Video has arrived – If you’re brave! - This is what we’ve been waiting for. We should now be able to do Mac-PC video chats via Skype.

Yesterday, I encountered first-hand an nerve-wrecking issue that has plagued a fellow worker’s PC. Everytime he loaded a page from the CCE LTER website, the browser would slowly redraw the entire background before displaying the rest of the page.

This occured on a rather fast machine, and only with Internet Explorer 6. Firefox on this machine worked fine. Other PCs worked fine (with both browsers). Macs worked fine (with Safari and Firefox). This issue seemed to be isolated to this one particular machine.

To work-around this issue, I resized the repeating background image from 1×4 px dimension to a 50×200 px dimension. This greatly reduces the amount of processing the browser does in drawing the repeating background image (by a factor of 2500 times) while very slightly increasing the image file size. This seemed to “fix” the slow redrawing issue.

Inspiration for this idea came from here: Tiny gifs: not a good idea.

Some important notes:
- I never technically fixed anything. I still have no idea why IE 6 on this machine rendered the page poorly, while other machines (some slower and older) showed no problems at all.
- I additionally noticed that IE6 on this particular machine rendered images very poorly. Jpegs appeared pixelated, etc. Firefox rendered images fine, as well as IE6 on other PCs (in our lab).
- It was important to see and experience the problem first-hand. Otherwise it would have been virtually impossible to diagnose the issue and find a solution or work-around. In other words, for this particular issue, it was extremely helpful to see the problem on this user’s PC.
- I made the same changes for the Palmer LTER website and also this site, both which employ the same design pattern of a repeating tiled-background.
- The Yahoo! User Interface Blog uses a 1px repeating background. Check it out and see how fast (or slow) your browser draws the background…. especially if you’re running IE6/Win.

Firefox cannot natively open PDFs, and the Adobe plugin doesn’t work in Forefox under OS X. Schubert IT has created a PDF Browser Plugin that I’ve found to be very useful. Just download the disk image, mount it, and move the PDF Browser Plugin file to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins (or ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins to install this only for your account). You should note that installing this plugin will cause it to be used by some other browsers, including Safari and Opera. Acrobat and Quicktime can override this behavior - details are in the Read Me file on the PDF Browser Plugin disk image.

Due to the persistence of comment spam and at the requests of individuals, all email notifications involving new posts and comments have been disabled. To keep on track with the blog, I highly recommend subscribing via an RSS reader. I like using NetNewsWire on the mac. Mac users may also use Safari’s built-in rss reader. For the Firefox users, I’m sure there are tons of rss plugins available in addition to the Live Bookmarks feature.

We will continue to combat the spam on this blog (a great deal of it is filtered immediately by the blacklist words). Apologies for the email noise over the last few days.
–Shaun

UPDATE:
Additionally, I’ve disabled open registration and anonymous comments. At this point, we can manually add new users as they come along, and users need to log in to leave a comment.

Sorry for the facist-like policy. I’m ideally for open registration and anonymous comments because this lets the casual passer-byer leave his/her two cents. Unfortunately, the amount of spam greatly outweighed the amount of meaningful passer-by comments, so it’s best to shut all doors completely.