Working around a IE6 bug ... only to create new problems

Today, I ran into a bug that was mainly caused by trying to escape other bugs.
The IE6 bug I ran into seems to be an undocumented one, but it is possible that the lack of proper description caused me not to find it on the net. Here it is: when
applying a relative position and a filter image on a table cell (th or td), the onhover functionality of included cells doen't work anymore.
It costed me some time to discover this one, but the main question was: why the hell
would you apply a relative position to a table cell?
Well, that was to escape the problem that on IE6, setting the border-spacing to 0 in CSS is not supported there. Thanks to vacskamati,
a hack was exposed to solved this, exploiting bugs in IE6. But unfortunately, it also sets the position to relative...

Vertical scrollbar problems in IE6

The real story of the scrollbar width problem in IE6 is easier circumvented than I thought.
This is the actual problem: when declaring an inner box inside a scrollarea having a width of 100%,
the inner box takes over the width of the scrollarea, and the scrollarea gets bigger with the width
of the scrollbar. I guess it's the IE6 box problem revisited, although I was taught that it only happened
in quircks mode, so I never actually bothered about it..

220 px ruler

Here, the width is not as expected in IE6
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0

This is a solution I found on the net, but it is not satisfying for me: part of the content is also
hidden by the scrollbar, and it also assumes the scrolbar width is exactly 16px.

220 px ruler

Here, part of the content is hidden in IE6.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5  6 7 8 9 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0

Of course, we could remediate that by having another box inside like below, but that means
inserting extra HTML code only to fix this item...

220 px ruler

Here, no content is hidden in IE6.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0

But the simplest solution is not use a width of 100%: the content seems to scale automatically
to the right width.

220 px ruler

This is the best solution.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0

New device, new inspiration

Tuesday, I bought a new device: a Mio Moov 510 GPS device. As usual, it took me quite some time to come to a decision, as I want to spend as less as possible and have as much functionality as possible. The reason I realized I needed a route planner after all is the usual annoyances when I'm driving and my wife needs to read the map. Last year, I borrowed a GPS enabled Mio PDA to drive to my holiday destination, and that was such a good experience that we decided we should never go on holidays without one anymore. And now with hew holidays to be planned, I had to made a decision on what to buy. As my wife needed a new mobile phone, I first tried to see if we could get a device that would do both. Choices seemed quite limited: I found one PDA device from Mio that had both functionalities, but the price including navigation software was about double the price of a standalone gps module, and the damn thing didn't have Wifi. Other choices included an Android phone, but the only turn by turn navigation system there is based on openStreetMap, but I didn't want to take the risk to use that a only database for driving around on my holidays. (Professionally, I would care less ;)). IPhone also fell off as there were only vague plans from TomTom on supporting the device, and the pricing would be too high anyway. So I decided to go for the Mio 510, and buy a low budget Bluetooth receiver so I could play with it from J2ME on my current mobile phone (Nokia 6300).

So I bought the Mio, and started to explore the stuff a bit. It turned out
that the Mio can store logs, which can be interpreted by the open source application GPSBabel, and thus allows me to export my tracks to google earth. As it also exports to gpx, chances are that I can use it to geotag my pictures too, which was the first case I wanted to do on my mobile!

So I am currently investigating how to get the Mio to store enough data for two weeks holidays, as the logs seem to grow very rapidly. I should try to get some statistics some day...

This is what currently is in the gpslog.ini file:

[GPS logging]
enabled = 1
maxfiles = 10
rotate = 1
maxfilesize = 2097152
location = \My Documents\


First thing I am trying now is to change the data location to store the data on the SD disk, as the space on the device is surely too limited to store this amount of data. I tried \Storage Card\, but that didn't seem to work. I found on gpspassion that the name of the folder is apparently in the registry, but I got no idea how to get there. Searches on the net also gave no results. So next thing I will probably try is to unlock the device using the informations on gpspassion.

Another problem I discovered is the short battery life: the device only has a 700mAh battery, which according the the manufacturer gives you 2,5 hours. I also have the feeling that this is rather exaggerated. Probably I should try to hook up extra NiMh batteries, since 4.8 volts is actually enough to drive the USB port. (USB specs claim 4.75 to 5.25 volts) Using2900mAh batteries should get me up and running for 5 times the current duration... Another track to investigate is solar panels, but I think I will be hard to found something that delivers (700 /2.5) 280mA * 5V. Probably, this problem is even more urgent than the previous one, as we were also planning to use the device on bike/walking trips...

Next thing to find out is an application to change the exif data inside my pictures...