released¹ most users are going to stick to previous versions – I know this for a fact as even though Internet Explorer 7 is already more than a couple of years on the market it still only has slightly better then 50% of the Internet Explorer market (not including other browsers).

That being said, its always “fun” finding more Internet Explorer bugs, something which the web developer I’m working with is proficient in (which she isn’t really doing on purpose – I’m not sure if it counts in her favor or not 🙂 ), so here is the latest one she stumbled upon²: (more…)

1. and it boasts a superior rendering engine – which is almost on par with  Firefox 3: it breaks horribly in the WordPress edit post dialog – its the first serious rendering problem I’ve seen with IE8 [↩]
2. I haven’t documented the several previous ones we encountered – I might do so in the future [↩]

Running any search on Google.com, at the moment, including searching for “google” may come up with all results marked This site may harm your computer:

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Another post just to get some information out there on Google – there is a known bug in Evolution regarding receiving meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 clients, and several Google searches didn’t come up with the solution, so here is the problem and the workaround:

A default Evolution installation has problems with meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 – when such an invitation is received, it is shown as a plain text message like this:

And you can’t take any action on the email. (more…)

But it is not – I’ve always been getting emails from people that use Outlook with weird characters strewn here and there for good measure, specifically a lot of people that send me email think its funny to add “J” (capital letter j) at the end of some sentences, for example:

And I never could figure out why, (more…)

במקרה שזפה את עיני הידיעה המשעשעת הבאה: בעקבות באג בחלונות ויסטה של מיקרוסופט, משתמשי ויסטה בעיירה לונד בשבדיה נשארו בלי אינטרנט. האשמה נופלת ספק על מיקרוסופט וספק על חברת האינטרנט המקומי שסרבה לשנות את התצורה של שרתי הלינוקס שלהם כדי לפתור (באופן זמני) את הבעיה.

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