Here’s an interesting quote.

Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman for the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You are too arrogant. If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name.’

Some may think this is a quote from Osama bin Laden or some other crazy terrorist. However, these words were spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967, regarding war in Vietnam.

I’m not some tree-hugging liberal who opposes all forms of conflict or anything, but just stop and think about that quote for a while…

I was just told that something I said was a good quote for my page.

We might know the most of the people who don’t have a clue.

Mmmmm, grilled cheese…

If you live in the US, the presidential election is coming up. If you need to, read up on the different parties and candidates, then actually go out and let them know who you think the best choice is.

While you’re at it, go to VOTEorNOT.org and sign up. The HOTorNOT.com guys are giving away up to $200,000 of their own money, simply because they think it’s that important. If you win, you get $100,000. The person who referred you also gets $100,000. So follow my link, sign up, and win (because I want $100,000)! The terms state that you may sign up for email notifications when you register. I didn’t actually see any options regarding email, so I used the Remove link at the bottom of the page once I did sign up, just to be safe.

• Federal Election Commission
• PresidentialElection.com
• Democratic Party
• Republican Party
• Libertarian Party
• Green Party
• Reform Party
• JohnKerry.com
• GeorgeWBush.com
• Badnarik.org
• VoteNader.org
• VoteCobb.org

Once again, a night out produces another great quote. The self-proclaimed Princess Of Quite A Lot had this to say:

It’s ok, you’re an adult boy.

Yeah, I know, you don’t care. It was funny at the time though. And I told her I would harass her make her famous on my page.

http://pctech.invisibill.net/iezilla.html

That’s basically just an experiment, but it’s pretty cool, I think. It uses the ActiveX control version of Mozilla, embedded in a webpage, just like any other object could be. This creates a little window on the page which renders the URL using Mozilla’s HTML engine. You can use it to test pages for compatibility, and to see just how broken some stuff in IE is. The default page is Eric Meyer’s css/edge, which comes up with cool things to do with standard CSS. Unfortunately, IE is know for very poor CSS support, and the IE button on the page will let you get a side by side comparison of the two HTML engines.

You do have to download and install the Mozilla ActiveX control for it to work. http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm#download has the download links. Just download the file and run it, and it will install the control for the page to use. It’s about 4.5MB, but you basically don’t see anything once it’s installed. You don’t have to bother with using another browser or anything, it’s just a behind-the-scenes object that can be called. You may have to adjust the security options for some ActiveX stuff to view it, especially after WinXP SP2. If there’s any ActiveX stuff disabled, change it to “Prompt” instead. That way nothing else will be allowed by default, but you’ll be asked about it instead of IE just silently blocking it.

This thread at Anandtech lists a bunch of free programs which do the same thing as many commonly warezed programs. This is meant to raise awareness of free alternatives, so that people don’t warez. I know there are some people out there who pirate apps because that’s all they know. Hopefully this helps them avoid piracy, and encourages free and open source software in the process.

Spurl.net is also interesting. It’s an online bookmark system. Works pretty well for me in Firefox. Now we just need an extension so Firefox can use Spurls via the native bookmark system. =)

I just added a hack to this page for IE.

  <!--[if IE]>
    <link rel="stylesheet" title="IE Bugs" href="css/iebugs.css" type="text/css" />
  <![endif]-->

That calls an extra stylesheet only for IE. The stylesheet hardcodes the width of the Google search button. For some reason, IE insists on adding space to both sides of the text on the button, which makes the button much wider than it needs to be. Combined with IE’s poor CSS support, the wider button stretches the gray sidebar. That throws off the spacing of the whole page.

It only took a couple minutes, and that’s still time that shouldn’t have been spent on it. The code is a hack to get around an IE bug. It most likely won’t work well with non-default settings. That’s what you get with hacks for a browser that doesn’t work right – partial implementation that sometimes works. If you don’t want to deal with this hack and others like it, either pester Microsoft until they fix the bugs, or use a browser that doesn’t have these bugs, like Firefox.

I was checking out my site stats for some other stuff, and decided to check on the browser usage. While this site tends to be more pro-Firefox than your average site, I know there are quite a few people who visit this site who don’t care about what browser they use, so long as they have an “Internet” icon on their desktop. Just found the results interesting…

For comparison, here’s May’s graph.

I’ve always used bits of info from several different sources when explaining how to slipstream SPs into install shares. The whole process is pretty much trivialized by nLite now, which can slipstream the SP and create the bootable ISO with just a few clicks, without even needing to really understand the concepts.

But I went ahead and wrote up a guide on how to do it manually. http://pctech.invisibill.net/slipstream.html should explain the whole thing pretty well. Let me know if you find any errors or if anything is unclear, so I can improve it.