I have discovered the one thing that SP1 RC1 has done to my computer… it has made Mozilla Firefox crash about 3 times as often… Sounds like a “Integrated Vista Security Feature”… since we all know that non-Microsoft products are all viruses…

Merry Christmas to all!

Blog Rush is a new service designed to help bloggers generate traffic through referrals. The Blog Rush widget is displayed on your blog, where it displays links to 5 other topic related blogs. The benefit to this, is that those other sites are displaying the same widget, which may link to yours. This site has received nearly a third of its traffic through Blog Rush referrals. Traffic and status of your Blog Rush account are easy to use and easy to track, and provide some pretty useful and detailed data as to which of your posts are attention grabbers, and which are duds. You have the ability to include and exclude specific posts from your syndication feed, certain categories, and even any posts containing a certain word. If you often include rants in your blog, you can label those posts “off-topic:” and have all of them excluded.

All in all, its a very innovative new idea that has worked well for this blogger. Sign up here: http://www.blogrush.com/r15660109

CSS. Cascading Style Sheets. Why are they named that?

This is a tutorial on how the cascading part of CSS works, and how to work with multiple classes.

The main thing to remember is the basic trump rule. Any newly defined properties overwrite any previously defined properties. Example:

p {color:red;}
p {color:blue;}

Having these two statements in a stylesheet will ultimately result in the <p> tag with blue text. Remembering this basic principle of “overwriting” will keep you on the right track. Here’s a real world example of this:

CSS:

.class1{ font-size:12px; color:#00ccff; font-weight:bold }

.class2{ color:#800080; text-decoration:underline }

HTML:
 <span class = "class1">Something like this would be good to <span class = "class2">emphasize</span>
importance in a sentence</span>

And heres how it looks: Something like this would be good to emphasize importance in a sentence

Not the prettiest looking thing in the world, but it gets the point across. The font size and the font weight remains constant. The color is overwritten when the “class2″ tag is implemented, and the new underline property is added as well.

Now an example of using multiple classes in a single tag. For simplicity, I’ll use the same tags.

HTML:

<p> This time, we are using a standard font, and instead want to emphasize
<span style = "class1 class2">this point</span> and <span style = "class2 class1">
this point</span> as well.</p>

Here’s how it looks: This time, we are using a standard font, and instead want to emphasize this point and this point as well.

Notice the difference, and remember the basic trump rule. The only similar property in both classes is the color, so whichever is the last listed is the one that will be shown.

There are some advanced tags and rules that can modify the basic trump rule, and I will post on those tomorrow.

Here’s the first gorgeous shot of an Google Android prototype in the wild. It looks HTC-ish in build, similar to the grainy versions we’ve seen in the official videos and the renderings in the SDK emulator. Our source, a Giz reader, had some feedback to add to the prototype, which he used for a day: Even in early form, it’s light and fast, much faster than the desktop emulator at times. And as a longtime programmer, he thinks it’s a lot more put together than Window Mobile 5 on the back side of things. It’s a prototype, so things will obviously change, but these are all great signs. I just pray that hardware by other makers is a lot more adventurous. In my mind, those HTC designs remind me a little too much of WM and will for a long time. [Thanks Tipster X]

So, the release candidate of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has been publicly available. I’ve been waiting for this since about April when I first installed Vista on my machine. There hasn’t been anything wrong with my machine, I was just giddy at the idea of an even faster, more reliable version of the Windows that I actually like using.

It’s been running SP1 for a few days now, and my computer doesn’t seem any different. At all. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I have installed service packs in the past that completely destroyed the computer. My installation of Windows Server 2003 is still shaky to this day. Having a machine just… work… after installing the service pack is always refreshing.

Maybe it is more stable. I can’t remember the last time I crashed. I can’t remember the last time a program froze up (except Firefox) and I had to manually close it. I certainly can’t remember the last time I had to CTRL-ALT-DELETE it.

Long story short… I have absolutly nothing positive or negative to say about SP1 RC1. As far as I’m concerned, my PC is running great… but it was before, too. But, according to Windows, its in there.