Socials

Fuck the December Twitter "Promotion of alternative social platforms policy" update. Socials links are here now.

SVG Image xlink:href linking

I noticed some other thing while working on my SVG map page. When you have an image in your SVG content (using xlink:href), control-clicking on that image actually opens the image in a new tab. Sure, the element has a href attribute. But it's only partially acting as a link. Since clicking normally on the image doesn't do anything, as it should in both cases. Anyway, here's a test case.

SVG Mouse Out Event missing

Still related to my SVG map page, I encountered another issue in Firefox (3.6.7 and 4.0b2pre) and Chrome (5.0.375.99). Somehow a mouseOut event is not always fired when the mouse if moved quickly over multiple svg:use elements (and the xlink:href is changed during the mouse events to show hover state - yes this could be done by pure CSS, but there's a reason not to). See the test case.

25 July 2010 - I just want to revisit this for one moment. I did file a bug report for this in Mozilla's Bugzilla. And I guess it's not really a bug. In an answer on my bug report Robert Longson explained that the changing of the href happens asynchronously. And if you happen to move the mouse out of the SVG element's area in that short moment, no mouseout event will be fired because there is no element dimensions to base that on. In Opera you always get the mouseout event though. So I guess there the linking of objects happens quicker/synchronous. Then the question remains which is the more correct way to do this.

SVG mouse event issues

I've been working on a webpage using a combination of XHTML and SVG. Everything seemed to go ok until I encountered a problem. Because some objects are used a lot, I'm using svg:defs to define the objects and reference them with svg:use to show the actual objects. That causes a problem when you want to highlight the individual objects on mouse-over. If the color is defined inside the svg:defs you cannot override it on the svg:use.

Though you can use CSS :hover on the svg:defs elements, I'd rather add some extra object definitions and then switch the used definition on the svg:use element based on mouse events. That switching of definitions causes different issues on the 3 major browsers though. I've created a special test case(oops, I deleted some test cases) to show the problems and a workaround.

Campzone 2010

For the past too many years I've spent my summer vacation camping... taking my computer gear, together with friends, gaming, BBQing, drinking beer, ie. having fun. And this year we do that for the 10th year at Campzone. 10-11 days long, in a field not too far away from a city in the Netherlands. Power from 4 diesel generators. A 10 gbit ring backbone ring&star network connecting the 6 fields. This year a 500mbit full duplex internet connection is sponsored by ISP Ziggo (for up to around 1000 people).

A little bit of history. In 1998 a group of friends organised WAN (We Are Networking) in the north of the Netherlands for a few dozen people. I joined them the next year with my brother and a few friends, borrowing the caravan of our parents. This took place in a small forest camping, with no showers (closeby swimming pool though), 1 toilet, BNC(!) network and around a 100 people. The atmosphere was great. So we came back for WAN null in 2000. The year after that the group of friends were all too busy, so a new organisation stepped in and Campzone was born in 2001. The first couple of years they organised the event on one field of the event terrain near Six Flags Holland, Biddinghuizen. Everything was organised a bit more and a lot more people took part in the event. It lost a bit of the cosy feeling of WAN. But it brought a lot more. The one year it was very sunny, another year it was quite rainy, with one evening the power grid and network being disconnected because there was quite the heavy lightning storm passing by (my brother and me were driving back to the field at night, back from a birthday party and we saw lightning strike all around).

This year Campzone will be organised from July 30th (00:01) till August 9th (afternoon), near Einhoven/Oirschot, Netherlands, for the, euhm, 4th year and the 10th episode of Campzone overall. On a field without any services: Power is still coming from generators, water comes from a firehose connection and sewage goes into a large bag (used by farmers to store manure). The first year on this new terrain we had some bad luck, but overall the new terrain has been nice.

Many years ago I created a 'location page' (for the old location then) where people could mark their place with simple dots on a map of the terrain. A few years ago I decided it was time for an upgrade, using vector graphics. Unfortunately SVG wasn't fast enough or widely supported yet back then, so I ended up using Flash for the map. I wrote the applet in ActionScript 3, compiling it with the free Adobe Flex commandline compiler. This year I've started working on using SVG for the map. I'll see whether I manage to complete it before Campzone starts.

Firefox plugins-container and Flash

Starting with the development version 3.6.3 of Firefox, the browser is using a separate process for plugins. I encountered an issue when you call a JavaScript alert or confirm dialog through ExternalInterface from a Flash applet. Details are described in this test case.

Update: This was fixed halfway 2011.