Joel Mama’s Blog

Don’t even get me started on “Document Compatibility” in Internet Explorer 8. In my opinion, flagging content as kosher for a specific version, of a specific browser, on a specific operating system, flies in the face of everything Web developers have been pushing for in the last decade plus. But I digress.

What’s the definition of irony? When you’re in an editor and click on the “learn more about document compatibility” link, which opens in your default browser (Opera 9.6x) and this is what you see. Yes ladies and gentlemen, the following screen shot is of a document labeled (and all about) “Defining Document Compatibility“:

Screen capture of Microsoft's "Defining Document Compatibility" page in the Opera Web browser

Seriously … Microsoft … is this some kind of giant Andy Kaufman-esque joke that I don’t get?

I’m working on digitizing my 700+ CD collection (oy vey!). I may go into greater detail about that whole process in another post, but here’s a quick tip for now. If you want to isolate the songs in your iTunes library based on their file type (like MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, etc.), you can do so with a Smart Playlist. But there’s a bit of a trick here, you need to know the magic string to type into the “Kind” field of the playlist. The folks over at Mac OS X Hints have done the work for us. Here’s a pretty table:

Another way to get the magic string is to simply view the Get Info window of the file in question. But as Doug Adams of Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes pointed out, you can’t copy and paste that. So he whipped up this bit of code. Paste this code into the Script Editor and run it while the track in question is playing in iTunes:
tell application "iTunes"
display dialog "Current track's kind is:" default answer ((get kind of current track) as string)
end tell

If you have other file types not listed here, please comment with their magic string so I may compile them here. Thanks!

When trying to install the newest version of the ProxyButton extension for Firefox, I received this error:

Incompatible Extension

“ProxyButton” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

Luckily a solution exists over at Idea Shower. Add a new boolean key using about:config and restart. Easy-peasy. More at Idea Shower.

I was able to use a Mac OS X “.dfont” font file on windows by using a simple FOSS software to convert it into standard TrueType format (.ttf). The app is called Fondu. It’s actually a set of many command line programs rolled into one, but I only used the main fondu app. Couldn’t have been easier:

1. Download & Install .pkg file
2. From Terminal, cd into the directory where the .dfont file lives
3. Run fondu MyFont.dfont
4. Marvel as a .ttf font is spit out next to your .dfont file

Thanks Fondu!

Update 2009-05-22: Please note that the fondu binary lives in “/usr/local/bin/” by default. Either add this path to your environment, or prepend the path to the fondu command like this:  /usr/local/bin/fondu MyFont.dfont

I had no idea why some of my subscriptions in NNW were a light tan/brown color. See here how “RateMyTeachers.com” and “sportsbbq” are brown:

Turns out that the subscriptions change to that color for feeds that have not updated (added a new post) in 60 days. Perhaps I’m just dense, but this was not obvious to me.

Anyway, if you care to change that color, go to: Preferences -> Fonts -> General -> Show Color Options...