If you want to make use of the simple CSS position:fixed; to display an element static to the viewport, you will run into problems with the Internet Explorer.
position:fixed is only supported since Internet Explorer 7
I tested this solution with IE 7.0.5730.13 on Windows XP. IE 6 does not support fixed positioning.
You need to enforce strict mode
Internet Explorer will default to "quirky rendering mode", if you don't add special tags to your HTML document:
Both are essential! If you try IE 9 on the page without having added the meta tag X-UA-Compatible, it will render the page in quirky mode. And in quirky mode, it will ignore your position:fixed, and render your element where you have put it in the flow of the document.
Please note: I have read that this meta tag actually is not valid for this DOCTYPE.
It still does not work? I am testing with local documents!
Internet Explorer also takes into account where the element is being served from. This solution will work, if you upload your test documents to a server and access them over the Internet. It will not work (see note below) for local files, even if you use a local webserver to serve up the files (i.e. XAMPP). Internet Explorer will render your document in quirky mode, in this case.
Note: actually it does work offline (opening a document from the harddrive) in Internet Explorer 9 after fiddling somewhat with the document. I removed a IE compatibility script (not shown above), which I had included from Google previously. Check if you have one of those, and remove it!
URL Shortening is all the rage now. Sometimes you want to give people ridiculously long URLs, which might also be subject to change.
So you want to do it with C5, don't you?
Great, you think – there's the "add external link" menu option in Concrete's sitemap. Unfortunately it does not work the way you expect it to – it just adds the link to the Navigation, but no page alias to point to the external page (i.e. http://www.synapse-redaktion.de/FaceBook won't work after adding a "FaceBook" external link).
What to do to solve this dilemma?
My suggestion is to use both: add a (hidden) page "FaceBook" which does header JavaScript forwarding to the other page, so you can give out the links to the people, and a "real external link" so you don't have to rely on JavaScript for most of your visitors.
The SiteMap will look like this:
Adding custom attributes: (Header Extra Content, Exclude from Page List, Exclude from Nav)
with surfnext.com being the URL you are forwarding to.
If you have the time, you might want to add a static link or icon to the page (/*comment*/ the window.location = … part to be able to edit the page!) in case some person has their JavaScript turned off.
They are files created with Pages, a part of the iWork productivity suite for Mac OS X.
How can I open them?
There is no known software which can open .pages natively on Windows or Linux.
But, there's a kind of a workaround which lets you access the content of the .pages files.
The workaround
The file is actually a .zip archive! If you have 7-zip right-click the file to extract it. If not, you may rename the file to filename.zip and extract it with your favorite ZIP application. (Windows can do it from Windows XP upwards).
The folder / files which you obtain from the .pages file contains different files and folders.
index.xml – if you are truly desperate, the text is in here and can be extracted with a lot of patience, I guess. Also theoretically someone could write a parser for this file sometime.
QuickLook – this folder contains preview versions of your .pages file. If it is present – sometimes it is not (if the creator of the file did not include a preview!)
What about QuickLook & the preview files?
There's two types (I know of):
PDF files – you're lucky, it contains your .pages in a format suitable for reading and further processing
JPG images – this is a low-resolution screenshot of the .pages file, you can still read it, but … well no copy'n'paste here.
The guys over at fileinfo.com claim that Free Opener can open .pages. Well, it's just doing the preview files thing from above. Meaning – if you only have a low-res JPEG preview image, that's all you get from Free Opener. No text, I'm sorry to say.
I like the installer – I think more installers should be built like theirs, BUT – it seems to install along with it many programs which you actually did not want in the first place, if you are not careful. Also there are rumours about it installing Adware (see WOT).
I would at this point advise against installing Free Opener to open .pages files. Use the manual method.
Are there other solutions to open .pages files?
Google Docs is supposed to be able to open them
Ask your friend / colleague / … to send you a PDF file, or to export to Word-readable formats (formatting may be lost with the latter option)
Buy a Mac.
Can InDesign access .pages files?
Not on Windows to my knowledge. Tested with InDesign CS5 + Windows 7 64bit without any extensions, by trying to place a .pages file. "No filter could be found".
We are having the Information revolution at the moment. Digital information is easily copied and thus the cost of it approaches zero.
The next major step will be the easy availability of compact home-fabrication systems, which are able to produce things for the daily use.
3-D printers, sintering and such are technologies going into this direction. Maybe, maybe one day the Star Trek idea of replicators will be here, for you to enjoy.
This will allow people to be even more independent, and powerful.
