I know that this dates me, but I remember a time when IE6 was actually a top-notch browser – not standards-compliant even by the, as it where, standards ten years ago, but easily the best product on the market [1].

But IE6 is now long past its’ prime [2]. For years Microsoft let everybody down  by not updating IE to modern standards and when they finally tried IE7 and 8 where so bad that one wonders why they have bothered at all [3]. Actually I read an article that claimed that the market share for IE6 is bigger than that of IE7 and almost rivals that of IE8.

The best way to make IE6 disappear is not to support it any longer, which I, as a freelancer, am in absolutely no position to do.  But following some other companies now Google drops support for IE6 [4] and there’s hope that when the kraken spits something out as indigestible it will finally go for good, so this is very good news indeed.

1. Actually the idea behind MSIE was probably to destroy the market. Inconceivable as it seems now Browsers used to be payware before a certain major company started to distribute theirs for free
2. Wikipedia states that it has been introduced in August 2001
3. Possibly because they needed to support people who relied on ActiveX-Implementations of one thing or the other
4. As Ed in the comments pointed out the search engine will of course continue to work in IE6. But they are phasing out IE6 support for docs and pages and while they might support existing stuff for the time being they are not going to develop news apps with IE6 support. From a developers POV that's the important thing.

The server went down overnight…  again. Within the next few weeks this site will move to a new server, so things should get somewhat more reliable .

The latest version of “mod_placehere” (content item module for J!1.5) apparently does not work for a number of people (for production you can still use the previous version), and I have to say that I do not know why. I’ve spent the day with attempts to find the flaw, but didn’t find it.

So if you download the module I would ask you to first try the latest version; if this doesn’t work please write a comment or a mail with your Joomla Version, PHP Version and MySql Version.  A Screenshot of your module settings would be nice, too.

• Version 1.0.1
• Version 1.2.1

Religion and philosophy have for ages asked questions like “Why are we here” or “what is the purpose of our existence in the universe”. Since they haven’t found any answers yet I like to propose after this weekend two anwers myself. We are here to

• help a godchild to build towers and fortresses from sofa cushions
• to feel the gentle rasp of a cats’ tongue against the tip of our fingers [1]

Okay, so that’s not very philosophical, but I guess as long as I have a choice I prefer cats and kids to philosophy.

1. A second before she tries to claw of your arm. It's not so much that cats are actually unpredictable, it's more that apes always fall for the same tricks.

You may have noticed that I didn’t comment on the US election on this blog, and very little on US politics in general (although you will not be surprised to hear that I like Barack Obama better than the other guy). That’s because I’m pretty busy critizising my own country, I do not even have time to interfere with other peoples business.

But that does not mean I’m not interested in politics and in the relations between the US and the European Union; so I will comment on an article I found via Deborah Lipstadt’s Blog – a post by Andrei Markovits who contends that Europeans are hypocrites for praising Obamas victory, since they would never elect a black man (or a member of a minority) themselves. Markovits knows Europe well, but I still think he misses the point – two points in fact.

One,  he assumes that the joy over Obamas victory is authentic which, as far as as european realpolitik is concerned it certainly isn’t. The nice thing about the Bush Administration was that compared to him practically everybody looked good; no matter how bad your own politics were, you could distract from your own failures by pointing at the US where President Bush would inescapably do something even more stupid (btw. that german politicians could brag about the the well regulated financial sector in germany is due to the fact that they weren’t quite finished dismantling the regulations when the crisis hit. Now the crisis is blamed solely on the US).

As for the second point – well, have you looked at european politics lately? If we like progressive politicians that much then how do we explain Italys Berlusconi, Sarzkozy in France, the dopey duo of Merkel/Steinmeier in Germany?

Talking about Germany: we have anti-terror laws that are every bit as insidious as the laws in the US (and for rather the same reasons, for example they blur the difference between sympathizers^,. suspects and criminals) , only we had them for almost 40 years – ever since the days of the RAF, a terrorist faction that killed some 60 people in its 25 year history. On abortion – Germany never had a Roe v. Wade, abortion in Germany is actually illegal. Only there are  a number of cases where abortion (while still against the law) will not be persecuted. In the US there was a scandal when telecommunications companies, in violation of the law,  handed over customer data to the state. This would be impossible in germany, i.e. it would impossible to cause a scandal – telco companys are legally obliged to spy on their customers.[1] Germans usually don’t even know about their own laws (the media is so busy commenting on the backwards US politics, they can’t spare time to educate their readers about the laws at home), but even if they were I strongly suspect a majority would approve.

So the point is not that europeans wouldn’t elect Obama because of this race – we wouldn’t elect him because of his politics. We could possibly deal with a black man[2], but somebody with his views we would call a populist and a damn commie[3], and there, not with the race thing, lies the real hypocrisy.

1. Just for completeness sake, we do not have separation of church and state either, nor separation of powers - usually members of the government are also members of the parliament.
2. There is a saying attributed to the late Bavarian prime minister Strauss - "I prefer a right wing foreigner over a leftist german"
3. After the elections in the german federal country of Hessen Andrea  Ypsilanti, the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Hessen  was accused of collaborating with the communists, since she wanted to form a minority goverment which was to be tolerated by the left Party Die Linke.  The "communists" in Hessen are mostly former members of the SPD who favour a mandatory minimum wage which the SPD opposes.

I’ve been traveling for the last few days and maybe some time I will tell a few stories about russian motorbikes and a short trip though the realms of my childhood (the damn place is still to soggy to burn). I’m back now, but already swamped with work. I have read the recent comments and feature requests, but I won’t be able to come up with any answers before the weekend, sorry.

A few people asked if there’s a way to send donations, either for the module or for the support. Now, if I want money I name my price up in front, and I do not take money for stuff I put up under the GPL anyway. But if you liked my work you can of course donate to worthy causes. Like it said in the readme-File for the contentitem-module,

If you feel you must donate any money then donate it to a charity (preferably a childrens fund) in your vicinity or give something to the Joomla Project.

However I’d very much like to see where and how you used the module, so I appreciate it if you send me a link to let me have a look at your site.

There is a small thread in the Joomla! Forum under that title. Now, in theory it is very simple to display articles side by side.

• Open the module parameter tab in the module manager
• Enter a value in “Number of items displayed”
• Set the value for “leading paragraphs” to 0
• Set the value for “numer of columns” to the same value as “Number of items displayed”
• You might want to set “width” to a sufficently large value if you set “Output mode” to table (so the width of a column should be the value for width divided by the number of columns)

However there is a catch, because this will only work when your template has actually enough horizontal room to display the articles side by side, if it hasn’t the result might be a little unpredictable. The template mentioned in the original post was Rocketthemes “Catalyst” and for that I can only point to my post about compatibility with commercial templates.

I haven’t had much opportunity to use Joomla 1.5 in production – in fact, now is  the first time that I use it for a ‘real’ project. I just finished entering my articles when I realised that they were still showing print,pdf and mail-buttons in the frontend (they weren’t supposed to).  Since the article parameters were all set to “‘use global” I changed the parameters for the article component – to absolutely no effect.

A post in the Joomla Forum said that a change of the global setting would not affect existing articles but have effect only on newly created articles. What the fuck ? If this is true it’s completely retarded  behaviour.

So I hope that I made some stupid mistake and there is in fact a way to change the parameters for some 100 articles in one go. Can anybody help me ?