At work we are struggling with how to make pages more accessible to users with impaired vision, particularly senior citizens who may find the text too small on the page. Coding a fluid layout is the proper solution but more often than not, no matter how fluid you design the layout there is always potential for elements to fall apart. Top navigation bars are a great example.

Now there is this really, really, really great and easy way to solve a lot of these issues and retain layout, and that is through the browser’s zoom page feature. In all the browsers that I have used zooming the page in and out using ctrl – + or ctrl – - works like a charm. The only problem is that most of the people who would benefit from this probably are unaware of this feature.

So what seems like a perfect solution would be able to make these controls more accessible to the user, have them on the page where they would most likely benefit. A simple + and – for zooming the page, controlled through javascript. Sounds great, right? Well you can do this with IE but not Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Their reasoning is sound though, as they do not want to allow access to the users personal settings via javascript controls. Doing so opens the door to potentially serious abuse where designers are deciding for users how their browsers should be set. I agree whole heartedly with this but damn, it would be a fantastic feature to have full page zoom controls right there on the page.

So now we are back to having to figure out through css how we can control the sizes of the elements on the page in a manner that does not break the layout.

Any thoughts, suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Dave Yates had brought up on TLLTS and then later on LottaLinuxLinks Oggcast the possibility of Microsoft buying Novell now that the latter company is up for sale. He felt, and these are my own words revisiting his, that this would place Microsoft in an interesting position to own the Unix Copyrights and to have their own Linux distrobution. Then he wondered what the downsides for Microsoft might be; and so do I.

Then a thought occurred to me. If Microsoft did purchas Novell and then continue to distribute SuSE would that not invalidate their patent claims against other companies for using/selling GNU/Linux? Wouldn’t the GPL prevent them from distibuting SuSE while they hold patent suits against other companies for the same GPL’s software? I know more previsions were put in regarding this for version 3, but I wonder if even version 2 would uphold their inability to not file patent suite against companies using Linux and force an end to their FUD.

If that is the case, I don’t see how Microsoft would benefit from buying Novell unless they shut SuSE down and flex the Unix Copyrights. But then again, if they did this, I suspect there would be a lot of pressure on them from the likes of Google and IBM. While they may continue to have a strangle hold on the desktop market, I think there is a switch coming to more mobile devices like smartphones and tablets that will eventually topple the Microsoft Monopoly on computing devices and render their flexing of FUD less effectual.

Just some thoughts.

No, not Peter64, but our wonderful, fun loving rabbit Peter died last night. It was a sad evening, that it was. The girls and I buried him around 6:30 p.m. Paige was completely heart broken. I never thought a rabbit would be so fun and interesting as a pet. Godspeed Peter and enjoy your times in the fields of the afterlife!

This past weekend I saw two excellent movies. First up was Iron Man 2. The whole family went to see this. As a primer I had the kids watch Iron Man the week before and man were they loving it. Avery was pumped and cheering all throughout the first one. Page gave the sequel two thumbs up. It was a blast. It’s great seeing some of my favorite characters from comics on the big screen.

Nick Fury had more of a screen presence this time, not relegated to the post-credits clip. Speaking of that, make sure you stick around for the surprise clip to see the next big event. It’s probably no secret if you are a Marvel fan but it is cool as all get out. I cannot wait.

Yesterday I took in the 5:04 showing of Kickass by my lonesome. I don’t like going to the movies by myself but I wanted to make sure I voted for this movie by my dollars. I loved the comic and the movie was a very true adaption. I highly recommend this but not for the kids. It is extremely violent; you’ve been forwarned.

Next up I hope to get in Nightmare on Elm Street before it leaves the theaters.

“I see no harm in tinkering with ideas as I do objects, if only to better understand why I don’t believe what I don’t believe.” Mutty P. Dumphy to Alyss Heart in ArchEnemy, book 3 of the Looking Glass Wars trilogy by Frank Beddor.

