No man is an island

Recently i got the idea of scribbling down all the things i learn a day. I firmly believe that life long learning is important and i also believe that we will learn anyway. Mostly we collect all kind of factoids within a week or so. Most of them drop out of our memory within a week to a month.

So last friday, when i got home i recited a short list to me what i learned and it was surprisingly long, about 30 single items. Granted, i counted also small things like learning a new shortcut in vim - but still.

I am still unsure where and how to store the factoids. Naturally i coud spam my blog with this on a regular basis but that would block all future things that could be done, like questionnaires so you can check yourself if you remember what you entered a month ago, thusly refreshing and training it.

For me a natural way to do this would be a (2.0ish) website where other people could do the same and the can check each other’s factoids. Maybe this would be a good django training.

Just a short reminder mainly to myself how awkward IE is. I retouched a website for a customer today to make it fully working in IE. There were a few minor problems but nothing serious to get me to step in earlier.

So i went through my list of IE weirdness and discovered some things new to me:

• IE 6 cannot display borders with transparent as color. Now this was annoying since that meant to define a color in quite a few more spaces than necessary. Since the whole things i Zope/Plone backed i will collect all those colors in a DTML. Though Plone.org says this method is about to be deprecated i have yet to see what new way should be.
• IE 6 cannot display dotted borders. Yeah, thats right. It displays them as dashed. Workaround includes transparent gifs and a few css tricks so Mozilla or other browsers capable of displaying dotted borders don’t pick up the picture.
• IE 6 and 7 behave odd with fieldsets and legends. When you define a background color for a fieldset and that fieldset will contain a legend, the background color extends into the space above the fieldset itself to the upper border of the legend. This is definitely awkward, since the workaround really feels like fixing IE itself. The fix was basically to define fieldset position relative and legend position absolute and then move the legend to the right space again. This fix works only partially since a yet to be determined combination of margins, paddings and borders still lead to the background extending outside it’s borders.