Neil Schemenauer's Web Log

[Archives]

February 18, 2005

shutting up glibc link warnings

The Python posix module wraps some insecure functions (a warning is generated if they are used in Python code). Here's a hack to silence the errors generated when linking Python (I get sick of them after a while):

  cd /lib
  perl -pe 's/gnu.warning.(tempnam|tmpnam|tmpnam_r)/gnu.wanting.1/g' \
    < libc-2.2.3.so > /tmp/libc-2.2.3.so
  cp -b /tmp/libc-2.2.3.so libc-2.2.3.so

No warranty. :-)

February 07, 2005

New window manager

After many years using WindowMaker, I'm now running XFCE. I tried both KDE and Gnome but switched back to WindowMaker after about a day. I've been using using XFCE for a few days now so maybe it will stay.

February 03, 2005

Internet Explorer and "quirks mode"

I spent a fair amount of time tracking this problem down so I feel I should post a note about it. There is a bug in Internet Explorer 6 which turns on quirks mode when the XML declaration is positioned above the document type. Before removing the declaration, IE did weird things with my CSS font-size rules. There are a bunch of other CSS things broken in quirks mode as well. Henri Sivonen has a nice page that explains things in detail.

I wish there was some way to see if IE was using quirks mode. In Mozilla and Firefox, it is displayed on the "Page Info" dialog. Even better, browsers should include a little icon somewhere that indicates whether the page is valid, similar to the SSL icon. I think that small change would go a long way in reducing the amount of broken HTML produced by people.

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