Apparently MMOs suck

Funny, I have been thinking the same thing. On a side note, since we're talking about games, I think Starcraft 2 is gonna flunk.

DMCA takedown notice framing

A research paper showing you can frame just about any networked device into being accused of downloading copyrighted material. Yes, that means someone could frame you too.

"Finally" and IE memory leaks

Really interesting way to fix memory leaks. The downside is that uses try blocks, which are said to be slow.

Well, there goes two billion dollars

And the stealth bomber goes capoof.

button-span revisited

After having used a <button><span> structure to create cross-browser sliding-doors-styled buttons for a while, I decided to write about the issues I've stumbled across, and ways I've found to fix them:

1. Widths go out of whack in IE, depending on the amount of text in the button - weird bug with an easy but non-obvious solution: add overflow:visible to the button.
2. Firefox aligns the background images wrong vertically - this has to do with a bug in the way button borders are handled. To make everything align, set both background-position's to center vertically.
3. Pressing the button looks ugly in IE - this issue has a somewhat obvious fix: to add position:relative to the inner span. The catch is that this fix introduces another nasty bug in IE (if you have dynamically generated html): the span won't redraw properly when the button needs to move due to stuff being added to the page via ajax. You end up with half of the button where it's supposed to be, and the other half sitting where it was. In IE7, we can apply position:relative only to the hover state, but I don't have a good solution for IE6 :(

So in summary, the CSS rules I use nowadays to style button-span's are these:

<style>
button,button span {
  background:url(button.gif) no-repeat 0 center;
  float:left;
  line-height:16px;
  padding:0 0 0 10px;
  white-space:nowrap;
}
button {
  background-position:100% center;
  border:0;
  overflow:visible;
  padding:0 10px 0 0;
}
* html button span,button:hover span {
  position:relative;
}
</style>
<button><span>Do Stuff</span></button>

Supporting McCain out of spite

So Obama won the nomination, and now some crazy people decided that they'd rather support a Republican, just because their pet candidate Clinton lost. Words fail me.

Yahoo's email address book API

Interesting enough, there was an article in Coding Horror about the very issue of lack of address book APIs by big email providers. Well, here it is, at least from Yahoo.

You've been left behind

You might have heard of that service that allows you to send an email to non-believers after the rapture (i.e. the day when all christians supposedly go to heaven, while non believers are stuck in a world ruled by the anti-christ). Here's an article on Wired about it. The comments are so funny.

Facebook Open Platform

Released under a variant of the MPL, apparently.

Safari is getting faster

With SquirrelFish.