zahnster

If you find yourself setting heights on elements more often than not in CSS, take a step back, because you’re (most likely) doing something wrong, and down the road you’re going to hate yourself for it.

It’s one of the more common ‘css design faux pas’ that I have encountered as a web developer, and to me just demonstrates a lack of understanding about how box model elements behave. 99% of the time heights should be left inherit – locking yourself into a height can quickly bring limitations to your site layout, provide a maintenance nightmare, and they’re almost never needed.

By default, an element will be as tall as the elements/content that are inside it. A few cases which might cause a container’s height to collapse are if your internal elements are floated, or if they are absolutely positioned. In both of these cases, the easy answer is to set a height on the collapsed element and forget about it. However, this isn’t really good practice, and you’re basically treating the symptoms and not the cause.

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Just posting quick to publicly announce my intense disappointment in how Firebug has been maintained recently. Firebug 1.2.0 (beta 6) is so awful and buggy that today I’ve given up on it completely. Which is sad, really, because it means that my use of Firefox 3 is limited to browsing the web… as if I were some ‘normal’ web user and not a developer who constantly has her browser open for the purpose of developing websites.

So, for now, I have to go back to using FF2…. which is a bigger letdown than one would think.

The only light we have at the end of the tunnel was the recent announcement by John Resig that he would be devoting half his time to get Firebug back to where it needs to be.

This can’t happen soon enough.

It used to be that I would look at people waiting in line for a [toy|gadget|gizmo] and secretly make fun of them – what, don’t they have anything better to do with their time than sink into the cliche of commercialism?

That was, of course, until I found myself waking up at 5am to go wait in a 3 hour long iPhone line.

I’m not sure if people know how big of a deal that is for me. First, I love sleep. Second, I am so horrible at waking up early that you couldn’t pay me to usually. However, I was so excited about the thought of getting an iPhone that not only did I have no problem waking up, but I had problems falling asleep the night before (even though I was deathly tired).

So why is this? What is it about the iPhone that motivates people enough to stand in line for hours on end in the hot summer sun? Just what kind of magic has Steve Jobs and co released?

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This sounds odd, I know, but my jaw hurts.

Possibly because for the last two-and-a-half hours it’s been on the floor. All thanks to the new Batman movie.

So yeah, it’s totally recommended. In fact, get your tickets now if you haven’t yet, because the blockbuster of this summer has arrived. From the opening scene, this is an intense, thought-provoking thrill ride of a movie. I’m not kidding when I say that I spent half the movie with my jaw on the floor, and normally I’m not that kind of movie person.

Everyone who’s seen the movie so far talks about how wonderful Heath Ledger’s joker is, and I have to say first-hand that the Oscar-buzz is accurate. His performance as the Joker was amazingly spooky, and really hit home that the Joker is an all-out, nothing to lose, insane anarchistic guy who lives off chaos.

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This isn’t anything necessarily new, just something I noticed today as I went to upload some songs to my muxtape playlist. Apple’s file upload box goes all fancy when you pick the iTunes folder, and lets you pick and choose files using your playlists for shortcuts.

This totally beats the pants off what I was expecting – which was a long, tedious traverse through artist and album folders. Beats the pants off it, I tell ya! And it’s not just for music – all of the media types that Apple supports (such as photos and movies) have special interfaces as wel.

Well done, Apple. You’re the master of the ‘wow’ in the details.

(EDIT: My Muxtape is now mostly complete and can be listened to at zahnster.muxtape.com. Still to be uploaded – Radiohead (Jigsaw Falling Into Place), Elefant (Brasil), and Office (Possibilities)).

I really love programs that make use of my Last.fm data. I also really love things that are pretty. So, it should make perfect sense that I would instantly fall in love with a way to display Last.fm data in a unique, beautiful way.

And so, I introduce Wordle, but more specifically, Master Giraffe’s page that lets you convert your last.fm data to Wordle format (for import into Wordle, naturally).

Honestly, Wordle could use some work. It cuts out quite a bit and sometimes takes hard refresh to fix. Also… a Java applet? Really? It’s a limiting platform and leaves the app jumpy. However, the idea itself is one of the more clever things I’ve seen. It also generates really pretty displays, and is customizable in both layout and color, so there’s really not a lot of bad I can say about it.

So go ahead, if you have a last.fm account, check it out. Turn your music into art.

Ever since starting with Zenbe, I’ve found myself feeling refreshed and newly invested in the web community – so much to the point that I can’t pick a singular thing to blog about tonight.

So, I’ll mention them all. First up is a site called Mint, which is just brilliant. You sync up your bank account info with them and they put your finances together in a spectacular array of animated bar graphs and pie charts. It also helps you manage your budget and find ways to save expenses. It’s also full of cute little statistics like the Starbucks data to the left (which apparently helps you realize you went a little crazy with the lattes). I’m a total nerd for this stuff, and the app, which is built in Flex, is smooth and responsive in ways which almost make me feel like a fool for sticking with this javascript stuff.

Besides Mint, there’s also a lot of other applications of all types that have been coming around. First, Versions is finally out, and it’s quickly found it’s way into my ‘most used apps’ list. There’s also 280 slides, which does amazing things with web-based presentation tools; Fluid, which turns any website into a self-running webkit-based application; a youtube/last.fm mashup, and more. Much more.

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Most people who would be reading this blog know that today Firefox 3 is released to the public. I’ve been itching to get this release for a while – FF3 uses a totally different graphics engine and already I can tell that it’s a lot slicker, smoother, and overall just kicks some ass.

The FF3 update is pretty massive, and there’s a lot of reasons we all will want to switch over to it as soon as we can (not just the graphics thing). However, within 30 seconds of running the app – I noticed that it has new rendering differences (improvements) from the FF2 version. Quickly this turned into a sticky situation, as I was in the middle of debugging some CSS in FF2 that, well… worked perfectly in FF3. It brought home the sad fact that as web developers, we’re still totally owned by browser compatibility issues* and need to support FF2 for a while – until the 3.0 transition is long a thing of the past.

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Yes, I’m somewhat of an American Idol fan. No, I’m (mostly) not ashamed to admit that. It’s a music competition, and my addiction to music is so massive it gobbles up everything even remotely related to the subject.

My deal is I like picking the winner before a single vote is cast. Ever since choosing “that gray haired guy” early on in season 5 (what ever happened to him?) I’ve had a slight obsession in being able to hear, from just the auditions, who will win the season.

I’m proud to say that as of last night, with David Cook’s spectacular win, I’ve been correct 3 years in a row.

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So, I’ve been doing this web thing for quite a while now. I’m feeling pretty confident in my work, so I’ve been starting to explore ‘broader’ areas of the development process, among which is productivity.

What started as a passing interest has turned into almost an obsession. After reading up on books like “Getting Things Done”, “Practices of an Agile Programmer”, and “The Pragmatic Programmer”, I’ve been feeling pretty empowered.

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