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Archive for December, 2008

The Double-class/Double-ID CSS Hack for IE6 & IE7

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

I haven’t seen this CSS hack for Internet Explorer before. I encountered this by accident today while trying to work out an IE6 display error. My preliminary Google searches and few hours of research didn’t find this documented anywhere, but I highly doubt I’m the first one to encounter this. In any event, I’m tentatively calling this the “Double-class” IE hack. It lets you target IE6 specifically, or IE6 and IE7 both. I haven’t found a way to specifically target IE7 using this.

In a nutshell, if you want to target IE6 use two class periods:

..className{ /* styles here */ }

To target IE7 and IE6 both, double-declare the class name:

..className, .className{ /* styles here */ }

Or, an alternate way to do this and target both IE6 and IE7 is this:

., .className{ /* styles here */ }

This also works with IDs:

.#classID{ /* styles here */ } /* IE6 Only */

., #classID{ /* styles here */ } /* IE6 and IE7 */

Posted in Code | 1 Comment »

Firefox 3 – 2 days, 4 tabs, 1gb+ RAM in use

Friday, December 5th, 2008

I don’t normally restart my work box that often. Its a pain to wait for all of the services to get up and running (apache(php), tomcat(java), Ecliplse, 4 browsers, etc). I usually have to kill Firefox towards the end of the day and restart it to make it speedy again. I didn’t restart it for the last 2 days and thought I would document the first time I’ve ever seen FF3 use over 1gb of RAM with only 4 tabs open. Hopefully the next v3.1 update will help fix some of the apparent memory leaks.

firefox 3 using over 1gb of ram

firefox 3 using over 1gb of ram

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Tried Using ChaCha? Me Neither.

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I found out my younger sister “works” for ChaCha. She showed me the interface and told me about how it works.

The site only started getting over 500k monthly visitors since August, according to Compete.com.
She can usually sit there for up to 2 hours waiting on a question to come through from a user. The problem isn’t scalability, its finding customers who actually want to use the darn thing.

She made a little over $20 for the entire month of November. Their internal message boards are filled to the brim with hundreds of other workers who complain about never getting questions. The reason ChaCha stopped accepting new workers a few months ago seems to be that they outstripped the supply of people asking questions.

An important policy that seriously restricts the usefulness of ChaCha’s answers is that its workers are restricted to the sites they get their answers from. They are not allowed to use 3rd party search engines, such as Google or Yahoo. They are also restricted from using Wikipedia and almost any kind of message board.

ChaCha has an internal directory of human-categorized approved links across a number of directories, ala Yahoo’s early attempts to create a categorized view of the web by employing librarians to index sites. That was the 1st gen business model that pretty much failed for Yahoo.

I ran a series of questions by her and the answers she could find were a combination of inaccurate, incomplete, or occasionally right.

After having seen ChaCha from the inside, more or less, I can’t say there’s anything there that shows me it has any value to the user. Go hit Google, Yahoo, or even Live.com. You’ll get better results.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

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