sugarenia.com

You know it’s that time of the year.

The time when I’m getting the November blues, or I’m getting too stressed, or I’m on PMS or whatever. The “Why Greek sites suck” saga is here.

Since I was recently on the market for a used car, I turned to the one medium that feels easier to me, which is of course the mighty interwebs. The Boyfriend suggested that I should check out the Autotriti.gr site, that is a site of greek driving magazine, that supposedly features a full-scale gallery of used cars, along with a convenient search form.

And so I did - mind you, I only wanted to check prices according to the criteria I had set.

First of all, in my teeny tiny (well, not THAT much) 13” Macbook screen, truth is, you really cannot see much in their frontpage, apart maybe huge ugly ads and pointless ugly imagery.

Wow. Just… wow.

Hovering the menu items hides its text in Safari - classy.

The almighty menu hover - never to work under Safari.

So I decide to conduct an advanced research, woe is me. But wait - my page has gone all the way to the right (from all the way to the left, plus, half of my page is conquered by an ugly ad which I cannot turn off, with sound which is default on to top it off.

Why is my page all crammed to the right?!

As you can see, to see the content I have to scroll horizontally. What were these people thinking, really (apart from the advertising money).

Ok then, to the search. You think this form looks too simple? Wait till you see that:

My search results, 3464 clicks and 45433 pages later.

You know how I did that? By selecting an option one page at a time. That means, in the first page, I select the brand, phoosh, refresh, I have to select a model, phoosh, refresh, I have to select the cc, et cetera. Really, you have to try it to believe it. And of course, restarting the search procedure does not work.

On a geekier note, each and every one of the search terms is passed in the query string as a GET variable. That means over 20 vars up there, after a while. *sigh*

I don’t know how these sites have users. I cannot possibly understand how. Am I too strict? Maybe. Will I ever be close to the naive user webmaster? Never.

All in all, I’m happy with Leopard. It has a legion of small fixes over Tiger that really made my life easier, not to mention Quick Look, Stacks and Time Machine.

But I found a bug the other day.

Sometimes, when my Macbook is working off the battery, it goes to sleep and never wakes up.

I wiggle the mouse, press the spacebar repeatedly, nothing. I have to restart manually to get rid of the bright black screen of death. I admit I was never patient enough to see if it will wake up eventually, so I just force restart after a minute or so.

By searching around, I stumbled upon an Apple support thread with posts that described the same problem. It seems to plague laptops which are working off the battery, with some Logitech mouse plugged in it. Weird.

I’m sure a fix will be released soon though. Thank God it’s not a bug that prevents me from using my Macbook, the only machine I work on nowadays, apart from my work PC.

Do you have the same problem? Or any Leopard problem anyway?

leopard, macos, bug, sleep, logitech

Want to change the way the Stacks icon behaves?

That is, always changing depending on the newest file you drop in the stacked folder… It quickly becomes a mess and most of the times you have to actually hover the folders to see what’s what.

Check out this clever tip from XD.

Stacks on my Dock

It’s a simple idea: it uses some nice semi-transparent icons, touching them to change the modified date to somewhere around 2010 (hopefully Apple will release a Stacks fix till then) and placing them in your stack folders, where they will always be on top.

It has its flaws (namely, if you have an Inbox folder like me, it’ll never be empty, unless you make the icon a hidden file) but the icons are pretty and it’s worth a try.

I already use this trick and anxiously wait for more varieties of icons to emerge.

P.S. You can also check a top-5 list of some cool looking docks there. Neat!

leopard, apple, macos, stacks

Arktyp.ca is an awesome design, heavily based on grids, using geometry and some pretty gradients (based on blue-green and coffee brown, a popular choice these days).

I especially like the pretty font used in the logo and headers.

So! It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it? (and no, I don’t mean Halloween)

Last week I was informed (?) by my hosting provider that tada! all hosting accounts have to be closed. Like, CLOSED. I knew they had problems, security leaks and hack attacks and God knows what else, but shutting down our accounts completely? And informing us only in the morning of the same day? That’s absurd! What’s more, I had paid my Paypal invoice during the last night. Sometimes I kick myself for being so timely.

What’s more is that I can’t see any way of pausing / cancelling my subscription in my Control Panel, so I had to open a ticket just to ask how I could get the hell out! Needless to say, they still haven’t answered.

Thank God I had bought a 3-month hosting package at Lunarpages.com, meant to be used as a sandbox initially. It’s not the most perfect of providers, kinda too slow, but gives everything and then some in terms of and they have decent support.

So all my weekend was spent on moving blogs and finally completing the restore procedure from my LaCie to my shiny new Leopard machine. Which kicks camel’s ass, by the way, the only stable thing in my tech life during the last week.

lunarpages, spoonohost