I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.
Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.
After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links.
Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.
In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.
“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.” - Woodrow Wilson
That’s how I feel in politics…
When I originally installed Ubuntu on my DecTOP, I didn’t have any problem booting from a USB flash drive or an external CD drive. Reinstalling Debian on the same box, however, was not quite so easy.
For my own future reference, plus anyone else who may run into the problem, the key is to hold down ESC while the DecTOP POSTs to get it to boot from an external USB drive (at least for a CD drive, presumably a flash drive as well). Shortly you should see a CD-ROM check box appear next to the memory test box and you can let go.
After a whole week of being sick and generally not feeling well enough to work on anything, I’ve finally gotten back to hacking on some Habari code.
I’ve been up until about 5am the last two mornings working on a variety of things. Yesterday included a plugin directory plugin that hopefully will eventually find a home on the Habari servers providing directory and update notification services. I also had the opportunity to track down an obscure database class error while helping add some new tag merging / renaming functionality.
This morning I’ve been hammering away at a new database schema for Oracle. All in all there aren’t a lot of changes, but things like the lack of auto_increment fields made it a very time-consuming process.
Tomorrow I hope to get some more work done on Oracle support (hopefully allowing me to test a running blog, if not the installation and other backend functionality) and finish some updates I’ve had planned for the Monthly Archives plugin for far too long.
At some point in the next couple of days I would also love to rearrange my desk. Unfortunately that means I first have to clean it off, which is a much larger task than it should be…
I imagine many people have been confused with the differences between all the myriad open source licenses available. I did a quick Google, and found a very nice basic table listing some of the more popular licenses you might encounter and their key points.
Check out the comparison here, thanks to the KDE project.
The Open Source Initiative also includes a large index of licenses here, albeit comparison is left up to you.
Babble Blabber