Author Archives: Steffen

My blog has been bombed by hunderts of trackback spams the last 2 hours. And I’m not the only one as I figured out via Technorati, there’s for example Twig, Beau, Avery, and bronzefinger having the same problem.

I’ve investigated my log files a bit and the requests are all coming from different IP addresses all over the world. So I guess it is some sort of spy-ware/trojan/virus that got installed on all those computers. It is interresting that the browser IDs in the request are always “real” browsers, and are different with every request, e.g. “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)”, “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; SAFEXPLORER TL)”, “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Mac_PowerPC)”, “”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M)” – always MSIE… That could be a trick, or that could mean, that the trojan is installed in Internet Explorer (whereas this would be hard to do for version 4 to 6 and even on Mac OS…).

And I’m asking myself: is it possible that these requests, though distributed over the whole world, are coordinated? Well, I’m curious what the virus companies / computer news tickers / you say about this topic the next few hours and days.

[tags]blog, trackback, spam, trojan, virus, spy-ware[/tags]

Simon had an idea how to speed up my site and the link to Tanny O’Haley’s domload posting he sent me let me think and do. The result is my new JavaScript library RUZEE.Events.

The main feature, and at the same time the turbo for RuzeeBorders, is as follows: When the HTML content of your page is loaded completely, but before all images, ads, Flash stuff, etc. is there, the script triggers an event and your JavaScript code can get active. Modify your page, install dynamic behaviors, start JavaScript animations. And let the browser load in parallel all the other stuff your page requires.

It works cross-browser, i.e. on IE 5.5, 6.0, FF 1.0, 1.5, Safari 2, Opera 8.5, Konqueror 3.5 (and maybe others), and comes with loads of other features. Try it now!

[tags]javascript, events, event, domload, domcontentloaded, ruzee[/tags]

RuzeeBorders are much faster now with version 0.8 – The Performance Release. The kick gave Simon with his hint about using caching strategies to improve speed by drawing a corner only once and reuse that on other DIVs with the … Continued

There are lots of fixes for the lack of support of min-width in Internet Explorer <=6.0. I recently added a pure CSS solution to the theme of my blog (see here), which works fine in strict mode. You simply cannot have a liquid design without some sort of min-width… And all those JavaScript solutions are simply too slow, eat too much bandwidth (if you have a 384 kBit/s uplink), and have response times on window resizes that are unacceptable.

But then again, IE 7.0 RC2 still does not support min-width and I read that the layout engine will not be changed for the final version – which means that all those ugly workarounds will be required for some more years… Unless others are successful, who say that they are working hard on the feature to be included in the final. So I guess, we’ll just wait and see ;-).

[tags]IE 7, Internet Explorer 7, IE, Internet Explorer, min-width, css, webdesign[/tags]

Wow, that was much easier than I thought: The new RuzeeBorders version 0.7 support border widths other than 1px, which can be specified via the corresponding CSS property (e.g. style=”border: 5px solid green”). They look really Web2.0ish this way ;-). … Continued

If you are a Mac OS X fanatic and at the same time a Java developer, check out Christoph‘s JAR Inspector. It’s a JAR file manager with direct support for viewing and changing manifest files and comes with a Java … Continued

My blog got a new URL scheme. It is now located at https://www.ruzee.com/blog instead of http://www.ruzee.com/wordpress. The /wordpress URLs still work, but you’ll be 301 redirected to /blog URLs. This will work for the next few weeks – I guarantee … Continued

The new version 0.6 of RuzeeBorders supports pseudo-transparency, i.e. you can put simple borders on top of background images. The RuzeeBorders page has an example and the download link.

I’ve decided not to used “real” opacity because I want the borders to work on the supported browsers with the same quality and the dependency to opacity would make the borders look extremly bad on Opera and Konqueror (read my last posting for details).

[tags]rounded, borders, corners, javascript, ruzee, ruzeeborders, css, shadowed[/tags]

I did some research about the support for opacity in modern Browser. Opacity means, that parts of your web page (DIVs, images and other elements) may be semi transparent so you can, potentially partly, see the background behind them. Firefox … Continued

I said the wrongs things to my girl friend (sorry again for that, babe), one guy told me that his team is developing something extremely similiar to what we developed that last few months, another guy wrote the wrong email, and I found out that googleing “css javascript rounded corners” won’t find RuzeeBorders after 40 pages… Aaarrgh! Aaaaarrrrgh!!! … Btw.: Did you now that Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh is extremly common when considering the same word with some [a|r]s more or less? No? Well, Oliver Steele did a very nice and geeky statistics of the different ways to write the word “Argh” at The Aargh Page. Almost funny ;-).

[tags]argh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh, statistics[/tags]