Code Retard

I upgraded to Firefox 3 today and after the switch I found out that I had lost my left and right navigation buttons. After floundering for a bit, I was able to restore them quite easily but at the expense of my current toolbar layout and settings.

If your problem isn’t as severe as mine, it might be as easy as right clicking on the toolbar and selecting “Customize…”

From there it’s as easy as dragging the left and right direction buttons back onto your toolbar. If that doesn’t work you could also try clicking on the “Restore Default Set” button boxed in red below. I must warn you that this will delete your layout and restore state it was at the very first day you ran Firefox.

In my case, neither method worked so I had to take a drastic measure. Read more »

CSS is a powerful method to describe the look and layout of a webpage but as versatile as it is, being able to center an object isn’t immediately obvious. Unlike HTML, which has an explicit centering tag, namely

<div align="center"></div>

no such mechanism exists in CSS. After a bit of research, I found out how to do it. Simply use the margin-left and margin-right properties. If you set them to the same value, that “centers” your object, be it a div or anything else. Read more »

Using pure CSS to arrange hundreds of differently sized and colored characters, Roman Cortes has painstakingly drawn the current US President George Bush. It takes an artist’s eye and a CSS master to accomplish something like this, so props to Roman. It’s wonderful to see it being rendered like vector art when the page loads. To truly test if it’s really comprised of a bunch of characters, just highlight the picture on Roman’s page and you should see some familiar characters being highlighted. He’s also done a simpler Homer Simpson. Talk about taking ASCII art to another level.

Whether you program in C++ or code in HTML, you’ve probably encountered a quick reference (”quickref” for short) at some point in your career. These handy guides aren’t meant to teach newbies how to use the language, but are more like the index at the back of your textbook except condensed and consolidated in a few pages. Today’s post lists a few useful quickrefs that I’ve accumulated over the years. Read more »