Gerd Riesselmann: Notes From the Bog

Today I was helping a friend of mine doing his removal (my dictionary says it's called removal, my mind says, it's called relocation. I'm not sure which to trust: The dictionary is from 1961, actually). I really like to do this kind of things: Carrying furniture and boxes down the stairs, stuffing them into a van, carrying them up again. I even like the little scratches you get from the cardboard boxes.

I'd like to thank Johannes Hölzl, who pointed out my stupid mistake regarding canceling form submission in Firefox:

The
ECMAScript binding for DOM Events says that the EventListener (which is the function "cancel") hasn't any returnvalue. But you get as parameter an Event object, where you can call "stopPropagation()" or "preventDefault()".

So I replaced this code:

function cancel()
{
  return false;
}

with this:

function cancel(e)
{
  if (e && e.preventDefault)
    e.preventDefault(); // DOM style
  return false; // IE style
}

and it works. I updated the test page accordingly.

Thanks a lot, Johannes!

Releasing a web project for the first time brings up something new every day. The lesson I learned yesterday was to never rely on Apache's Multiview feature, since it doesn't work with the most important browser on earth: Googlebot. As you may know, Google does deep indexing of new content onyl once a month, which happened to be yesterday. But imagine my horror, when I discovered each of my content pages delivering an 406 error to Googlebot. Oh me, oh my! What has happened here?

... Well, at least on the comic marketplace site I did recently. While this may be community specific, Firefox however is very popular in Germany. The German online magazine Spiegel Online for examples reports a Firefox market share of 28%.

Spiegel online, you may also remember them as the people who think Carl Barks was a German, now published an interview with Firefox developer Blake Ross (in German, though), covering the phenomena:

Spiegel Online: How important the German market is for Firefox?

Ross: Germany is one of our biggest markets, and we work very hard to fit the needs of our German users.

Spiegel Online: Compared to other countries, Firefox market share currently is much higher in Germany. What are the reasons for this?

Ross: Europe seems more open to the idea of open source than the US. I'm not sure, what's the reason for that. The energy and passion coming from our German fans is refreshing and highly appreciated.

Further on, Ross was asked about Google's influence on the Firefox development:

Spiegel Online: Don't you fear Google getting to much influence?

Ross: The world would be better off, if Google had more influence. Google understands what people want from technology - and delivers it with astonishing precision.

Just releasing the online marketplace I did the last months in my spare time, I stumbled upon the float label bug from the Mozilla 1.0 branch. This bug kills all my labels - and there are quite a lot of them.

Spiegel Online will einen Skandal gefunden haben, wo keiner ist: Hitlers Mein Kampf in der Micky Maus?

Das ist ein alter Hut. Allerdings ist die fragliche Geschichte April Foolers zum ersten Mal unzensiert in einer Micky Maus erschienen. Die Originalversion - mit Mein Kampf auf der Müllhalde - war bisher nur in der Barks Library Comics Nr. 18 verfügbar. In ältere Versionen wurde Mein Kampf retuschiert:

Carl Barks put this book on the trash dump where it belongs. With it Barks made a statement about Hitler, bigotry and the culture of hate. All this belongs to the lowest of places, the trash.It seems that Barks made a pretty inside gag into his story that appeals especially to the older readers. And yet when the German editor and translator came across this gag they decided to cut it out. [...] The editor of the German comic book "Micky Maus" confirmed my first assumption but gave me another reason. This cover has no place in a Disney comic, he said. I am of a different opinion. Why can't there be a place in a Disney story that can be understood by the grown-ups who will be pleased by this little inside gag. As I saw it for the first time I thought that Carl Barks had found the perfect place for this book.

Profaner warf man dem deutschen Ehapa-Verlag einfach Zensur vor. So ändern sich die Zeiten - und wie man's macht ist es verkehrt.

Ein pikantes Detail am Rande: Obwohl gleich drei AutorInnen für die Non-Story verantwortlich zeichnen, wusste anscheinend niemand von ihnen, dass Carl Barks kein Deutscher war.

Endlich ist es geschafft! Der Comic-Marktplatz ist online. Daran habe ich seit dem frühen Herbst - mit Unterbrechungen - in meiner Freizeit gesessen. Puh!

Der Mac Monexsac-Preis der D.O.N.A.L.D. geht dieses Jahr an Herrn Dr. Josef Ackermann, derzeit Sprecher des Vorstandes der Deutschen Bank AG. Mit dieser Auszeichnung werden ausschließlich Persönlichkeiten geehrt, die eine besondere Befähigung bewiesen haben, ihre wirtschaftlichen Interessen frei von den Fesseln moralischer Bedenken durchzusetzen und in dieser Hinsicht den Entenhausener Wirtschaftslenkern in nichts nachstehen.

I just came over a strange behaviour in Mozilla Firefox. It seems Firefox ignores return values for dynamically added event handlers. I stumbled upon this, when I tried to implement some quick mechanism to cancel a form submission.

I'm quite busy at the moment, since the marketplace application I'm doing in PHP started beta testing this weekend. However, I'd like to present some side product from this project: A javascript progress bar and password quality indicator. You can see it in action here.