Say you have a webpage, with a background image and a select box. In Internet explorer 5.5, you will run into an issue where the background image won't fully load, and the contents of the previous page will be your background instead. Moving the scroll bar will sometimes fix the problem, or sometimes make it worse.

That is, if you are using IE 5.5 in stand-alone mode, along with IE 6.0.

Which goes to show, the only sane way to browser test is to install VMWare or have a separate machine for every IE version you need to test. Yes thats right, a separate computer for every (Microsoft) browser that you need to test.

Imagine that.

Insert heaping of scorn upon Microsoft here. Man. Just make your browsers stand-alone-able already.

This is more for my own reference rather then anyone else...

Posted a feature request on bugs.php.net... Bug number 36636. This is long after ranting about it in one of my previous entries Here.

This is similar to, but different from This bug where a protocol weenie asks that all PHP bugs return a 500 error. I just want errors that I can't control observe proper semantics, thats all.

This is a critical bug in Firefox. I've had it happen to me, and so have others. Your bookmarks just go away. Your bookmarks are lost. It seems a lot of people are willing to chalk it up to user error, which is really annoying, because sometimes they do in fact, just disappear.

If you got here because this has happened to you, here is a list of things to do:

1. Make sure you aren't running 2 firefoxes under a different profile.. Check this post here for some information
2. do a search for bookmarks.html on your system. Make sure you DO search hidden files! Open them up with your browser, and if it is your bookmarks, then you are safe. Away you go!
3. Do a disk-repair and check. your bookmarks might be in a file called fileXXXX.chk (where XXXX is a 4 digit number, like 0001). What you should do is open the file with a text editor, (notepad if you have to), and you are looking for HTML, with a list of all your bookmarks.. (good luck).
4. Use an undelete utility, and look for the file bookmarks.html.moztmp. Apparently that might be your bookmarks file, but it may take some massaging.

Regardless of whether or not his has happened to you... remember

• Start backing up! learn from your mistakes. Bookmark Backup is pretty cut and dry, but there are other solutions out there.
• This is bad, this is a very big, bad scary bug with Firefox. But the grass probably isn't all that greener on the other side. IE is still not terribly secure, and, depending on your system, can crash if you even look at it wrong. I don't know about Opera.
• There has been some discussion on bugzilla about this problem, so it will hopefully be addressed and fixed.

With older palm pilots, you can get caught up in what is commonly referred to as a "Digitizer Loop". This is really annoying if you happen to need to do a Hard Reset (because of lost battery power and sketchy caps, for instance), and you're stuck, in palm setup mode, because of the stupid digitizer that will not go away.

An interweb search will reveal mostly fruitless results. Vague suggestions to try various free and shareware digitizers that get caught up in the same loop, or worse yet, torrid tales of returns, return returns and rereturn returns of various palm mXXX handhelds.

Eek.

Funnily enough however, the solution is really simple.

Just do a soft reset that bypasses the startup. Just hold down the up button while hitting reset at the back of your device. Bam. No more digitizer loop. Of course, if you happen to hit the digitizer preference...

It is by no means perfect. The margins are a little screwy, the first date div is smashed up against the left side due to some kind of box-model freakout I am sure, but for the moment, the CSS is at least workable in IE.

God, what a piece of shit.

So I fixed my Float/Clear problem by positioning the right side absolutely, and giving the content area a margin equal to the right side. This is a variation on the canonical(sp?) Glish 3 Column Holy Grail. The lesson? Don't do anything complex with css and IE. Stick to tables man. Until microsoft fixes their borken-browser, it is either pain and hacks, or tables.

Update: It just has to do with the single "info" div on the Original IE Fixins post. As soon as I get some time... (that is, next week. 8P) I will fight with IE some more, and fix0r it up. Interesting to note however, that there is Another Post that has a right floating info div, that does not interfere the same way..

While Harmony had her nap, I spent some time working with the css of the site, in attempt to fix some of the brokenness. Not surprisingly enough, Internet Exploder is the biggest culprit. There are posts abound about how much IE interferes with shit. There are plenty of Well deserved tirades all about how Internet Explorer's CSS mangling is teh suck.

I fixed the list at the right hand side. It still needs some tweaking, but it is coming along. At least it doesn't horribly break in IE anymore. Next up on the list, is the little problem of the nested div, that clears inappropriately.

So, I've been using this great little app for my Palm Pilot, called Plucker. It is a (relatively) thin HTML document reader. It is MOUNDS better then avant go, easier to use, and doesn't require the use of a third party server. On top of that, it is GPL. (horray!)

The problem is, the Desktop component (which lets you download, and convert HTML documents + Images into something Plucker can read) will sometimes crash, and crash hard. Maybe it complains about the "Locale '(gibberish)' can not be set"

The fix? First off, try moving the plucker.ini out of the way. That should fix the problem. If you want to keep the channels that you set up earlier, just Copy them over one by one. They are all at the bottom of the file, and true to ini file format, each channel name (and configuration section) is in [square brackets]. You can try and copy over the whole lot of em, but if that doesn't work, (and you start crashing again) remove each channel one by one till you have it working.

For the record, plucker totally kicks the tits out of Acrobat Reader.