Mike's Page

I stumbled upon this blog. The author is also a Travis McGee fan and followed in Travis and Meyer's footsteps on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico (from the novel Dress Her In Indigo. If you read some of the other entries, you'll see pictures and quotes from some of the places in the book. Cool! I really enjoy the McGee novels based in Mexico. Cinnamon Skin is probably my favorite.

Happy Holidays everybody!

Do yourself and webmasters a favor and use anything but Internet Explorer. Try Firefox!

I do work for a few websites and while most of my work is done behind the scenes on databases and scripts, I do a little basic web design. Today I was updating a site for a client and decided that instead of trying to match the background color of my logo graphic to the table cell color, I would try to use a transparent PNG instead. This worked beautifully in Firefox, but I had forgotten about Internet Explorer. IE can't render 24-bit transparent PNG images properly...it leaves an ugly cyan background.

Fortunately there are some workarounds. Normally I avoid these but too many people still use IE and I like PNGs. This site shows how to do it with Javascript. This one uses PHP, but it's meant for people using PNGs all over the place. As I only needed to do this for one image, I adapted their solution and used this code:

<?php
// Deal with PNG transparency problem
$arySize=getimagesize($strImage);
if (preg_match('/msie\s(5\.[5-9]|[6-9]\.[0-9]*).*(win)/i',
  $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
  echo '<img src="spacer.png" ', $arySize[3],
    ' style="filter: progid:DXImageTransform.',
    'Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=\'',
    $strImage, '\', sizingMethod=\'scale\';"></a>';
} else {
  echo '<img src="', $strImage, '" $arySize[3], '></a>';
}
?>

The spacer.png is a 1x1 pixel transparent 8-bit PNG which keeps the area empty until the filter has a chance to run (you can download it from the PHP-fix link above). If you put the original image there, you'll see the buggy PNG rendering briefly until the filter runs.

Ugly, isn't it?

We just got back from one of our typical trips to see the folks in Ohio. Here are some notes:

Monday, Dec. 12: Left SC in the afternoon. Bright and sunny until we got to NC. It was interesting driving by the Charlotte airport on I-85, because I had recently been "flying" there in Flight Simulator and recognized the runways the approaching planes were using. It started snowing as soon as we climbed I-77 in to the Virginia mountains. We stopped at the Sleep Inn in Princeton, WV. It's fun to swim in an indoor pool while it's snowing outside. Tried to use their free internet but my computer refused to load their weird login page, even after I turned off the firewall.

Tuesday, Dec. 13: The motel had these cool waffle irons where you poured in a cup of batter, closed the lid, and 2 minutes later it was ready. Not bad for the typical motel "continental" breakfast. Finished the drive to Ohio in cold but sunny weather.

Wesnesday, Dec. 14: Spent some time out in the cold trying to photograph birds. Jen's folks had a lot of them eating seed off their picnic table. The overcast weather made the images turn out sort of dull. The Canon 100-400mm lens needs lots of light. Got a halfway decent shot of a red-bellied woodpecker.

Thursday, Dec. 15: Drove through some nasty rain and sleet to get to Cincinnati.

Friday, Dec. 16: Spent most of the day lounging around but braved the cold to see Katie Reider play across the river in Newport, KY. Great music and an interesting crowd.

Saturday, Dec. 17: Went to see relatives in Louisville, KY and back to Cincinnati in the evening.

Sunday, Dec. 18: Set up my dad's new computer, replacing an ancient machine from 1998. Really wish you could buy a Dell without them installing all their resource-sucking trialware. Got rid of a lot of it and installed AVG and Firefox.

Monday, Dec. 19: Time to head home. Was 12 degrees (-11°C) and sunny when I started the car at 10am. Didn't get above freezing until we got to Tennessee. We got to SC after dark and it was 40 degrees (4°C), a nice improvement. There were lots of trees down along the sides of the roads from the ice storm we missed. I was worried about my house, which has a lot of trees around it. Fortunately we had no damage.

My son is getting interested in playing around with the computer. Many of the shows he likes have eqivalent websites with stories and games. Several of these are on the Nick Jr. website. My son is smart enough to navigate these sites by himself for the most part. I was really disappointed when I found that several parts of their website have video ads that you have to watch or click "skip" before you can see the content. That's pretty desperate on their part. Don't they get enough revenue advertising on TV? Fortunately my son is faster to click the "skip" button than me, but I think I'll be pointing him to better kid websites in the future.