Ubuntu 9.10 has recently been released and if you haven’t tried it yet, go check it out. However, you may be one of the people who has upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10. Everything worked fine, except the wireless Broadcom network card in your machine just doesn’t auto-start anymore.

A fix would be to access System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers. Here, you can remove and the re-activate the proprietary Broadcom STA driver to make your wireless network card work in Ubuntu 9.10. The downfall is that you’d have to perform this task on each startup.

But in order to permanently make it work, you must access System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. Then you reload the list and search for:

bcmwl-kernel-source

Now, right-click on the package name and choose “Mark for Reinstallation”. Then press the big, green “Apply” button, wait till it’s done, restart, and you’re good to go!

Yesterday, I stumbled across The Netscape Archive containing some of the classic versions of the good old Netscape Navigator – how cool of them to keep those versions lying around! You guys remember the 4.79 version with the recurring “Document: Done” status message at the bottom of the browser? Oh, but those were the days. Here’s a couple of screenshots to relive the beginning of it all:

Our Meeho!™ Blog shown in Netscape Navigator 4.79.

google.com looks kind of odd in NN 4.79.

So what happened to Netscape Navigator? Well, put shortly, it lost the competition to the – back then – rising star Internet Explorer. Funny thing is, version 4.79 is from 2001, which is also the release year of Internet Explorer 6, the most broken and randomly acting browser to have ever annoyed millions and millions of web developers world-wide. While Netscape Navigator phased out pretty quickly, Internet Explorer 6 is still out there… It makes you wonder, huh?

Working with the iCalendar format using Ruby on Rails brings many possibilities of quickly getting data generated by using gems such as iCalendar. However, the gem seems not to handle the ORGANIZER attribute in a proper way. What it does is the following:

ORGANIZER:Kasper Tidemann

… which will make the ORGANIZER info not show in iCal. However, it will work if you remove the spaces in the attribute’s value, that is, it will work if you do the following:

ORGANIZER:KasperTidemann

… but while it may work, it’s not really what we want. The organizer’s name is not “KasperTidemann” to be exact, but “Kasper Tidemann”. Now, while this post deals with fixing the use of the iCalendar gem to make the organizer tag show properly in iCal, the following principle is general and should always be followed.

To make iCal show you the name of the organizer plus the person’s e-mail address, what you need is for the ORGANIZER attribute to look like this:

ORGANIZER;CN=Kasper Tidemann:mailto:kt@meeho.dk

This way, it will show up in iCal like this:

Screenshot of iCal showing the organizer info. Please do not mind the Danish attribute names.

I have written the maintenance guys of the gem, but they haven’t replied me yet. Until then, you can either modify the gem yourself or use the custom_property method they’ve supplied the gem with:

event.custom_property("ORGANIZER;CN=Kasper Tidemann:mailto", "kt@meeho.dk")

It’s kind of not the way you would use the method, since you’re really supposed to simply type in an attribute name as the first parameter and the attribute value as the second, but hey, the above works and will help you out until the gem itself is fixed.

Are you stuck trying to figure out why your div is not shown above a Flash element embedded in your HTML page? Do you test your HTML code in Internet Explorer 8 and do you use swfObject?

If your answer is yes to both questions then fear not: the solution is quite simple. Open up your swfobject.js file and have a look at the lines 29-32. They look something like this:

var q = quality ? quality : 'high';
this.addParam('quality', q);
this.setAttribute('useExpressInstall', false);
this.setAttribute('doExpressInstall', false);

All you need to do in order to make your div show above a Flash element is to add the wmode parameter to the swfobject.js file. The line you need to add looks like this: this.addParam(‘wmode’, ‘transparent’);. Now, add it after the quality params line and you get something like this:

var q = quality ? quality : 'high';
this.addParam('quality', q);
this.addParam('wmode', 'transparent');
this.setAttribute('useExpressInstall', false);
this.setAttribute('doExpressInstall', false);

… Refresh your browser using the slightly modified version of swfobject.js and you’ll see your div hovering proudly above the Flash element just as you would expect.