This is a rant I’ve done before, but not here. I’ve been wrestling with a wordpress theme for someone else. It’s actually something I quite enjoy. Except for one part: compatibility checking.

Now I’ve been a Linux user for several years, but I’ve got a couple of windows installations kicking about in virtual machines. As a result I am at least in a position where I can test with pretty much all browsers. Not with Safari as of yet (haven’t bothered to install the Windows Beta), but Safari’s rendering engine is based on KHTML anyway, so I assume anything that works in Konqueror will work in Safari. So far, so good.

Unfortunately problems always seem to crop up at exactly the same point in compatibility checking. Having exhausted my Linux based browsers (Firefox, Konqueror & Opera) I switch on the VMs. IE7 usually doesn’t give any trouble. But then, there’s IE6. That always seems to be trouble.

In all fairness I knew (to some extend) what I was getting myself into this time. I want an effect that is best achieved, in opinion, with semi-transparent PNGs. Unfortunately Microsoft never added support for the PNG alpha channel to IE6. That leaves just three options:
1) Accept that buttons are ugly in IE6
2) Accept that solution isn’t as elegant but buttons work everywhere
3) Keep code clean and use an ActiveX filter to make IE6 buttons less ugly, but not actually pretty

Having to deal with that sort of thing is frustrating, to say the least. But the best recent figures on browser usage I can find still make IE6 the top browser ahead of IE7, which means that for many sites not supporting IE6 is not an option.

So I end up forcing myself to with the less elegant but functional solution, and I end up hating IE6 just a little bit more. Hopefully we’ll be rid of it soon, but realistically that’ll probably take quite a while.

I’ve finally updated wordpress to the latest version (2.2.1). So now all the security holes there might have been should be plugged again. Fortunately it was another painless upgrade, which so far has been true for all my wordpress upgrades.

I woke up almost exactly at eight o’clock Sunday morning. Which means it’s now pretty much 40 hours and 40 minutes since I slept. By all rights I should be in bed sleeping right now, since it’s well past midnight.

But I’m not sleepy yet. And going to bed before I actually felt sleepy didn’t work out too well last night. So instead of trying to sleep I’m writing this entry, and hoping that the sleepiness will come.

Who knows, maybe I just need another hour and twenty minutes before I’m ready. That would make 42 hours in total, and if that isn’t the ultimate answer I don’t know what is.

At least I’ve managed to dissuade myself from upgrading wordpress in the mean time. While I may not be sleepy I’m not really in the right mood for carefully backing up database tables “just in case” either. So I’ll just stick with reading for now, though I may add a few more entries here if I get bored with reading.

“I’ve slept 4 hours in the last 48, and none of them in the last 24″ is not a conclusion you ever really particularly want to reach. But it’s even less appealing than usual at 08:00 Monday morning. It certainly doesn’t help build a feeling of heading into the new week with full confidence and enthusiasm.

Granted I require less sleep than most people, and I can usually pull an allnighter without too much trouble the next day, but there are limits. Specifically I don’t like to pull allnighters after only getting 4 hours instead of my usual 6 or so the night before.

The 4 hours was an accident. I was talking with someone on skype and basically just having a fun conversation, and four hours later it turned out to 03:30 when we closed our skype link. Sure the sensible thing would have been to keep a late night conversation (at least on my side of the Atlantic) short, but by the time I’d really noticed the time it was 01:00 and I was starting to get my second wind, which is just about the worst time for me to try to sleep. So I went on until I started feeling sleepy again and then went to bed figuring: “It’s Sunday morning, I can sleep in.”

And I could have slept in, except that I seem to be constitutionally incapable of sleep for very long after 08:00. But still if you usually don’t need much more than 6 hours a night, 4 isn’t a disaster and I felt pretty fit all day yesterday. I didn’t even feel particularly tired in the evening, which may be where the trouble started.

