April 11th, 2003:

So now I’m fed up. Really fed up. So I pull out wget tell it to grab her page and save it to disk and then I tell Phoenix to load the page from that file. It loads!

But, since she has relative URLs in her design, the style sheet isn’t there and neither are the images. So I edit the file to point to the aboslute locations of those files. Now Phoenix crashes. Okay, okay. We’re getting somewhere.

Being the smart cookie that I am, I leave the absolute reference to the image at the top of the page , and change the style sheet link back to be a relative reference that points to a non-existant file. It works. But, without any CSS, of course. I think you see where this is going next.

I change the external image reference back to a relative reference that points to a non-existant file, and I then point the style sheet link back to her style sheet on her server. It crashes!

I copy her stylesheet from her server to a local file on my system. Then I change the external reference to the style sheet to be a relative reference which, since I’ve copied her style sheet on to my system, now exists and is the same as the one her server servers. It crashes!

Okay. Now I know. It’s the style sheet that’s doing it. Not the network. Not the server. Not the graphics. Not the XHTML. Just the style sheet.

I look for errors in the style-sheet: there aren’t any.

I make the style sheet nothing but an empty file: It works.

I add back in the body section: It hangs.

I leave only the body section, but remove the “letter-spacing” setting: It works.

I replace her entire style sheet and remove only the “letter-spacing” setting from body: It works!!!

I put “letter-spacing” back, just to make sure I’m not crazy: IT CRASHES!!!

Now I want to be REALLY sure, so I load another page that uses CSS and “letter-spacing”. I choose Eric Meyer‘s CSS2 test page for letter-spacing: it CRASHES!

This is good… and bad. It’s good because I figured out what is causing the problem. It’s bad because, the exact reason is unknown.

It’s not JUST Mozilla, or everyone would be having a problem. And it isn’t JUST Linux, or else Opera would be having trouble. Obviously Mozilla is part of the problem. However, it may be Mozilla coupled with my TrueType libraries. It might be Mozilla and my use of XFT. It might be Debian’s version of Mozilla.

Based on the fact that it is happening with two DIFFERENT default fonts, and from two different pages with different fonts being requested by them, I can rule out font choice for now. Also, we can rule out Mozilla alone as the problem. So, it’s either my XFT support that’s doing it, or it’s Debian’s Mozilla.

I’ll test that idea later. It’s time to go home.

Okay, this is getting silly. Who’s playing a prank on me? Come forward. I won’t be mad. I promise.

I decided it MUST be something with the way Mozilla is being packaged for Debian. So, I installed Phoenix (apt-get install phoenix, thank you very much. Here are the specs:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20030117 Phoenix/0.5

Now Phoenix is a bit nicer. It still doesn’t display Jess’ site. But instead of crashing entirely, Phoenix just hangs. Okay… maybe that’s not nicer.

I decided that I didn’t care and installed Galeon instead (apt-get install galeon-snapshot. Man I love Debian). Galeon doesn’t provide the same information that Mozilla and Phoenix do regarding rendering engine versions and whatnot. So, all I can tell you in this case is that I am running version 1.3.3 (WOW! Galeon has changed a lot since I last used it).

It, just like Phoenix, starts to load the page, and then just hangs.

This isn’t over yet.

Mozilla doesn’t hate my wife… it just hates me.

I just deleted my ./.mozilla-snapshot directory and upgraded to the following version of Mozilla:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030326

Jess’ site still crashes Mozilla immediately upon attempting to load. After seeing that Mike was able to load it under Linux in version 1.3 of the browser with a VERY recent Gecko version, I know it must be something particular to either Debian Mozilla or the way I set up my system (XFT support enabled, my default font set, etc).

This is more than annoying.

My good friends have returned from their travels to The North (gooooo Boilermakers!! — Are they referring to the trade or a nice shot of whiskey with a beer chaser?). Little do they know, their daughter paid us a visit yesterday. Brad’s mom said she led her right to our door. Awwwww. Of course, once she was here, she just had to see our new kitten, Miette (which means “Crumb” in French for all you mono-linguals).

I see Brad and Morgan almost every day, and at least every other day. I guess I’ve begun to take their presence for granted because I really noticed the fact that they weren’t here all week. I’m really going to miss them when they head off for the icy tundra that is Indiana this summer.

I use Mozilla as my web browser of choice because, well, simply, it’s the best. However, there is one thing that it isn’t so good at: rendering my wife’s website. In fact, it’s so bad at it, that it doesn’t even make an attempt — the browser just crashes. It hasn’t always done this. However, I upgrade Mozilla often (thanks Debian) and, somewhere along the way, I got a version that decided it hated her. To make matters worse, it tells every newer version that I install that it should continue to hate her. It’s even managed to communicate with itself on every machine that I use and inform all of them to hate her as well. So, I have three machines running Mozilla (all with the same version) and none of them are willing to render her page. I’ve even tried deleting my entire preferences directory to no avail.

Here’s the specifics on my current version of Mozilla:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030327 Debian/1.3-4

If you know why Mozilla hates her so much, please let me know. If you don’t, and happen to have a version of Mozilla laying around, try to visit her site (http://sivatonight.com). Don’t try this unless you don’t have anything valuable loaded in your browser, as it will most likely crash it. After you visit, let me know if you were capable of seeing her site and, regardless of the outcome, what version of Mozilla you were using (you can tell by clicking on “Help” and then “About Mozilla” on the Menu Bar of your browser). This way I’ll be able to determine what versions of Mozilla hate her, and whether or not it’s just ME.

Oh, LazyWeb, I invoke thee.