Dave Landers

As I reported earlier, I had a severe problem with Time Machine on my MacBook Pro. As I experimented with it, I realized it was probably related to another problem I have been living with ever since I got the machine.

The previous problem occurred when I was running a build or other long, CPU-intensive operation. Sometimes, the machine would just reboot suddenly. And it was always when I was away. I had no luck with any of the usual fixes suggested by Apple or found on the web. I had figured out that it was probably related to the screen saver coming on, but it was impossible to reproduce this for anyone.

But something about Time Machine allowed me to reproduce this more repeatably: lots of CPU, generating lots of heat, coupled with intense graphics == reboot.

The folks at the FlatIrons Apple Store were really great, especially given the madhouse produced by the holidays. I described both problems and they just decided to replace the logic board. They ordered the part, and I was without my machine for only a day-and-a-half. It seems like this has done the trick. Hurray!

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, reboot

My oldest son, Paul, had his Board of Review last night, and is now an Eagle Scout. I am so proud of him, obviously.
After the board was finished with their deliberations, they took a moment for each member to share some of their observations about Paul. And his mom and I were invited in to hear these. The board was several adults, most of whom did not know each other, but all knew Paul from various places - school, church, scouting. It was great to hear all the positive observations they shared about Paul. And equally great to hear a consensus that he is the same kind of person in all these different environments.

The comments last night made it clear what we already knew about Paul: while he did work hard to meet all the Eagle requirements, he did not have to work to become the kind of person you expect an Eagle to be. He just is that kind of person.
He worked hard for this, obviously, but all that work served only to validate who he already was.

Congratulations, Paul!

Technorati Tags: eagle, bsa

Someone pointed out to me that some of my code sections were unreadable in Internet Explorer. They looked like this:

Hey! where’s the text? The rest of us (at least Firefox and Safari) were seeing something more like this:

Much better, but what’s going on?

I quote code in a <pre class="code">....</pre> block. And my style sheet contained:

.code {
    font-family: courier, monospace;
    margin: 10px 20px;
    padding: 3px 8px;
    border: 1px dashed #999999;
    overflow:auto;
}

It looked to me like IE was robbing space from either the text height or the padding to cram in a scrollbar. And since that made the resulting area for text too small, it also added a (way too small) vertical scrollbar, too. The result is non-functional in any real sense.

A bit of searching and I am drawn to this comment from the CSS 2.1 spec:

In the case of a scrollbar being placed on an edge of the element’s box, it should be inserted between the inner border edge and the outer padding edge. Any space taken up by the scrollbars should be subtracted from the computed width/height, thus preserving the inner border edge.

As I read this, the scrollbar needs to fit inside the element border, and thus subtracts from space that can be used for the content. This does preserve the overall size of the element no matter what type of scrolling might be used (or not). But in my context, it seems wrong. It also means that IE is probably right here (which also goes against my intuition :).

Wrong or not, it is certainly not what I want. So I did more hunting and experimenting, and I found only two solutions that I really thought worked.

First, I could simply increase the padding-bottom to make room for the scrollbar. This solution is nice because it keeps the browser-specific hacks out of the stylesheet. But I don’t like the way this looks when there is not a scrollbar, because there’s extra blank padding at the bottom.

So the only real choice for me was to add some browser-specific thing to the stylesheet. What I ended up with is based mainly on
this post, and looks like this:

.code {
    font-family: courier, monospace;
    margin: 10px 20px;
    padding: 3px 8px;
    border: 1px dashed #999999;
    overflow:auto;
    /* add padding in IE (which supports expressions) to make room for the scroll bar */
    padding-bottom: expression(this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth ? "19px" : "3px");
}

This seems to be working reasonably well, as it does not mangle the size of the element when there is no need for a scrollbar, and it bumps up the bottom padding to make way for IE’s scrollbar.

There are some downsides, like the expression is probably being over-evaluated, and it relies on a proprietary IE feature (expressions), so I may reevaluate this in the future. But for now at least my blog is (more) readable for IE users.

Technorati Tags: css, ie, scrollbar

Yesterday, I decided it was time to move on. I deleted my bootable Tiger backup and turned on Time Machine. I like the fact that it promises to do hourly/daily/weekly incremental backups, and the Time Machine application, while heavy on the cheese, is a pretty nice way to access backup recovery.

But backups aren’t backups unless you test that you can recover files (and you know how to do it without having to mess around when the time comes). So today, with a day’s worth of backup history, I decided to play with Time Machine.

I flipped back and forth thru time-cheese, and after a few seconds the world disappeared. Oh wait, it was just my MacBook Pro rebooting. Bong. Apple. Spin wheel. Login.

Nothing in any of the logs (there wasn’t time) - just a hard, fast, shutdown.

So, I did what any self-respecting software engineer would do. I tried it again. Same result. I have now hard-rebooted my machine like 10 times via Time Machine (I don’t recommend it).

If recovering a file risks a hard shutdown, and I can’t resolve this - I will just have to go back to rsync.

Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mac, reboot, time machine