Saturday, February 20, 2010

Another Internet Explorer annoyance that you might not be aware of

Recently, I've been using display: inline-block in CSS a lot. It's a very useful feature -- it allows you to have a fix-sized (e.g. 100x20px, or just fixed width / height) element that is inline, incredibly useful when doing precision design work. However! Internet Explorer 7 cannot handle display: inline-block on an element that is natively a block element. So, for instance, if you try to use inline-block on a <div>, it will work fine in any browser except IE7 which will consider it display: block. Now I'm stuck with using <span> everywhere. Ugh.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Sleeping with Linux is dangerous

Seriously, using the sleep function with Linux is dangerous. I just put my laptop on sleep for a while, woke it up and apparently everything was fine. But only apparently, because the system fan (you know, the one that keeps your laptop from melting) lost its "medium" speed. That means that it wouldn't run unless it had to go on max. So, after half an hour of peace and quiet, the fan started running like hell, and the laptop was really heated up (it was like being near a radiator). Reboot the system and the "medium" speed works again. What if the max speed wouldn't work either? I wouldn't have noticed it and might have ended up with a brick. Sleeping with Linux is dangerous!!