Though I wasn’t particularly tired or exhausted I was somewhat tired when I decided to go to bed at 00:38, a pretty regular time for me to be going to bed. But for some reason I couldn’t get comfortable. I tried one pillow, didn’t like it, tried another pillow, didn’t like it either, tried both pillows at once, decided to give that a go for an hour or so, and still hadn’t moved from “lying there with my eyes closed” to “being unconscious” at 03:00.

So I decided to get up, at 03:00 and have a hot shower to help me relax. I had a hot shower, felt more relaxed, went back to bed around 03:20 and, at 04:40 concluded that feeling more relaxed hadn’t done the trick either. That being the case I decided to give up for the night so I could be sure of being bloody exhausted when the next try comes, about 16 hours from now.

And now I’m off to make my second litre of strong tea for the day, while True Faith by New Order plays for the 25th time today on single track repeat. As I said before I can take not sleeping without too much trouble, but I won’t claim to be wholly unaffected by it.

The Babylon Podcast website now has a post about Starfuries vs. X-Wings that includes a voicemail from my opponent, Trampas Whiteman, on the experience of debating me. It is of course firmly tongue in cheek, but never the less the upshot of it is that I now have a bitch of my very own.

Now for some people this would just be a fun moment, but for me it’s almost a religious experience. After all a bitch of my very own means I’m now just a little closer to the great and mighty goddess Mur. Not that I would ever dare to think I could truly be like the mighty goddess.

My body currently feels so relaxed I’m almost amazed I can move the muscles I need to type. I’ve just had my first hot shower since Monday night, thanks to the new boiler that was fitted earlier today.

Even just a couple of days without is enough to remind me that while other measures are enough to keep you clean there’s nothing like a long hot shower for pure relaxation.

And I’m going to cut this post short right here so I can wallow in the “just showered” feeling some more.

The latest episode of the SciFi Smackdown podcast has just been posted. This is the episode in which I functioned as a guest host, arguing for the Babylon 5 Starfuries against the Star Wars X-Wing fighters.

So all my fellow Babylon 5 fans should of course go and investigate this episode, and the podcast in general for that matter. Star Wars fans should probably go as well, though I don’t know if they need bother giving feedback

If listening to it is even half a much fun as recording it was everyone should have great fun with this episode.

I created Category42 (or at least gave it its new name) a few days ago with the idea that I’d start posting in it more. Then I got busy, so I didn’t. One thing that’s been taking up quite a bit of time lately is Freshly Green, where I am officially the “Managing News Director”. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not eating up vast amounts of time, but still an hour spent there is an hour I’m not blogging here.

Not that I would be likely to spend much time blogging here as I currently spend on preparing and/or posting stories for FG. But time can only be used once.

Today I’ve also been busy with things of a more physically practical nature, which is why I started writing this post this morning and have now updated the timestamp for the third time. My boiler has been acting up, or rather acting down; which is to say it has not been producing hot water. So I had a repairman in today who looked at it, concluded that the thermostat was broken and that the part was no longer in supply, and the upshot is that I’m getting a new boiler tomorrow morning.

I’m looking forward to it already, because among other things it will enable me to shower again. I can keep clean pretty well with just cold water, but a cold shower just doesn’t have the same relaxing effect as a hot one.

I’ve decided to get rid of my “Miscellaneous” category. Or rather I’ve renamed it. Miscellaneous is now officially Category42, dealing with Life, the Universe, and Everything. Yes, I’m definitely a geek!

I’ve you’ve been a very frequent visitor to my site the last few days you’ll have noticed lots of colour changes. After trying out what seems like half the colours known in HTML and CSS, trying to find the right solution for the main column, I’ve finally gone for another solution: a background image.

What you’re looking at is the heart of a flower I took a picture of in Berlin. If you have an indecently large screen you may actually be looking at a substantial part of the flower. It’s been covered with a semi-transparent layer of white to improve readability.

At 46 kilobytes it makes the site a little dial-up friendly, but I think it should still be managable for the broadband challenged. As soon as I can find someone still living in such primitive conditions who’s willing, I’ll have them try it.

Addendum: I may be playing around with it a little in future, but the majority of it is now right (in the fourth version). Still don’t be too surprised if it changes a little in the near future.