If you google it, you will come across a large number of suggestions on how to resolve it. However, just a minor subset of them are completely solid, thus providing a concrete solution.

Dave Shea on mezzoblue writes about it. Despite the fact that he briefly analyses the phenomenon not only you can get a good idea why this happens, but you can read the best solution that I have ever tried. In brief, Dave Shea suggests to convert a sRGB profile prior to the slicing.

The single disadvantage is that the layers are erased upon the conversion so make sure to save a copy first.

The one thing I admire the most on the brand new Macbook Air is its trackpad. As you may know the Macbook Air comes with an extreme trackpad where you can perform a variety of finger gestures like those in iPhone. Obviously, such features not only bring trackpads to the next level but they raise the bar for competitors as well. Finger gestures are like shortcuts for a keyboard; they provide an advanced but yet efficient way for using an existing device.

However, from my point of view, the Macbook Air has a major design and aesthetic issue. I don’t like the click button… or should I say that I don’t need the click button? In fact, I don’t get it… If a trackpad is smart enough to perform all those magic gestures, what do I need a click button for? I just tap the trackpad and that’s it. I can do this even on the relatively lame trackpad my macbook has.

Steve Jobs has always supported that the second button is not necessary on both trackpads and mouses (that’s why Macbook and Macbook Pro comes with a single click button). Well, I think that the time has come and we can even abandon the remaining single click button. After all it’s more than useless on a Macbook Air and it takes space; we need more space for our magic finger gestures

Don’t get me wrong, but it sounds like a good joke to me; Internet Explorer becomes a standards compliant browser!

The important part of the official announcement is that “IE8 now renders the Acid2 Face correctly in IE8 standards mode”. You got it? IE8 standards mode; IE8 as every browser comes with two basic rendering modes: quirks and standards. In addition, IE8 provides a special mode called “IE8 standards mode” which is the only mode that successfully passes the famous test. The fun part is that “IE8 standards mode” is not enabled by default and it’s up to the web developer to enable it by placing a new opt-in flag in the head tag.

I admit that I don’t like the way IE8 works. I understand that it is partially necessary to provide support for websites that were built especially for IE6. On the other hand, the lack of such support would force the web developers to update such websites in order to work under “IE8 standards mode” and hopefully under any standards compliant browser!

To conclude, IE8 provides a standards compliant mode which successfully passes the Acid2 Face test but in the meantime encourages old websites to keep and maintain their IE6-only code! Someone could fairly argue that this is just another move from Microsoft in order to keep their browser share.

A lot of things happened during the last three months. Once again, I abandoned an open source application which meant a lot to me but I still hesitate to call it a “dead project”. Of course, as the end of everything in this life triggers something new, a new project is around the block and about to be published but this will be analyzed in a dedicated post.

Oh, and as you may know, I finally switched my hosting provider leaving dreamhost after two years of love and hate.

Let me take this opportunity to wish everyone “Happy New Year”!

Att: I’m Chan from Hong Kong, I have a business proposal for you, should you be interested kindly contact me for further details partickwchank@yahoo.com.hk

Regards

Anyway, back to work

Update: I keep getting these annoying messages from several persons around the world that have an interesting business proposals for me I may change my cellphone number.

In fact, some ATMs provide your money first and then your credit card which I find very wrong! Why? Let’s assume the following scenario: it’s night, I need urgently one hundred pounds — I drive to the nearest ATM, insert my credit card, then my pin number and eventually get my money. Since my mission (to get some money) is accomplished, I return back to my car fully satisfied that my wallet is full again. Meanwhile, ATM ejects my credit card making the day for the next customer. The chances are I will not notice that my credit card is missing until the next time I will need it. Too late, don’t you think?

Things are getting even worse when someone takes into consideration that until few weeks ago, ATMs were ejecting your credit card first. It goes without saying that the action of receiving the money has been associated as the last action of the transaction by many people, making the process even more error-prone.

I don’t know what led to these changes but my guess is a bad updating process. I expect that the corresponding support centers will accept a large number of incoming calls regarding missing cards. Hopefully, after a lot of complaints the original operational mechanism will be restored.

A few days ago iacons.net and wordpress.gr was featured on showcase.gr as well, a CSS gallery dedicated to creations by Greek designers and developers. In fact, wordpress.gr jumped straight to the first place — I am sorry Marios, I did not plan this to happen

Of course, all these features are of great importance to me and I would like to thank everyone who helped in any way to promote my work.

I will miss…

• doing almost everything online and especially all the great services such as amazon.co.uk
• the “Next day - Guaranteed delivery” option
• the great transportation media

I will not miss…

• the rainy days and the hopeless hope for a shiny day
• the afternoon tea

Well, that’s all! I was struggling to think of some more but that wasn’t possible. They said that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone so probably I will extend the list when I will be back to Cyprus.

It is well known that cross domain AJAX requests (XMLHTTPRequest) are not permitted due to security reasons. Numerous workarounds exist such as cross domain JSON and Flash but some of them are not suitable for every single case. For instance, cross domain JSON assumes that remote server is able not only to serve JSON but to include a call to the specified function (the callback function) as well. On the other hand, Flash method assumes that… well, that Flash is enabled!

An interesting approach is presented by Cameron Adams in his great article Go forth and API. Cameron suggests to take advantage of mod_rewrite or mod_proxy module in Apache in order to redirect our calls in external domains; a simple but ingenious solution! However, the most common solution is the application proxy which is accompanied by some advantages outlined perfectly well by Jonathan Snook:

[…] you have more control over the entire lifecycle. You can parse the data from the remote server, do with it what you will before sending it back to the client. If anything fails along the way, you can handle it in your own way. And lastly, you can log all remote calls. With that you can track success, failure and popularity.

Cross Domain Ajax: a Quick Summary

Lately, I have developed an application proxy in PHP which I decided to publish. You can have a look at the demo and of course download it.

How it works? All you have to do is to place the corresponding file in your web server. Whenever you want to make a cross domain request, just make a request to http://www.yourdomain.com/ajax-proxy.php and specify the cross domain URL in parameter csurl. Obviously, you can add more parameters according to your needs; note that the rest of the parameters will be used for the cross domain request. For example, if you are using jQuery:

[The requested file could not be found]

It’s worth mentioning that both POST and GET methods work, while headers were taken into consideration. That is to say, headers sent from browser to proxy are used for the cross domain request and vice versa. Finally, for security reasons you will need to define all the valid requests into the ajax-proxy.php file:

[The requested file could not be found]

Please note that the script is released under a CC-GNU GPL.

In brief, this version aims to make things much easier for you guys since it is no longer required to edit your theme files. The dates are converted automatically into links unless you are using an old version of WordPress like 1.5.x. If you are already using an older version of the plugin you can easily and safely upgrade to this one. Please note, that there is no need to re-edit your theme files; the plugin supports the old-school functions clickable_date and clickable_time.

Thank you all for using and supporting this plugin. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment for suggestions or questions.