Nice but DIM

I'm going on holiday tomorrow. (Pauses to whoop gleefully.) This means setting up a holiday auto-responder on my email. Yeah, I know you folks all have your exchange-enabled outlook auto-responder wizard to do this, or your webmail can set it up with a few clicks. But for us old-fashioned types the thing to use is the vacation program. Originally developed by the near-mythical Eric Allman it's now being developed by Chris Samuel and Brian May. (Of Queen fame? Maybe, maybe not.) Download the source from Chris's site: http://www.csamuel.org/software/vacation if your flavour of linux doesn't provide it. (Hint: before it would compile, I had to "yum install gdbm-devel". Your mileage may vary.) Create a file in proper email format in your home directory, and call it .vacation.msg: From: you@yourdomain.co.uk (Your Full Name) Subject: I am on holiday Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, I am currently on holiday and so will probably not see (or reply to) your emai

I own a shiny new-model macbook pro, which I delight in very much. However, a couple of months ago I came across an initially very alarming problem which turned out to have a simple fix. I've finally got round to blogging about it in case anybody else should witness the same behaviour. Now, much as I love Apple's hardware and software, I sometimes find their decisions a bit arbitrary and annoying. For instance, they removed a perfectly good DVI port from their macbook pros and replaced it with the new mini-display-port thingy. This means I had to buy two adapters -- one for DVI monitors and another for good ol' VGA. Anyway, that is by-the-by. This story is about what happened when I connected a "big telly" to this preposterously tiny port on a fine day last August. I did this as I wanted to watch a DVD (the most excellent Lives of Others, since you ask). This procedure went well. When finished, I pulled out the displayport adapter. At this point, I noticed that th

I was recently working on a site where the client wanted a large image slowly faded in when the page loaded. In the past I might have used flash for this, but thought that the same effect could be achieved these days with javascript -- jquery, to be precise. And it can, as two minutes reading the docs will show you. It's in theory as simple as doing $(document).ready(function() { $('div#intro').hide(); $('div#intro').fadeIn(3000); }); This works, but I noticed it gave me a FOUC when viewed in safari (a flash of ugly content). The div would pop up for a microsecond, then vanish, then perform its gentle fadeIn. I first messed around with trying to hide the div before the document was ready, reasoning that the "hide" call was coming slightly too late. But this appeared to make no difference -- and indeed, if you only call hide() without then calling fadeIn() there is no FOUC problem. The actual fix (and I've no clear notion why this works, other than t