macdiggs.com

A couple of my-workers has been to preview of Miyazaki Hayao's new anime - Geto Senki (English version: Tales of Earthsea) and it looks like the movie is not as good as everyone expected. The story is shallow and the plot is weak and there seemed to be no real (believable) solutions to any of the problems which are brought up in the movie. Also, it looks like other people around the country who had a chance to watch the movie didn't like it at all and mostly have the same experinces as my co-workers.

Talking about Miyazaki Hayao's animes, the Geto Senki is not exactly his own movie but rather a movie by his son which he seems to have been patronizing and supporting, but didn't seem to do any actual direction. So that seems just the son is not as talented as the  father.  

I have not seen the movie myself yet, and I guess I will not, until it is out on DVD. And doh.. that just sucks because I was really looking forward to watching the movie.

Update : it's not Geto Seiki (seiki = genitals) :D it's geto senki!! aaaalright :) 

Aptana is still-in-early-development Eclipse-based (and therefore is written in Java) IDE for Web programmers.

It supports JavaScript, HTML, CSS syntax highlight, JavaScript syntax checking,  auto-completion and even shows browser compatibility information for JS commands and CSS. You can work on levels of projects, as well as single-file editing.  The IDE also supports various AJAX libraries, and you can even create projects based on AJAX libs you choose (incl. Prototype, Scriptaculous, Rico and many many more)

 Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. Do, do yourself a favour and check Aptana out.

The only drawback for me is that it only supports UTF and Roman encodings, and none of Japanese-specific ones. Yeah I know in this age all sites should be created in UTF, but just.. I don't know.. can't get used to it. Being lazy I guess.

I've experienced a very weird crash on Windows Internet Explorer (XP SP2, English) just yesterday. So here's the problem and the solution and may be, just may be it will help somebody.. someday.

The problem is that IE was crashing on me completely. And according to reports I was getting, mshtml.dll was the problem - so it is definitely IE's HTML renderer  (thanks Remedee for pointing this out as I suck as Windows debugging - 100% Mac user).

 And the code I was having on the page was just an ordinary blocked output (photo + description, in a SPAN tag), just as follows:

The result was a grid of pictures with descriptions under them.

The problem was that if I had over 23 such blocks on a page, IE was just crashing on me!! With some weird "illegal access" 0xC0000005 in mshtml.dll (or something) error. And of course ALL OTHER browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera) were processing the page without any noticable problems at all.

Well I dunno.. was thinking about inline javascript was causing the problems. And inline javascript is NOT a good thing, but of course it depends.. for example if you have LOADs of images and want to create something like lightbox gallery that would work without needing to wait for the whole page to load (and it WILL take time for lots of images). Anyways.. I was using inline Javascript and though it was causing the problem, so got rid of it, but it didn't help at all. Then.. I just started to remove blocks of code and the problem seem to disappear, but I was left with a non-functional page (I need it to look exactly the way I want, and anyway, that's not a huge amount of markup to be able to play with many combinations).

In the end, the solution for the problem was to add the <span> tag  around the text below the picture. JUST TWO TAGS solved the problem.

The resulting code was just like the one below:

Now.. I don't know what was the source of the problem for IE. It could be that I just suck at coding and and don't know the basics. And I definitely will remember about the problem and solution in the future.. But can anyone explain my.. WHY?.. Well it was rhethoric question I guess :)

 PS: Oh and yes, the page actually validates..

Well there's alot of stuff happening and lots of things I'm learning. But today's entry is not a technical at all :)

News #1: "YahooBB Japan sucks"

Yeah.. I'm without Internet at home until 20th this month. And no, there are no problems with the line being blow up by an anarchist samurai. Not at all! It's just YahooBB decided that since my contract with them ends on 31th of this month, they can just go ahead and disconnect my line on 10th! WTF??

And WTF do they think about when they send me a paper stating "Your contract ends July, 31; ADSL line disconnection was conducted on July, 10. Thank you very much for using our services". Yeah very nice of you to disconnect the line 3 weeks before the contract expires… Spending almost 2.5 hours on phone with the support, shouting and firing nuclear missiles didn't bring any result as support guys seem to be acting according to some service manual ("No, we can not conduct reconnection  until 20th. No you can't send us fax with your clain because we only do support via phone and email.. we are very sorry.. blah-blah-blah"). The only result was that I saved 50 bucks this month on Internet (I don't need to pay this month's bill because of Yahoo's mistake).

Well what I want to say is that if you ever come to Japan and want to connect to Internet here, don't even consider YahooBB Japan services. Because they suck. They make mistakes and they don't carry any responsibility regarding them. Their tech support only available 10:00-18:00, and they don't offer free dial if you call them from mobile phone. Oh well..

News #2: Got the loan!

Well, this one is completely off-topic :) I got a call from the bank today and it looks like our application for the house loan have finally passed! So we will be moving to a new house in the end of this month. Own house. Man.. that's fantastic.. Now the only cloud on this perfect blue sky is of course that there are 35 years of loan repay awaiting me ;) But oh well no pain no gain or whatever :D

News #3: New Ochre's album!!!!!

Ochre have released the new album! Name's "Lemodie" and the genre is IDM (that's for Intelligent Dance Music - a kind of electronic). The guy is incredible and if you're into electronic stuff you should definitely do yourself a favour and listen to some of his compositions. If you want to "try before you buy" you can listen to some freely available mp3's on Ochre's site.

Man.. I wish I would have access to the cache from which these people get the stuff they smoke ;)

Have a look! Absolutely stunning! 

There is a very useful chunk of code for paginating data in Spry, available at Raymond Camden's blog. You might want to check it out.

 Pagination in Spry.