Via lonemagpie (and I get a higher score than a professional writer? Either the benefits of an Oxford education or, much more likely, lucky guessing…)

True English Nerd

You scored 85 erudition!

Not only do you know your subjects from your objects and your definite from your indefinite articles, but you’ve got quite a handle on the literature and the history of the language as well. Huzzah, and well done! The English snobs of Boston salute you.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on erudition

Link: The Are You Truly Erudite? Test written by okellelala on Ok Cupid

The file or directory \iPod_Control\iTunes\iTunesDB is corrupt and unreadable.

Oh F***.

Open iTunes/iPod or Windows Media Player to answer the following. Go to your library. Answer, no matter how embarrassing it is.

How many songs? 476 (I have an iPod Nano and a laptop computer so space is limited)

Sort by artist
First artist: 4 Hero
Last artist: The Zutons (apart from two with no artist listed)

Sort by song title
First Song: “A” Bomb In Wardour Street - The Jam
Last Song: Zuton Fever - The Zutons

Sort by time
Shortest Song: 0:27, Interlude II - Aziza Mustafa Zadeh
Longest Song: 13:32, Try - The Magic Numbers

Sort by album
First Album: A night like this - Rebecka Törnqvist
Last Album: Wonderful - Adam Ant

First song that comes up on shuffle
Cold Light - Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs

How many songs come up when you search for “sex”? 6
How many songs come up when you search for “death”? 0
How many songs come up when you search for “love”? 29

A followup to my last post about unobtrusive fieldsets and legends. Safari and Konquerer are applying the relative positioning just as Opera does. But they had already removed all indent on the legend as Gecko does. This is a problem as both Opera and Safari are under constant developement and have good CSS support. So how do we distinguish between them?

There are some CSS hacks that cause code to be treated differently by these browsers but instead of relying on poor CSS parsing in older browsers (as in most IE5 hacks) they rely on parts of the CSS spec that aren’t supported yet (e.g. the :lang hack). But Opera 9.1 or Safari 2.1 might well support them, rendering the hack useless.

And it’s not a case of one browser being wrong, legend elements are somewhat peculiar and the default implementation of their presentation can legitimately vary between browsers.

So unless anyone knows a good way to feed different styles to Opera and Safari (that doesn’t rely on browser sniffing, either via JavaScript or server side languages) all I can suggest is that you either use the negative left margin method and accept that Opera will indent the legends, or use the relative positioning method and accept that Safari will outdent the legends. The former method is probably less risky but irks me as an Opera user.

I was tidying up some web pages (Goodbye single column table, hello unordered list; goodbye multiple level one headings, hello heading hierarchy) when I came across a heading followed by a group of checkboxes. Looks like a fieldset with a legend, I thought, but the page design really wouldn’t be helped by the default presentation of these elements in most browsers. So how make to make these elements completely unobtrusive?
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Via lonemagpie

Gimme some sugar baby.

Which B-Movie Badass Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

Stuff from all over, ‘cos my mind is a bit scatty at the moment.

New blog, (discovered via TMP) Olduvai George, dreadful paleontological pun but wonderful artwork of ancient mammals. And some les ancient ones, like weasels.

Ever since I started working on the VisitLondon.com web site I’ve been annoyed by how many of the pages display in Opera. The main content section of these pages consist of many visual boxes stacked one atop the other. Some of these boxes are div elements and some are table elements, depending on the nature of their contents (and yes I know the whole thing is wrapped up inside both a layout table and some div soup). In Opera the table elements were displaying two pixels wider than they should have been, breaking up the nice column of equal width boxes.

This week I had time to dig into the CSS I discovered the cause. The style rule table {text-align: left;} is the cause. Easy fix, move that text-align rule to the th and td elements. Anyway, the bug is now documented.

And you know what else? Opera 9, technical preview 1. Yep, bug is fixed already. (Also getting close to passing Acid 2, which would be good as it’s all been Mac and Linux browsers so far.)

Oh, and Firefox has a new version out as well.

A relative of a colleague is playing a Cyberman in the new Doctor Who. The same family also contains the man who played the Stormtrooper who banged his head in Star Wars.

And the rest was memes from sites that are down at the moment…

As in a warning about spoilers to be found elsewhere. See last paragraph.

Had today off work, decided that a Monday was the least painful day to try some Christmas shopping, so went up to Oxford/Regent Street. It wasn’t much worse than a normal Saturday (so slightly worse than hell itself then) and I actually had a fair amount of success.

Books in Borders (with £5 off thanks to the voucher in Saturday’s Guardian) for brother and mother. More books in the BBC Shop (always worth a look as they often have recent BBC releases at cut prices and older releases that you can’t find elsewhere anymore) for father and, um, myself.

Then to the Apple Store to buy wife’s present. That place is like some sort of strange cult. They were even running training sessions for iTunes upstairs. iTunes for heaven’s sake, one of the simplest-to-use pieces of software ever written. I wondered whether they could identify me as a Windows using apostate via mystical means? And when I got to the front of the queue I realised that the only PIN I could remember was that of my debit card, so good as I’m not building up a debt but bad as in I can’t play games with the interest free period and keep my savings intact for another month’s worth of interest.

And to make Lettice very happy I bought the Christmas Radio Times. Out came the pink highlighter as soon as I got home. I hope we get some good DVDs for Christmas because other than Doctor Who the telly looks dire this year. And speaking of RT and DW, there’s a ten page feature that spoils the Christmas special in just about every detail. Still, some people will like the pictures of David Tennant in his jim-jams. Oh, and a chance to win one of the actual Daleks from the ‘05 series…

We’re off to wonderful Camberwell for the annual Dalby-Billington Sausage Fest. Mmmmm.

Sausages (great word isn’t it?), mulled wine, mince pies. A frightening number of university contemporaries with children. Christmas starts here.

What’s up with the BBC and Walking with Monsters?

This program is a prequel to Walking with Dinosaurs covering the period before the Dinosaurs. The DVD and book have been available for a while but the BBC web site is very quiet about the show. A press release from July says that it will air in this autumn. Um?

[Update] - Ah. Thursday 8th December, 8pm, BBC 1. Good.