Here’s to newlyweds Vimmy and Adam… all the best in your new life together!
Monthly Archives: May 2007
I have a question
I’ve started this post about ten times using different analogies and phrasing. It just ain’t gonna happen in my current state of mind. I’m tempted to throw in the towel, but I’m too stubborn—some would say naive—to give it up for good.
Stretchy background images
For a project I’m working on I want to have full-width background images regardless of the size of the browser window. Ideally I’d use CSS3′s background-size property, but no browsers support it yet, even experimentally. This forum post experimental page shows how to hardcode what I want into a page, but it requires a bunch of extra markup that I’m not prepared to add. So instead I’ve written up a nasty little JavaScript that sorta kinda emulates its behaviour.
The gist of the script is that it moves the <body> of a document into a <div> named fake-body and sets its background transparent, wraps that in a <div> named fake-scroller and sets its background transparent, then adds another <div> named fake-background that wraps an <img> containing the original body’s background-image.
The script works in Firefox and Safari, and would in Opera if I did browser detection—it needs a weird little hack that I don’t quite understand—but I’m pretty much at a loss for finding a way to make it work in any version of IE; I’d hoped making it work would just be a matter of finding the right style object and using IE7‘s document.recalc() method.
If anyone out there on the LazyWeb has any ideas—or improvements in general—please chime in!
Interesting definition of "solution"
I think the Akismet folks missed the point, and perhaps Paul Benetis did too: his WordPress install was unusable unless the Akismet plugin was enabled. In other words, the fact that a completely optional component hadn’t been turned on caused the software to function poorly. That’s not exactly the sort of thing I’d trumpet.
By the power of Greyskull!
Disappointed is a mild word for my reaction to Spider-Man 3; I thought it was bad in more ways than I feel like enumerating fully, but some include character cheats, lousy timing, and horrendous attempts at what I can only presume to be comedy. Even Stan Lee and Bruce Campbell’s cameos fell completely flat, the latter doing a bad riff on The Pink Panther‘s Jacques Clouseau. There were a couple of higher points, but overall it gets a two-star meh
.
(Matt’s a lot more forgiving than I am.)
Fortunately, Hot Fuzz made up for all of Spidey’s shortcomings. Although I’ve never been a fan of zombie movies I thought Shaun of the Dead was brilliant, and HF is almost its equal in the buddy-cop film genre. Simon Pegg’s parodic formula starts to show a bit, though—for example, he substitutes He-Man references for Shaun’s Star Wars lines—and I think a third along the same lines might be pushing it a bit. Still, I wonder if he’d be up for a superhero movie after Run, Fatboy, Run?