Tonight the wife and I watched the latest episode of Modern Family (on the Mythbox of course) a show we both love. After 30 minutes we were both disappointed with the fact that it was essentially 30 minutes of iPad product placement. The story: It was Phil’s birthday and simultaneously the release day for the iPad. He was going to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and get in line for his iPad. As a present his wife says he can sleep in and she’ll get in line but she ends up falling asleep on the couch and not getting out of the house until late. So the whole episode is them trying to find an iPad for him while he bemoans how his birthday is ruined. Well at the risk of spoiling this episode for anyone they manage to get one and all is well with the world. What a piece of crap. To take a great show and reduce it to nothing more than a commercial is piss poor in my opinion. Boo Modern Family and boo Apple.

So last night I figured it was time to give Arch a spin on the Meso. Next to Slackware I have a real soft spot for Arch. It’s a great distrobution with fantastic documentation and a wonderful community. So, I downloaded the core install iso and slapped it on the flash card using unetbootin and no dice. No matter what I tried it would not find /dev/archiso. I read some posting, tried some things and then said to hell with unetbootin and pulled down the core img and dd’ed that to the flash. The install was up lickity spit and about 20 minutes later I was booting into a beautiful console. So I finished up with upgrading and installing wicd to do the rest today at work.

Needless to say I have a fully functional system again in short order. Arch is just fantastic and I look forward to running with it for a long while.

Well I was ecstatic to find out on Friday that the Netflix streaming service to the Wii was live and that I was getting my Wii disc on Saturday. As expected, it arrived in the mail mid-afternoon and we promptly popped the disc in. It was a simple matter of entering a code provided on the screen into a form on the Netflix website and we were browsing the instant queue, along with all the other stream-able movies. Eager to try this out we settled on the Never Ending Story.

The movie started just fine after a 15 second load and played great for about 15 minutes when it stopped. Hmmm… I thought, bandwidth issues? I hit play again via the Wii Mote and it continued on. About three minutes later, same thing only this time it would not accept my Wii-mote input. We waited, and waited and waited and then I figured, what the heck? Maybe it was the wireless router. So I checked all the inputs and kicked it. A few seconds later it started up again. Odd I thought, my phone connected phone. Then it did it again a third time and no amount of fiddling would fix it. Well, I thought for a second that maybe I needed to get the primary Wii-Mote as this one was coming up third. So I set for a frantic search for the primary Wii-mote and where do I found it? Between the couch cushions with Paige leaning on it activating it and pausing the movie. There was no problem with the streaming service at all!

We watched the Red Balloon Saturday night and throughout the day Sunday the kids were watching movies. So, of course, we give the Wii Netflix streaming service 2 thumbs up.

Paige has a science project due this week and she chose to do Mars and it’s two moon Phobos and Deimos. Well she is painting up some Styrofoam balls as models of the heavenly bodies and questioned me as to whether Mars was looking proper. So I figured, I could pull up pictures of Mars on a browser up on the MythTv box or better yet, I could pull down Celestia and have a nice OpenGL representation of the galaxy. I chose the later and man, not more than 3 minutes later we were golden. There was a beautiful rendering of Mars complete with craters and ice caps. The moons were fully detailed allowing for Paige to even shape the balls into more accurate representation. Once again, MythTV FTW!

If you have never checked out Celestia, I highly recommend you do so. The models are beautiful and you can do nifty things like follow planet or moon orbits, create journeys where you can fly around to the different planets and moons, see galaxies and constellations and watch comets zoom by. You can even drop down to any planet or moon and view the heavens from that vantage point. Really awesome stuff.

When I got home from work and finished my workout the daughters gave me wonderful cards for my birthday. On top of that, Paige did her first scratch project for me: Paige’s First Project. Now what more could a geek father want? Awesome stuff for her first go around. I am so proud of her.

On a different note, a warning to all Fathers out there, be careful on what you let your kids do or you will wind up like this. Now it will be even harder for me to go a running.