mandazi » Web Development

Empty Anchor Links Positioned Absolute Not Clickable in IE 6, 7 or 8?

Amir Sahib — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 21:01:26 +0000

So my co-worker at work had an issue with getting a link to be clickable in IE (any version). The anchor had these styles:

a { display: block;
height:80px;
left:45px;
position:absolute;
top:140px;
width:500px;
z-index:100; }

It was working fine in FireFox but not in IE (which happens quite a lot at work). I did some R&D (aka proceed to StackOverflow) and found this. The solution was to add a background-image that did not exist:

background:url(/img.png) no-repeat;

That worked. I wonder why IE8 never bothered fixing this. Maybe IE9 will, but that’s wishful thinking with IE.

RoR Newb Note: Gems are installed per RubyGems version

Amir Sahib — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:52:28 +0000

So while working on ShoutReel, I had to upgrade to a newer version of RubyGems in order to use the i18n version of the geokit gem. When I upgraded, it said I was missing all the gems for the app. Consulting with my friend who told me that when upgrading RubyGems, you also have to re-install all the gems for the app.

This is just a newb note for myself as well as anyone on the Internet having this issue.

ColorZilla not working on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit / Firefox 3.6.8

Amir Sahib — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:52:30 +0000

So I couldn’t get ColoZilla working on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. After checking out the Ubuntu forums and doing some Google search it seems that it doesn’t work for 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. The solution is to use gcolor2. You can get it via the Ubuntu Software Center or via the command line with:

sudo aptitude install gcolor2

It’s a separate application that functions the same as ColorZilla, so you will have to switch from window to window to get the color picker. Not really ideal but its a solution for me.

If anyone knows of any working color pickers for Firefox, please share. Thanks.

Diving into Ubuntu (again)

Amir Sahib — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:08:32 +0000

A while ago, I attempted to start using Ubuntu, but failed to install it on an old gateway laptop that didn’t have any linux drivers for audio, visual and wifi devices. Or at least I couldn’t find any online for the laptop. Due to the failure in getting it to work, I stopped my Ubuntu journey. I wasn’t ready for it. Skip forward a year later and I found myself installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my newer HP laptop. Installation was a breeze and everything worked out of the box except for some issues with double fingers on the touchpad and the right/left click ares on it. I was impressed. Wifi, bluetooth, sound, video, and pretty much everything worked instantly with Ubuntu.

As soon as I started to use it for a few hours, I noticed they took a some of their UI from Apple’s OS X and Windows. It’s the best from both OSs combined into one. Workspaces is cool. I’ve never experienced that working on Windows. I find that very useful when multitasking. I also like the way alt-tab works when switching from one item to another.

The best part of it all is developing with Ubuntu, which is the main reason I switched. I was having a hard time dealing with Windows and developing with Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu it was extremely fast for obvious reasons. I haven’t tried developing in PHP or Java yet, but will soon.

SMS linking on mobile browsers, Can’t add message to link

Amir Sahib — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:28:03 +0000

So today at work I spent several minutes trying to figure out how to send an sms link with a message along with it. Turns out according to the iPhone URL Scheme, you can’t do it (at least for their phones). So to all those people who are going to try to search on the web (hopefully this blog post ranks high in the search results) I’ll make it easy for you and show you what you can do:

SMS Message

You can also add more than number:

SMS Message

Nothing else. You can’t add a message along with it.

You can also see what this guy tried here and failed.

Check out Shoutreel!

Amir Sahib — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:13:27 +0000

We’ve made some updates to Shoutreel. Check it out and tell me what you think.

FF surpasses IE6 (finally!)

Amir Sahib — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:16:38 +0000

Web developers have waited for what seems like ages for this month to come along. Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft’s browser. Firefox’s steady gain continues, Safari remains in a nonthreatening third place, Chrome is happily carving out a small niche for itself, and poor Opera can’t seem to budge from fifth place. In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth.

Source

ShoutReel

Amir Sahib — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:20:36 +0000

My friends and I have been building this basic app called ShoutReel. The idea is basically taking the forum and making it simpler. An easier way to explain it is Twitter is micro blogging while ShoutReel is micro forums.

Check it out here. Of course it’s still basic and still in beta or pre-beta. Let me know what you guys think.

How to add a class to the form_for tag in Ruby on Rails

Amir Sahib — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:40:49 +0000

I’ve searched for a while and couldn’t figure this out until I actually picked up my book and browsed the source of examples. I’ll get straight to the code:

<% form_for :user, :url => users_path,:html => { :class => ’standard-form’ } do |f| -%>

That produces:

As you can see I added a class called “standard-form” to the form tag.

PhoneGap

Amir Sahib — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:44:29 +0000

Anyone use this before?

Looks interesting. Planning on trying it out soon.