Posts filed under ‘rants’
IE input background image issue
February 28th, 2008
IE strikes AGAIN!
Just when I thought I was 100% done with the revamp of New Millennium, I noticed an UI issue in IE. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this before. It shouldn’t be anything new. I did some google research but didn’t find anyone mentioning it either.
Applying background image to input tags should be nothing new. You see the little search icons for search inputs all over the web now but did anyone notice in IE if you have a background image set to no-repeat and someone puts some very LONG text in the input field, the background image SCROLLS with the text? This causes very odd behavior.
Here’s my input background-image. I pick this one so I can do background image affect on hover by manipulating background-position.
CSS:
input.formInput {
width: 255px;
background: #a99787 url(formInput.gif) left top no-repeat;
border: 0;
padding: 3px;
height: 22px;
color: #302721;
}
input.formInput:hover,
input.formInput:focus {
background-position: -261px top;
}
In Firefox, it looks great but in IE if you start putting very looooooooooooooooong text in the input, it will look like crap.
So does anyone have a good solution for this issue?
If I were to do it, I’d wrap the input in a container and put the background image on the container and hopefully by applying the hover affect on the container, it would get the desirable effect. Of course I will need to test out my theory. But it’s past midnight so I should get some sleep for now.
AND it does work. check it out.
Man, I just love IE.
dodo has been online for ten years
January 4th, 2008
the other night i realized something amazing. i’ve been to the online world for ten years. i got my first modem at home when i was 16 and i’m turning 26 soon. TEN YEARS.. that’s a long time. a very significant part of a life. from 16 to 26, a person can change so much. so i started to remember everything that happened in this ten years. i became so emotional i couldn’t sleep. perhaps every generation has its own thing that’s bound to change people’s lives and the internet is the one for mine.
now please excuse my poor english. i can never express my emotions in english the way i do in chinese. therefore i notice when i get emotional, i speak in chinglish.
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The story behind Chingish
January 3rd, 2008
A while ago I posted some photos of Chingish. I found it amusing that some people thought they were fake and photoshoped. Well apparently I owe you an explanation. I was reading some of my favorite Chinese blogs today and found this particular entry. It talks in details where some of these translations came from. If you are interested, please read the Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation.
IVA - Individual Voluntary Agreement
IVA provides a viable alternative to bankruptcy and is therefore for those individuals that really cannot afford to pay off existing debts any longer. An IVA can help because it is a proposal that is sent to all of an individual?s creditors offering a settlement over a period of five years or so. After that period, the debt is settled. However, there are certain criteria that your proposal has to meet before coming in to being!
Wisconsin Dells Vacation
September 2nd, 2007
We have planned this vacation in May and we finally did it. Even with all the moving, selling & buying house, getting a new job and going back to school, we still made it. It was an awesome vacation. We stayed at the Wisconsin Dells area for six days five nights. Two at Chula Vista and three at a whirlpool suite at Wintergreen resort. We spent most of our time in the Chula Vista indoor water park and the Mt. Olympus but we also visited Timbavati Wildlife Park, Ghost-Out-Post, went on the original duck tour, the jet boat tour, and watched the Tommy Bartlett Show. We also tried out some restaurants in the area. Here’s how I would rate everything.
Chula Vista - Love this resort. Next time we will definitely stay longer. The indoor water park here is even better than the one at Mt. Olympus. We rid the fast Ruby Run tube ride for oh maybe about 20 times. We didn’t realize it connects to the river walk so we did our walk around in a dumb route.
Wintergreen resort - The hotel is not impressive. The “suite” with the whirlpool is very crammed. They forgot to do housekeeping in our room after the first night. I was not happy. We had our breakfast at the hotel restaurant, it was decent.
Mt. Olympus - We went there coz the tickets came free with our stay with Wintergreen. The outdoor water park is decent but the roller coaster rides cost extra on top of your admission. What kind of sense does that make? After two days we find ourselves mostly in the wave pool and the lazy river. If we had any energy left, we’d probably check out Noah’s Ark but you get wore out after too many rides.
Timbavati Wildlife Park - a tiny worthless zoo. Not worth visiting if you don’t have young children.
