Watching Grumpy Old Women (well what else is on? Nathan Barley? – I’ve spent the past seven years working with people like that) and I’ve noticed that they show photos of the contributors as they were twenty or thirty odd years ago. I don’t recall them doing that for Grumpy Old Men. Did they?

… Sun Hill police station.

By my count twenty-four officers and staff have been killed during the twenty-one years that The Bill has been on telly. Seventeen of those have been in the past five years. Sensationalist? Surely not.

I mean come on, Brownlow was forced to resign because of one corrupt officer but he “only” saw seven deaths during his sixteen years in charge. Okaro has seen eight deaths in two and half years and has had a host of other scandals (psycho-cop, another psycho-cop, rogue gun-toting cop, undercover journalist, and let’s not forget that a third psycho-cop hasn’t been discovered yet) on his watch as well. Still, he needs one more death to match Chandler’s total of nine (himself included) – in just two years.

Hmm, must find more interesting ways to spend my time.

People who are much cleverer, wittier and more insightful than me have written much about the large gay presence within Doctor Who fandom. And there’s every indication that the new series isn’t going to dent that following – let’s not forget that the new series producer, Russell T Davies, is the man behind the [insert long list of superlatives] Queer as Folk. But this picture seems to suggest that the QaF influence runs a bit deeper than previously suspected:

So I finally got the categories list to display hierarchically – seems that in Word Press 1.5 setting the hide_empty argument to true (and it’s true by default so this means doing anything other than explicitly setting it to false) causes the categories list to get stuck on a non-hierarchical, sorted by ascending ID only setting. So now you get to see any categories that I thought I’d need but haven’t used yet.

Unfortunately, the hierarchical sorting reveals a bug in Internet Explorer’s CSS support. Yeah, another one. As you can see the first item in each child list is missing some styles. It was originally worse than this, the first item in the list (and all the other lists in the sidebar) and the first item in each sub-list, and the first item after each sub-list were all affected.

If you look at the source code you’ll see some peculiar code: <!--[if IE ]><li></li><![endif]–>. These empty list items are hidden inside MSIE only Conditional Comments so that anyone visiting the site without stylesheets won’t see them (they collapse to zero size in any stylesheet enabled browser and it’s next to impossible to disable stylesheets in IE) and in IE they act as the first list item and hence suck up the lack of styling.

But for some reason they work for the first and third cases listed above but not for the first item in each sublist. Bugger.

At some point I’m going to need to make a test case and identify the CSS properties that trigger the bug. With luck these will be something that can be rewritten or hidden from IE without blowing up the design.

I also fixed a long standing problem with Mozilla whereby the items in the sublists were being indented too far and some of the page background was shining through. Just a case of remembering that different browsers have different default styles for lists – some use margin and some use padding, some apply these to the <ul> element and some apply these to the <li> element.

But I haven’t been able to fix another Mozilla problem – the one pixel gap that appears after every fifth list item. The regularness of this suggests a rounding error of some sort but I have no idea what triggers it or how to avoid it. Bugger.