Intellectual property is the only property which really can exist – as the human mind is running completely on thoughts (input <-> processing <-> output). For it to be able to be copied millionfold allows the cost of the individual unit to be low. Very low. And it should be.
In this fascinating approach to male sperm, they are shown as highly complex machines. The first part of the movie highlights some major points about sperm, i.e. the Fructose needed for them to run being ejaculated by the male organism together with the sperm.
Then suddenly the movie goes on to say, that God had to create sperm. The reason given is, the sperm don't provide direct feedback to the testicles whether "everything worked out". And how are the testicles to know what exactly to develop? Thus, someone must have engineered sperm to precisely fit with its role in a female body.
This kind of reasoning seems to have the underlying assumption that everything is already in place as a complex whole, today.
Take Ubuntu for instance. It fits precisely with your machine, although it had no way of knowing … stop! I hear you shouting. There's the human engineers, who are designing and testing Ubuntu against a wide variety of hardware.
Yes, that's true. But, just as the human body integrates many different components derived from many different other projects – for instance about 30 % of our proteins are absolutely identical with chimpanzee's proteins – Ubuntu is also based on a lot of other projects, i.e. the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities, the apt package management system from Debian, and many, many more. And these have been developed for other systems pre-dating your system. You know, those big bulky boxes with floppy drives. And now the software has evolved (has been evolved by human engineers, granted), to support the older hardware – or at least parts of it – and also more features of your new hardware.
In the same way the human body is based – this is the evolutionist approach, of course – on previous developments and environments. Where many small, "logical" steps have been taken in the course of evolutionary change. Which gradually allowed the amazing sperm of today to happen! The male body develops a new approach, which the female body over time responds to by developing an amplified answer to, which in turn again triggers the male body to develop another layer of complexity.
Do we really need a God?
Do we really need a God? What is "God" actually to believers?
God is a system of beliefs and explanations. Take the rain, for instance. For primitive societies, it is made by God, or some mythological explanation is given about heavenly creatures – mimicking human society and behaviour, and thus experience. Think of Eris, the one with the golden apple. Think of "structured heavenly societies", like angels, fallen angels, demons, St. Pete at the Pearly Gates (fulfilling a specific function), etc.
For a scientifically-minded society, the explanation may be given by some entity, water, being vaporated by some other entity, the sun's light rays, and condensing into drops in colder areas, which then start falling down on the city. (Actually it is quite majestic and magical to just think about this "simple process". Maybe listening to the appropriate music?)
But actually this is just another system of beliefs and explanations, just more elaborate, and with less (apparent) contradictions in itself. How many of you are going to see a human cell under the microscope? How many are going to really analyze the molecular structure of sugar? There simply is no possibility of checking every known "fact" in existence. Trust is necessary, trust in the explanations, models, and insights of others.
Just as in indigenous societies, the medicine men explain the world to others, and communicate with the "spirits", in western societies scientists communicate with the "spirits" of nature using their instruments.
As such both religions – or more specifically most religions' ideas of God – and science are a set of thought structures inside people's minds. Transmitted from one generation to the next.
In my opinion "God" and "Nature" are just two different names for the same processes. The more science "demystifies" nature, the more shifts from being declared as "created by God" to "being a natural process". The sperm thing is just another example of this. If we fully understand how sperm came to be the way it is, there's still some precise physical conditions and structures which nature as a whole is based on, which we can't explain as of yet, which have to be attributed to "God". The structures and explanations are transferred from one belief system to another, which has more explicit understanding, which manages to build a better mental model. If one has the desire to understand the world.
Other vantage points
A squirrel may see the building of nuclear reactors from an entirely different perspective. It does not know that they exist – as such they would just be (noisy?) objects which do not contain nuts. And are not interesting as of a consequence. The Tom-Harry-or Dick squirrel from your neighbourhood has no use for electricity. It does not know about it, it does not understand it (do we?), nor does it want to know. It simply wants to go about collecting nuts.
The squirrel has a different (less elaborate) belief system. But it does not have to have more. You probably have some beliefs about microprocessors which are not entirely accurate. Even if you design microprocessors, you are working in a model (!), which "mostly" works OK.
Everyone is a creator
OK, this article is already quite confusing. One last point to add: everyone is a magical creator of the world around us, by transforming it. Just as I write this article, there are people programming games for children out there. This is true magic from a child's point of view. This is being God.
This is immobilienscout24.de, a website for the sale / rental of flats and other real estate in Germany.
Although they do try to group some elements, it is simply too much. Overwhelming. I do not know how to do the things I want to do with it.
Furthermore, while editing an advertisement on this page, I nearly clicked to prolong the contract for another month. I bet a lot of people make that mistake – the design promotes it.
