netwalker.nl

exploring the web and random thoughts

Strange mouse over effect on almere.nl

When I just visited a page on the site of my home town, I came across a strange and annoying mouse over bug. When crossing links they change background color and remain dark blue, which makes it kind of hard to read the text.
almere.nl mouse over bug

I expected some Internet Explorer only code and had a look at the messy source code of the page. What I found was even better and something I have not seen before.

<td height=’14′
onMouseOver=this.bgColor=’#F2E8E7′
onMouseOver=this.style.cursor=’hand’

onMouseOut=this.bgColor=’transparent’>
<a xhref=’smartsite.dws?id=3911′
class=’sitemap’>
Afvalbeleid</a></td>

How is a web-browser supposed to know what to do? Actually in the content part of the page you will hardly see any double-quotes enclosing HTML tag attributes. I guess their content management system, which is Smartsite from a Dutch company called Seneca Web Development can’t handle it. Needles to say, that you can achieve the same mouse over effect with a few lines of CSS code without any java-script. The w3c html validator reports in total 2019 errors just for this page.

 

MacInTouch Apple laptop survey results

The MacInTouch survey spanned every laptop capable of running Mac OS X, encompassing 41 models sold over seven and a half years. More than 10.000 readers reported their experience along with thousands of comments. Their detailed results show, that the first revisions of new Apple laptops have a significant higher failure rate.

By contrast, 17″ and 15″ Aluminum PowerBooks, PowerBook G3, and iBook G4 12″ models all appear to have become more reliable as new versions were introduced. This may indicate that Apple engineers were able to learn from early problems and fix them.

This is also our own experience. Our fist Apple notebook was a white 500Mhz G3 iBook from 2001. Just after warranty had expired the hinge problem started, which means, that the display turns black at a certain angle. This is a common problem with the internal video cables. I hardly know any iBook user who does not have this failure or the defective motherboard. The 1.25Ghz 15″ PowerBook suffers from the latch problem – it often doesn’t stay latched. I tried some of the repair tips but it only helped a bit. I am writing this article on a 10/2005 1.67Ghz 17″ PowerBook and until know did not have any problems. Some early AirPort connectivity problems where solved by a software update. So I cross my fingers and hope, that the results of the survey are correct and that this PowerBook will be as reliable as one would expect for the price they cost.

All of this is also the reason why I don’t really care much about the recent MacWorld 2006 rumors about new Macs with Intel processors. We all know that Apple will introduce new hardware with Intel processors in 2006 but I would and will wait at least until 2007 before buying any of those.

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Atari = Akai?

When I read about the new Atari® Flashback™ 2 Classic Game Console I tried to find it here in the Netherlands. Since Atari Benelux doesn’t even know about it yet I tried some of the larger retailers. Mailorder company Neckermann had an surprising search result and obviously thinks, that a customer looking for Atari might be interested in Akai products as well. Click on the thumbnail to see the screenshot. Is this a bug or a feature but since Akai does not even make games or game consoles I would call it a bug.
Neckermann search results

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