Targeted CSS – IE 6 or IE 7 down

There is a pretty well known hack for CSS that allow us to target Internet Explorer 6 and older. This is a life saver because IE has never handled the box model correctly. Padding is especially problematic in older versions.

Underscore hack to the rescue! Here’s how you might use it…

.myClass {
position:absolute;
left:15px; /* all standards compliant browsers */
_left:35px; /* IE 6 and older */
}

Ok, great. But what if you need to target IE 7 and below? Star hack to the rescue! Here’s how to use it…

.myClass {
position:absolute;
left:15px; /* all standards compliant browsers */
_left:35px; /* IE 6 and older */
*left:45px; /* IE 7 and older */
}

This has been such a life saver to me I thought I would post it in at least one more place on the web. Get with it Microsoft IE team! Quit trying to force everyone else to use your busted rendering model and get standards compliant!

Life Design Tip – Backup your stuff

Recovering data from a failed hard drive

There’s not much worse than realizing that you just lost months and months of work.  We keep things backed up on a fairly tight schedule but it still got to our nerves when the hard drive went bad a few weeks ago.  The silence between each click of a stuck hard drive spindle seems to last forever when it’s your data at risk.  Our experience is yet another testimony that hard drives DO fail.  Backup early and often.

Luckily for us we didn’t have to lose anything.  A great tip that worked for us was to leave the hard drive in a zip lock back in the fridge over night.  The next day we plugged it in and spun it up.  Everything worked long enough for us to recover all of our most recent projects.  What would we do without refrigerators?

Working with Flash video

Our most recent project dealt with streaming Flash video.  After dealing with some of the nuances of influxis’s configuration we began experimenting with flv and mp4 wrappers.  It appears that the flash player will play just about any h.264 video file regardless of the video wrapper type.  This is good news because it allows people to encode video using a bigger variety of tools.