It is partly too much choice and possibilities they offer, and partly misplacement of the corresponding buttons.
A big problem is certainly the many links which are on this page, the many different colors and font sizes.
Feel free to criticize my projects and sites, I can only benefit from that!
amMap is a pretty cool Flash-based map which allows you to display geographical information. Check out the examples on amMap.com. It has been used on many pages world-wide, and now – thanks to SurfNext's needs – it is coming to MediaWiki!
What is MediaWiki?
It is the Wiki software which is behind Wikipedia and many other major wikis. SurfNext.com is also based on MediaWiki. Ah, the power of free software!
Why Flash, why amMap?
Because there is no free JavaScript-based map out there, which is not based on tiles. (Please post a link if you know any vector-based JavaScript map !!!)
Unfortunately iDevices (iPhone, etc) do not have Flash capabilities. Thus, you can't see the amMap on them.
amMap requires you to leave the link to amMap (inside the map) intact, or to buy a commercial license.
I ask you to provide a back-link to my project SurfNext.com, if this extension is of value to you.
This extension is still in early beta, use at your own risk. Post comments about the extension on this blog page, thank you!
Installation
snAmmap requires MediaWiki 1.17 or higher, as it uses ResourceLoader. (Feel free to fork a version for earlier MediaWikis).
An alternative, of course, is to upgrade your Wiki. It is advisable, as the new release sports significant speed enhancements.
Put the snAmmap folder in your extensions folder.
Add require_once("$IP/extensions/snAmmap/snAmmap.php"); to your LocalSettings.php
If you want to, you can create custom data and settings files and put them somewhere in your Wiki installation path. (i.e. a folder custom)
Usage
Currently snAmmap only supports one map per page. After you have installed the extension, use the following tag in your Wiki where you want to include the map:
None of the tag's attributes are required, there are sensible defaults for them (falling back on the data_file and settings_file provided with amMap, for instance.)
height => sets the height of the map. Can be a percentage
width => sets the width. Can also be a percentage.
bgcolor => sets the initial background color, which can be modified in the settings file later.
data_file => sets the path (URL!) for the data_file. Can be a full URL with hostname, but you have to enable cross-site scripting, which is dangerous. Use a file from your server, preferably.
settings_file => sets the path for the settings_file
See the documentation of amMap for more details and information what you can modify.
Live Example
SurfNext.com uses the snAmmap extension on the main page in conjunction with custom data and settings files for a map which links to Wiki pages. It also has a dropdown menu from which you can select the individual countries by name, which also links to the Wiki pages.
SurfNext shows you how to obtain Internet access everywhere in the world. Feel free to join and participate!
Feel free to comment about SurfNext on this blog page.
IMPORTANT: WordPress fucks up the quotation marks above, fix them by hand!!!
This tells Lectora's code to treat Opera like Netscape Navigator and its derivates. For the title we are developing for the WHO (ICF eLearning tool) it works flawlessly.
This fix is taken from this Lectora forum message, posted by ssneg.
(ssneg also explains why it is not possible to override this.min and set it to true – because Lectora only includes code for IE or NS to display the title contents, like buttons, later on. Thus we need for Opera to "pretend" that it is Navigator. The code works.)
Do you know any other browsers incompatible with Lectora? Please post a comment, and we might find a solution :-)!
I copied the list of recent changes from MediaWiki
Pasted it into Notepad++
Did some regex-assisted search and replace to remove leading and trailing text surrounding newly created pages
Blanked all the lines not concerning newly created pages (again with regexes ^[^N].*$ => select the whole line which does not start with N)
removed all blank lines using Notepad++'s TextFX
removed N! before the page titles, using regex
scanned the list for pages I want to keep and removed them
copied it
pasted it into the mass delete form
That seems like a mighty complicated way to do it – but: like this, it is guaranteed that every undesired page has been killed, and it's more fun than stupidely clicking a lot of times and waiting for the browser.
Best of all – this way can be automated to give you a list of newly created pages. (Actually there is an extension called DPL which does precisely that, but DPL seems to have some security issues in the initial setup, thus I am still refraining from installing it).
Microsoft has just released a new "safety scanner", which anyone can download without restriction, to remove viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Security essentials on the other hand is only available for users of genuine Windows systems, and only free for home users and businesses with up to ten PCs.
But they both scan for viruses and spyware. What should I use?
If you already have Security Essentials you don't need the Safety Scanner. If you can't get Security Essentials, use the Safety Scanner.
This article has a very good overview of all Microsoft Anti-Malware Software:
