I finally got around to installing Ubuntu Linux on Kirsten’s old PC. The old PC had struggled to run Windows XP, but it seems pretty zippy with Linux. I have it set up on my desk: two monitors for my Windows PC, and a third for the Linux box. Now I’m trying to get Synergy working so I can use a single mouse/keyboard to span all three monitors. It will be good to get back into a real OS after slumming in Windows for so long.

Speaking of a real OS, I moved Kirsten to a nice iMac last year, with mixed results. The mouse that they ship with these things is absolutely horrible. She had a heck of a time trying to burn some music to a CD (iTunes is pretty unintuitive in that regard: you can’t just select some songs and burn a CD, you have to select the songs, create a playlist, then burn the playlist to a CD). Also, the kids use her computer, and there are just certain things and websites that won’t run on a Mac, so she occassionaly comes down to the basement to use my Windows PC.

In any case, I’m hoping to get a MacBook when they make their next revision, which will hopefully contain the new Santa Rosa chipset and LED backlit monitor.

<h2>Me &amp; My Shadow</h2>

Then the tab control displayed “&” instead of a single ampersand character.

It looks like this occurs because the JavaScript DOM function document.createTextNode() does not convert entities. However, it looks like innerHTML does convert entities, so to fix your problem find the following line in tabber.js:

DOM_a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(t.headingText));

and replace with the following:

DOM_a.innerHTML = t.headingText;

I’ll think about this some more and if I can’t find any bad side effects I’ll add to the tabber code.

I just released a new version of my JavaScript tab interface software.

New Features

• Can automatically set a unique id for each tab navigation link, which allows you to individually style each tab.
• Includes a “minimized” version of the code (with comments and whitespace removed, for extra-fast loading).

Now with yummy cookies!

I added an example page showing how you can use the new onLoad and onClick function hooks in my JavaScript tabifier to make the tabs persistent (using browser cookies).

That is, if you leave the page and come back later, the tab you previously selected will still be selected.

I just released a new version of my JavaScript tab interface software.

New Features

• You can set a custom onLoad function to be called after the tab interface has finished initializing.
• You can set a custom onClick function to be called when the user clicks a tab. In addition to performing any other actions, this function can stop the tab from changing.

Here’s an interactive tutorial I’m working on:

Learn CSS Positioning in ten steps

I’m using it to give some CSS and HTML training today. It uses a customized version of my JavaScript tabs interface and triggers a styleswitcher each time you switch tabs, so you can see the CSS change right on the page.

It’s a work in progress, so let me know if you have any suggestions.

I just released a new version of my JavaScript tab interface software. It has some new features that make it crazy-easy to use, plus I eliminated a memory leak in the IE browser (damn you Microsoft!).

New Features

• You can set the tabberOptions global variable before you include tabber.js to change any of the tabber settings.
• You no longer have to specify a title for each tab – it automatically finds heading elements in the body of the tab. Of course you can still specify a title if you don’t have headings or to override the title of the tab. And if you don’t do either it automatically numbers the tabs. See also tabberOptions.titleElements and tabberOptions.titleElementsStripHTML.
• Removes the title attribute from the tab so it does not appear as a tooltip when you mouseover the body of the tab. See also tabberOptions.removeTitle.
• You can prevent tabber from running automatically in the onload event. See tabberOptions.manualStartup.
• Fixed a small memory leak that appeared in the IE web browser.

I’m running some tests tonight on my JavaScript tabber code… yeah, I would say it handles nested tabs.

I wonder if there are any issues with “memory leaks” due to IE’s faulty garbage collection… let me know if you notice anything.

Update: Hold the presses, I found a few more links. Some of these pointers are not used except when creating new elements to add into the DOM, so I can probably just switch those to use local variables. It shouldn’t matter, but with IE’s faulty garbage collection, who knows if it might cause problems.

Update h good god, the squiggly lines have taken over!