Hello 
I'm Siobhan Curran/Kisa Naumova, and this is my weblog. I tend to write about stuff like crossdressing, Macs, code, cats, wine and Second Life, but in general it's just an ongoing conversation about all sorts of stuff. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what this all is, I recommend starting on this page which has a little bit of info on who I am, and what I'm trying to do — or you could dive into my five years worth of archives if you like.
Otherwise, feel free to close this box and explore...
FlickrBlog: Introducing Filters
This is (of course) exceptionally big (and welcome) news for all of us in the Second Life Group, and something we've been waiting for for a long time. A quick mental guestimate based on Tao's comment from 7 months ago suggests to me that we've been waiting almost a year and a half for this.
PNG in Windows IE
How to get PNGs working in MSIE — which I'm only really bookmarking for my own reference
Bedtime Reading
Shaggy
photo shaggyblogstories book me
I am absolutely brimming with chuffedness
Which is odd, because in that pic you look like you're brimming with pure evil. 
My facial expressions for "delight" and "evil" are worryingly similar 
Hmmm. So it says here, "Look into my eyes, not around the eyes,..."
Blind Coding
I hate Internet Explorer. If I had my way, every computer in the world would have MSIE scrubbed from its hard disk by friendly Firefox Pixies, and my life as a (occasional) web dev-type person would be a lot easier. Not having anything to test sites I do out in MSIE before releasing them into the wild, I'm often caught with my panties down in an embarassing pose as whole swathes of CSS fails spectacularly.
Anyways...
The site I made for work just over a year ago has been a bit of a success really, with over twenty-thousand pieces of work uploaded by the students on two of the courses in the School. The thing is though, what with The Paranoid Nature Of Institutions In General™, and the Not Yet Developed Self-Curating Skills™ of the students, we can't allow unfettered public access to everything that gets put on it, and have to pick through them on a regular basis and select some for "public" display.
Despite me whacking umpteen Ajax-y useful features on the site to help us do this, well, you know how it is — other things get in the way, and as a result the 'public' feed from the site isn't as rapidly changing (and therefore reflective of the 'private' feed) as I'd like.
So I'm enlisting the help of some of the students to curate a mini 'show' for just after Easter, and while I was at it, I figured I'd give the 'public-face' a bit of an overhaul.
I was sat there yesterday, in Photoshop, dragging a few sample images around a window to try and drum up some type of 'inspiration', when it suddenly occurred to me that actually that's what I wanted the site to be like — a whole jumble of images that you can drag around, and then double-click to view larger.
I've made it, and it works fine in Safari and Firefox on my Mac, but I'm totally unsure as to what it looks like in Internet Explorer So I was wondering if anyone had a few minutes to spare, and had that awful beast of a browser on their PC, could yous take a look for me?
Here's the url for my 'mid-dev' version
What's supposed to happen, is that the page loads with a nice chocolate background and a spinny 'loading' image. When it's all loaded, that should change to the word "explore", which, when you click on it, should bring up a randomly-placed and randomly-selected bunch of images of different sizes — all with very subtle drop shadows.
You should be able to drag them around the page, and when you double-click on one, it should expand over the top of a semi-opaque black background that hides the original page.
I guess the main things I'm thinking might be broken are:
The PNGs I've used to get shadows and opacity, although I've used that technique I linked to above.
The margins, paddings and placement of things might be all over the shop.
The QuickTime embedding (one of the pieces is a film) might totally not work.
The JavaScript could be completely shot.
I might have to rethink my 'random-placement-maths', because I've assumed a browser window that's too big.
I'd really appreciate some feedback on that 
I'd like to show it to them on Tuesday and get them a little excited about using the web in more 'interesting' ways than just flopping a bunch of images in a <table> — but I kinda need to make sure the underlying code works before I start promising things...
Ouchies
They're such rarities, I feel they should be documented
Sadly no Code comments for me, just tell Erica Sutcliffe that '1624' rocks.
Hey Siobhan,
Well, I'm at work with IE6, so...
Your spinny loading thing and Explore thing are working fine, and the random images fit nicely on my screen (1024x768) and are draggable- your chocolate backgound looks black, though, and I can't see drop shadows.
Double-clicking the images expands them, but there's no background- you can see everything behind the image. It's difficult to read the text and I can't find a way to dismiss the image; you can also expand multiple images on top of each other. I had to refresh the page to get back to square one.
In short, it's pretty borked in IE6- sorry 
Mel xx
Thanks for testing it Mel
Hmm, so the transparent black background is showing up in the wrong place — not over the images (and initially hidden) where it should be Was there not a little close-box to the left of the title then, also?
A little logo-y thing? Yes, but it doesn't work.
God I hate MSIE 
It ain't great... I use Firefox at home, but we've rented our souls to Bill here, and we can't even use IE7!
I think the problems I've got here, are the IE doesn't like the way I've done the semi-transparent <div> that's supposed to sit over the draggable images and fill the screen — both in the way it's handling the PNG background, and the way I've made it 100% wide and high.
The non-close-box thing is most likely me setting the text-indent of the title to a negative value, and the surrounding <div> clipping it.
If it's just those two things, at least I can fix it...
Well, I'm about to bugger off home, but I've got a copy of IE7 there, if that's useful testing for you?
Thanks hon, but I think I've got a lot of Googling to do before I try and fix it...
...having said that, WTF am I doing coding on a Friday night?
/me goes to Sainsburys, buys booze, and watches telly in front of the fire.
In a dress.
It was all working fine for me on MIE7!
Using IE 7,
page works fine for me, everything drags as you say it should, double click brings it up with a lovely semi transparent glaze, eveything clicks OK for me (1440x900 resolution if you need to know).
Very nicely done.
It all worked fine for me, including the movie, under IE7 and XP.
The only thing I could do that 'broke' it was to push something so far 'up' that it disappeared and couldn't be retrieved (spare me the jokes pur-lease 
). Pushing things off-screen to the right or down was fine (activated scroll bars). Oh yea, IE7 crashed (instruction at bla, bla, bla, could not be read) when I closed it.
I tested it for you too. I'm honestly not sure which version I've got, but it's either 6 or 7. I got the page to open up but the works wouldn't move when I tried to drag them and when I double clicked I couldn't dismiss the work that came up. It LOOKS good though.
You'll sort it out.
Heya. mmm, safari on 10.4.9, it works to the point of dragging around, then if I try and do anything with another pic it's not into it.
Rachel
You should really Install Parallels and two instances of Win XP (one frozen at IE6, one upgraded to IE7) on your nearest convenient Intel Mac. Voila, instant testing suite. It's made my work life immesurably more simple.
Very sweet piece of UI. Well done!
your nearest convenient Intel Mac
That would be about 70 miles away
Thanks for helping guys I've obviously got a lot of work to do on it, but it's encouraging to know that it's not as completely borked as I thought it was going to be.
One key hint for IE6 + Javascript, always explicitly declare your variables, it really hates implicit declarations.
Also, note all the little s**ts (aka IE bugs) i've found here
Bit late, but whenever you take on the mantle of web developer one of the lines that defines how good you are is defined by how many browsers/platforms you test in. My passion for Opera compels me to remind you of another fine choice a MSIE removing pixies.
And if you cared your example works find in Opera too. The fact that you design first for Firefox is almost certainly the reason; designing for MSIE first is pure madness.
re Safety Level — do they have a "dont try this at home category?"