Ghost-Out-Post - more disgusting than scary. Pretty short tour and feel cheap.
The Original Duck tour - Very interesting tour on both land and water. Don’t expect a lot of leg room in your seats.
Jet boat tour - Very fun and fast. The boats do hard brakes and spins and you will get wet.
Tommy Bartlett Show - We went to the night show and totally didn’t enjoy the water ski part of the show. I thought it was completely overrated. The the performers made multiple mistakes. The clown was unbearably cheesy. The story line was poorly written. The only impressive thing was the hang glider at the end. The second half was so so. The juggler was very entertaining and kept your attention for the entirety of his performance. Overall it kept me wondering if my money would be better spent going to a different attraction.
Crabby’s All You Can Eat Seafood - $29.99 per person and it doesn’t include drinks. What the hell? The food isn’t bad but it’s just not worth thirty bucks. We regret eating there but it’s a once in life time mistake.
Wild West All-You-Can-Eat Buffet - We stopped by since we had a coupon but the place smelled revolting to me so we left.
Paul Bunyan’s “Northwoods Cook Shanty” - Family style all you can eat restaurant. They just keep bring out fresh food. Very awesome. Loved it.
That’s all the unique places we visited. We were also surprised how many Eastern Europeans were working in the area. I don’t have many photos to share since we didn’t take many. Just two I kinda like.
While the duck was passing thru a canyon
A view of the Dells from the river walk
just want to strangle IE
April 5th, 2007
for a minor revamp of the web application i’m working on at work, i want to implment this css vertical menu. i was thrilled to find that it works great in IE 5.5 which is something we still need to support. after i put everything together, i realized it is not going to work due to this notorious SELECT z-index IE bug. basically IE ignores the rule of z-index when it comes to select tag. this means when the css menu popup out in the area where there is a select tag, in IE, the select tag will be rendered on top of the popup menu. the ONLY way you can place a layer on top of any SELECT tag in IE is by adding an iframe in the html source on top of the select. altho there is a pure css way to fix this issue, it’s far from pretty.
i’ve applied the fix to my css vertical menu now and it works locally. BUT i know i’m gonna run into more issues. because the app will be on a secure server (https) and in IE it will show security alert when you have iframe tag without the src attribute. i ran into this problem before trying to use the thickbox script. i had to put a real https URL in the iframe tag for IE to shut up. but i really don’t know how everything’s gonna turn out until i’ve switched everything over and the app is deployed to the secure server.
this is the wonderful IE. you have to use ugly hacks to fix its shortcomings and then add more unnecessary code to get around the problem the hacks cause.
isn’t it lovely?
getting cable again?
July 12th, 2004
we haven’t had any sort of cable or antenna systems for more than three years. mediacom is the monopoly for our local cable for a long time. just recently direct TV is hitting this area too. what i hate about cable is you are paying a lot for many channels you really do not care for. but sometimes i do wish to watch news and sport events on TV. i also miss the discovery channel and a few others that i used to enjoy watching. after moving to our new house, we are saving about $100/month in utilities & rent so i’m thinking about the possibility of getting cable. i’ve explored the option of installing an antenna but some hawkeye sports are played on espn2 at times. it seems to defeat the purpose of “having TV” and yet have to go to andy’s brother’s to watch certain shows. i wonder how much do you pay for cable? here, it’s $40/month for the most basic ones.
long weekend
September 1st, 2001
long weekend (labor day weekend) has just started.. i’m stuck in the lab.. doing my 6 hour long work =P it’s so boring here.. i’d say there have been at most 8 people in the lab using computer… i can only hear machine breath and typing.. that’s all.. it’s so dead! i’m the only one working since the semester has just started and they are short on people grrr… how annoying.. i will have to image some of the computers.. two labs! about 100 of them 
i just did two small hacks for b2. now i should go do my discrete structure homework. i also have a retarded cs project but i dont think i will do that til next week.
andy’s at his dad’s watching hawkeye’s first game.. i wont see him until tonite since he has to work nite shift.. *cries*… i gotta find something to do before i die due to boredom =P i won’t.. still thinking of new ideas about a new layout for regretless… probably a professional and SIMPLE design.. i will try to my get search engine set up for my domain =)
