Week of 05/25/2008 - 00:00 to 05/31/2008 - 23:59

The kids went bungee racing at the festival. Tessa loses her glasses on the first run:

I worked on a new application over the weekend that will be web based and provide very nicely formatted printed pages of content. I wanted to do some really cool things with the layout on the screen, and I really hate the pop-up "print formatted" pages that a lot of sites do. In fact, in today's browser world, a separate print page isn't necessary anymore.

With a little bit of CSS styling and AJAX I was able to generate an invoice data entry web page that would never look right when printed. However, when you click print in your browser, you get a very nicely formatted invoice that spits out of the printer. There's no apparent relationship to the printed layout and the screen layout - in fact everything that is displayed on the screen is completely hidden when printed, and replaced with a completely separate layout embedded within the same page.

It's really quite easy. First, provide two separate CSS files for your layout - one for screen and one for print:

I've written before about my outgoing mail problems with my BlackBerry.

I'm finally narrowing it down. Now, I'm not sure how much is the BlackBerry service and how much is the Funambol client.

I know how my BlackBerry gets mail. It's nothing special - it goes out and grabs it every 3 minutes from my IMAP server.

Sending mail has been a bit more of a mystery...

When I first create my account on blackberry.com, it works fine. Within a few days when sending an e-mail I'll get "Invalid message from server". If I choose the message again and hit "resend" it goes fine.

Since I run my own Cyrus IMAP server with eGroupware I started checking my logs and playing with tcpdump to diagnose the problem. I found something rather interesting.

Mail logs when the message sends properly would show a login from some blackberry.com server.
Mail logs when the message failed would show a login... from LOCALHOST.

When we arrived at work this morning, this little baby was blocking the entrance to the building. Here it's sitting on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11" paper, so you can get an idea of how huge it is. I believe this is a "Cecropia silkmoth" which interestingly enough doesn't eat once they are adult. They consume all the food they need to get this size while a caterpillar. Wow!

Photo taken using a snooted DigiSlave 3000 triggered by a povertywizard propped on the table to the right.