July 2008

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My work has just pushed out an update, upgrading our users to Firefox 3. Naturally, we’ve been busy looking through our internally produced sites to check all is fine in the new version.

In 99% of cases, all our sites look the same in Firefox 3, apart from one notable exception. In this one case, there is a 1px gap between the left-hand margin (which is centred using “margin-left: auto”) and the header image. Being the perfectionists we are, we don’t want a 1px white gap in our nice header.

Oddly, this 1px gap would come and go as the browser window is horizontally resized. This behaviour set alarm bells ringing that it’s some kind of rounding error in the “auto” positioning vs the exact pixel dimensions of our centred container.

After a bit of searching, we found an entry in John Resig’s blog (of JQuery fame), where he has stumbled upon the issue and developed a test case for the main browsers. Turns out that fixing it is a challenge, as all the browsers round the numbers differently. Problem is, there’s no standard for how the browsers should round the pixels, so fixing it in one browser will almost certainly break it in another.

Ho hum, here’s hoping for a future standard.

They’re funny things Linux file permissions - the moment you think you understand them, you discover some subtle piece of functionality that means you were wrong all-along…

In this three-part article, I give a brief introduction to file and directory permissions, as well as some of the common gotchas. This part shows you how to interpret permissions on the command line and explains what they mean.

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As many coders will tell you, there reaches a point where you realise that you absolutely, positively must keep your code in a a revision control system. In my working life, I’ve used Microsoft’s ageing SourceSafe and more recently the vastly superior SubVersion (SVN).

There’s many powerful GUIs out there which you can use to interact with SVN, and make the checking out and checking in very easy. If you primarily use a desktop GUI (like me), then chances are you use a SVN client GUI to interact with SVN on a day-to-day basis.

But what happens when you need to move code between repositories?

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