Firefox

Can you believe it? The graphic bug in Firefox that I once told about was finally fixed in version 3.6! The bug was first reported in May 2009 – so it just took them almost a year … But well, it was only a rarely occurring bug and therefore probably didn’t have the highest priority. Let’s rather be happy that it has already been fixed now and not in version 4, as I first believed.
Finally there’s no more flickering on my site anymore, and embedded Flash objects are no longer getting overlayed by my background images. You can also convince yourself of the now gone flickering on my specially built test page.

English, please?

Recently I wanted to google something, but all the German search results were of no use. So I wanted to try in English – but how? Usually I simply enter my search term in English and thus get English results, too. But this time I was looking for a quite “international” term such as “instant messenger”. Since I could not translate the term, because it was already in English, I thought: “Okay, I’ll just go to google.com then instead of google.de and type it in there.” – Well, far from it! From google.com, you will automatically be redirected to the Google domain of the country you’re just sitting in with your computer. In my case, that meant: right back to google.de – oh great!

Recursion

Once again, I came across an issue that I racked my brain about for hours, if not days: I had written a recursive function in PHP that should run through a globally declared array with a foreach loop and then restart itself if necessary. Everything ran perfectly well – but only on my local server. On my live server, however, every time the function called itself again, the “parent” foreach loop was simply canceled. Meaning that, after my function had reached a deeper level of the array, the higher level was not being continued. Instead, it just quit there.

Miranda IM

Today, I have a tip for all users of the wonderfully simple and lightweight instant messenger “Miranda”. Sometimes the problem occurs that, when starting a conversation, the complete history of that contact will load and appear in the chat window. One may not even realize it at the beginning – I myself didn’t notice it for a long time –, until the history becomes so long that opening the chat window takes several seconds and makes the machine rattle.

Pretty - and pretty expensive?

When I wanted to sign up for my driver’s license at 17, I had to pass a quick eye test just like everyone else. After I had guessed the final, completely blurred characters correctly, with more luck than skill, my optician let me get away without the obligation to wear glasses when driving. Nevertheless, he urged me to have my eyes examined closer again in the near future and maybe get a pair of spectacles.
That was almost exactly ten years ago, and my vision has since become worse and worse. Yet I still don’t have glasses.

For a while I’ve been looking for a way to integrate the top-posts of my site, that have been established by the WordPress stats plugin, into my template. I wanted to have a list of the five most visited posts, preferably with the number of comments.
I remembered that I had once seen a plugin for that: WordPress Popular Posts. But when I installed it, I found that in the latest version, it works exclusively as a widget and does not provide a template tag. That way, of course, it was of absolutely no use to me, because my template is not and will never be intended for widgets. And simply installing an older version of the plugin is not a permanent solution either.

But as usual, I thought to myself: “Man, there must be some way to do this!” And there is one indeed! With just a few lines of code, you can integrate your top posts from the WordPress stats plugin at any place in your template, without any additional plugin!

This issue is certainly known to a few, and I too have had the problem for a while that I couldn’t leave any comments on my own blog when logged in as admin (I could comment only from the back end, but not from the website). Today I have finally taken the “time” to go to the root of the problem. I am writing this in quotes, because in the end it didn’t take me three minutes to find the error. If only I had started searching much earlier.

In these days you get more and more overwhelmed with commercials for online dating on German television, from “neu.de” to “parship.de” to “elitepartner.de”. And although I would never try and find a partner through such a service, three quarters of my own relationships developed – at least partially – via the Internet. But by what criteria do you choose a potential partner when all you get to see of him is only a name and maybe a few details and a photo? Can you make an informed decision at all as to whether a person is suitable for you or not?