Quickly now…

Just a quick one, as I don’t have a lot of time to post… but of course, as usual, I had to make time for a detour into the madness of Internet Explorer when I discovered that my CSS line-height positioning was breaking when there was an inline image in the text. Why? Who knows? But the solution involved sticking vspace=”7″ into each offending image tag. Yet another case of hacking a one-off solution into the code to work around an Internet Explorer quirk. Almost as frustrating as IE’s violations of standards is the fact that there’s almost never a one-size-fits-all workaround!

Forget what I said before; we have a winner!

It’s a given that anything I post here is going to be brain-deflatingly stupid. But this one goes beyond even what I would have expected of Microsoft. Fortunately, thanks to a highly effective Google search, I was able to solve the problem in minutes.

The problem was this: For a site I’m working on, we are manipulating the 404 error feature to allow users to set up customized URLs. If the URL entered doesn’t match a real page, it gets fed into this 404 error script, which looks up the path in a database and redirects the user to their customized page. A bit of a hack, but it’s pretty slick.

As usual, I am developing the site using Firefox as my test browser. But… UH-OH! Surprise! When giving a demo of this feature today using Internet Explorer, we discovered it didn’t work! Internet Explorer was not returning the server’s 404 error page, instead using its own internal version (which we’ve all seen and most generally ignore).

Drat! What to do? Well, as it turns out (thanks to the aforementioned Google search), the problem is quite simple. To quote the unbelievable but, as I verified, 100% accurate description I found on this page:

Internet Explorer has a lightly-documented “feature” that stops it from serving any custom 404 error page that is less than 512 bytes long. Your visitors will instead be sent to IE’s own 404 page, which is generic and suggests they use an MSN search to “look for information on the Internet.” That’s one way to lose visitors! Make sure your custom 404 error page is over this limit — about 10 full lines of text and HTML should be enough.

Yep, that’s it. I did my best Bart Simpson-at-the-blackboard impersonation, filling my 404.html file with a large comment block wherein I repeated (about 130 times, for good measure) the phrase “This block exists solely to force Internet Explorer to load this page.”

Sure enough, it worked. D’oh!

Thinking a bit more about this, I at least think I understand why Microsoft chose to do this. “If the server’s default 404 error page is so short,” I imagine them musing, “then it probably doesn’t offer users much helpful information. And since our wonderful web browser is much more important to our users than the web pages themselves, let’s just butt in and do things our way. (Is there really any other way anyway?)”

Call it “Rush for Neophytes”

If you’ve been following my recent blog entries (or if you just care to scroll down the list of articles right now!), you’ll know I’ve been going through a bit of a “Rush Renaissance” lately.

I first got into these guys back in high school (of course), almost 18 years ago. My interest in them waned after I moved on to more obscure progressive rock bands, but by the early part of this decade, after I had bored of most prog rock, I actually found myself drawn back to Rush, and I’ve listened to them more than any of the other bands in this nebulous genre over the past five years. But something clicked a month or so ago, and I’ve rekindled an obsession with the band that may in fact be even stronger than it was at its peak when I was a scrawny teenager with a learner’s permit.

On Sunday, much to my surprise, I actually heard “New World Man” on KQRS. While it’s certainly not that unusual for Rush to be on the radio, I don’t believe I’d ever heard this particular track on the airwaves.

Inspired by this radio surprise, I started to think about what might go onto a CD of the band that I could use to introduce new people to their music. Personally, my first exposure was listening to the live A Show of Hands album in its entirety. Even though most prog maniacs generally consider the band’s 1977 to 1981 period (from A Farewell to Kings through Moving Pictures) to be its best, I think the end of that period, overlapping into the next, say, from 1980’s Permanent Waves through 1985’s Power Windows, is best for an introduction. The early ’80s songs are a bit more accessible to an unindoctrinated ear than what preceded, yet they are of higher quality than the weaker material of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

With that in mind, I’ve prepared a track list for a 79-minute CD spanning from 1980 through 1985 (with a nod to the earlier era at the end), that I think would serve as a near-ideal introduction to the band for a new listener. Here we go:

  1. The Spirit of Radio (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  2. Limelight (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  3. Subdivisions (Signals, 1982)
  4. Tom Sawyer (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  5. Distant Early Warning (Grace Under Pressure, 1984)
  6. Marathon (Power Windows, 1985)
  7. New World Man (Signals, 1982)
  8. YYZ (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  9. Freewill (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  10. Natural Science (Permanent Waves, 1980)
  11. The Enemy Within (Part I of ‘Fear’) (Grace Under Pressure, 1984)
  12. The Weapon (Part II of ‘Fear’) (Signals, 1982)
  13. Witch Hunt (Part III of ‘Fear’) (Moving Pictures, 1981)
  14. La Villa Strangiato (Hemispheres, 1978)

We start off with some of the band’s most accessible (and, once upon a time, popular) tracks. I’ve heard all of the first four tracks with some regularity on classic rock radio. Next we move into a few of the great but probably less familiar mid-’80s tracks. After a couple more “fan favorites,” I move into longer pieces that hint at what a new listener will discover if they go back into the extended late ’70s tracks, including the “Fear” trilogy that is rarely heard together in sequence.

OK, Rush fan(s). Let’s hear what you think!

Rush Bass Tabs!

I’m posting this mainly to remind myself to check it out more fully at a later date. (Hmm… could just bookmark it…)

Just what I was looking for (even though, curiously enough, I wasn’t looking for it at the time when I found it): Rush bass tabs! Any Rush fan or bass player (or, both, and I’d guess that both do occur in disproportionate numbers to that of the general populace) would want to check this out.

Frankly, since I can read music, I’d rather have actual notation instead of tablature, but any transcription is a good transcription. (Check that; not every transcription is a good one, but I’ll have to study these more closely to determine if that is true in this case.)