The other side of the moon

So what exactly needs to happen when you set overflow:hidden on a container element? At which pixel point do the element's contents get hidden? Is it at the padding, the inside of the border, the outside of the border, the outline or somewhere else?

The spec sort of states that it's at the border or padding (depending on background-clip):

Other effects that clip to the border or padding edge (such as ‘overflow’ other than ‘visible’) also must clip to the curve.

With that in mind, I decided to throw rounded corners into the fray and have some fun:

Caveat: Opera is broken.

Anyone wanna try a deathstar?

There are various reasons why one might need to spoof ones MAC address. For example, your ISP may have bound your connection to your MAC address, and then you had to change your network card because the old one was fried by a lightning strike (this actually happened to me). Another reason is privacy. You may want to change your MAC address if you're surfing the net from a coffee shop with free wifi to make sure no one sniffing the network can identify you. Whatever the reason, the actual commands to (temporarily) change your MAC address are quite straightforward.

Note that these commands work on Linux, FreeBSD and MacOSX (at least versions greater than 10.5).

Before you do anything, make sure the port is up:

sudo ifconfig <iface> up

Where iface is the network interface. This should be something like en0 for the ethernet port on MacOSX, or eth0 for a linux box, etc. If you're not sure, just run the ifconfig command without any arguments... although if you're not sure, you probably shouldn't be doing this anyway ;)

Now, once your interface is up, you can change its MAC address. This only lasts until the next reboot, but given that I almost never shutdown my laptop, it's as good as permanent.

For the ethernet port:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether <new MAC address>

This works even if you're currently connected to a network.

For the wireless card, first disconnect from any wireless networks. I've found that the easiest way to do this is to try to connect to a network that doesn't exist. From your Airport icon in the menu bar, choose "Join Other Network", and type in some random string. Note that you don't need to do this if your airport doesn't automatically connect to a wireless network.

Once you've disconnected, just run the command as above, but for the en1 interface:

sudo ifconfig en1 ether <new MAC address>

You can now reconnect to any wireless network.

Note that even though this is temporary, I do have it set up to be more or less permanent on Ubuntu through my network startup scripts. I'll publish them some other time.

I got an HTC Freestyle from AT&T today. It was free, so I can't complain about the price, however it's a bit of a downgrade from my E71. First, what I like about it.

It has a decently sized touchscreen, and the Twitter+Facebook app is pretty decent. The browser is WebKit based and handles CSS @media queries correctly. It even switches correctly when you rotate, which the iPhone gets wrong.

On the downside though, rotating from portrait to landscape is not automatic. You need two clicks to tell the browser that you've rotated. No accelerometer in this phone. Which brings us to the things I don't like about it.

No GMail and GMaps apps for it. Since the primary reason I went in for a smartphone was to check my email and use the GPS while I'm on the road, this makes the phone a complete non-starter. The sales rep at AT&T told me that it was an Android device, but once I got it home and looked it up, it turns out that that isn't true. It runs something called Brew MP.

Transferring contacts from my older phone is clumsy, but doable. The main problem here is that I need to use the SIM card to transfer contacts and it just doesn't have enough space for all my contacts.

I could set my ringtone on the E71 to any mp3 file that I had access to. On the HTC Freestyle, it's limited to files under 300KB. Seriously. Kilobytes. What is this? The 80's? My current ring tone on my 3 year old Nokia is 6.4MB.

After using the real keyboard on the E71, the onscreen keyboard on this device is extremely clumsy to use. I've made mistakes on every occasion that I've needed to use the keyboard. I even make mistakes trying to hit the backspace key. I guess I'll get used to this eventually, however one thing to note is that the E71 does far more with just one key than this phone can do with its keyboard. The main problem is the number of times your hands/fingers need to move in order to type or even to just select menu items.

No wifi. 'Nuff said.

Ok, so that's it for the "Smart" part of the phone. Now to the phone part.

I tried to make a call when I got out of the AT&T store. The call dropped after 3 seconds. Remember, this is right outside the AT&T store. All the phones inside the store had decent signal strength. I thought it may have been due to the battery having almost no charge (since it was a new phone), so took it home and charged it up, but it hasn't changed. On 8 out of 9 calls that I've made so far I've been unable to hear what the other party says though they can hear me.

Switching on the speakerphone requires two clicks after the call connects. On the E71 it was one click while the phone was ringing. This makes a big difference because the person at the other end has no idea what's happening while you're switching on the speakerphone. It also makes it impossible to answer the phone in speaker mode while driving.

The speakerphone sound quality is also pretty bad. It's not clear when soft, and starts jarring when loud. There doesn't seem to be an optimum volume setting for it.

All in all, this is not a phone I'd pay for.

Internet Explorer 8 has a "useful" feature where it tries to detect if a page is under an XSS attack. If it thinks it has detected an attack, it will disable the malicious code and warn the user about it. Sound good on the surface of it, except that it's often wrong, often with ads. In most cases with security issues, it's better to err on the side of caution, but what happens here is that IE ends up warning your users about non-existent security issues on your site. Users lose trust in your site and everyone loses.

If you already take proactive steps to protect your users from XSS attacks, you SHOULD disable the check and warning. To do this, add the following HTTP header to all your responses:

X-XSS-Protection: 0

How you do that depends on the server you're using. For apache, you'd add this to one of your apache conf files:

Header add X-XSS-Protection 0

TTYL