I’ve been dreaming for a set of nice gadgets for a month or two now. This is my wishlist for the immediate future:

• Nikon D-70 digital SLR camera — replacement for my current SLR, Fujifilm S1. Nikon is much smaller and lighter, has better resolution and accepts all my current lenses.
• Canon PowerShot S500 — A smaller digital camera would be handy for those occasions that something worth taking pictures appears. Currently photographing is quite planned activity and more spontaneous stance would be good.
• Sony Vaio PCG-TR3 ultra-portable laptop — I’m currently using Dell D400 and I consider it clumsy. Sony has packed same features, and better display, into much smaller case. The price isn’t that bad, either.
• Apple PowerBook 12.1" — I’ve been pondering on starting to use Mac for a long time. Several friends have switched, and they’re not coming back.
• Palm Tungsten T3 — My Tungsten T has wandering key calibration problem, and it would be cheaper to buy a new one than get this fixed.

I added the titles of the five latest entries to the Nomadig.com front page. The job was surprisingly easy; maybe it was due to taking a shortcut — instead of using WP to do this, I wrote my own PHP script that reads the data directly from the database.

The WP database format is not described in any documents, a usual situation in an open source project, but it was still quite straightforward to figure out the correct table and the required columns. After that everything was a snap: connect to the mysql database, execute proper SQL select clause, read the responses and format them into HTML code. I put all this into one PHP file that gets included on the front page.

An essential part of every decent traveller’s agenda is planning and dreaming on future trips. The best plans, at least in my opinion, are never exact and never executed meticulously.

I’m currently thinking of my forecoming trips. We, that are I and my wife Sanna, are going to go for three trips in the quite near future.

First, we continue exploring our home country, driving once again to the cottage by the lake (check out earlier post on this matter) to meet some relatives, and then hopefully taking scenic route back to Helsinki. The vista near Punkaharju is magnificent, the road is located at the top of very narrow ridge between two lakes. I’ll provide you some pictures, if the weather is favourable.

In the second trip, we take the big boats from Turku to Stockholm and spend a day in the city. Sanna has been busy collecting information about good restaurants, museums and design shops. I’m eagerly waiting to see Moderna Museet, as it has been reopened in the centre.

The third trip takes us to Iceland (Reykjavik) and then to US; we’ll visit Boston, New York City and Washington D.C. The aim is also to rent cars and drive some scenery routes in Cape Cod and Long Island.

I’ll provide updates on the road.

I just took a quick glance to the site with Internet Explorer 5.0, and found that the layout was broken due to badly interpreted CSS. The rightmost column was somehow moved ten pixels to left, forcing the main column to start after the right column has ended. The end result was a lot of empty white space in wrong places.

I read a few CSS articles how to spoof IE 5.0 to ignore certain rules. There were at a dozen different ways to do it and three first didn’t work. In fact, they worked too well, as IE 6.0 or Mozilla 1.7 were also fooled to follow rules for IE 5.0. I did some advanced googling and finally found the solution.

The trick is to add a comment /* */ just after the selector name in the CSS file. The selector for the menu was the following:

#menu {
        background-color: #fff;
        float: right;
        width: 188px;
        padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px;
}

And now it has been changed into:

#menu {
        background-color: #fff;
        float: right;
        width: 188px;
        margin-right: -10px;
        padding: 0px;
}

#menu/* */ {
        margin-right: 0px;
        padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px;
}

Notice the difference? The padding is set to zero and the right margin is set to negative value, as for some reason IE 5.0 otherwise places the menu too left. The second selector is for the rest of the browsers to set things right again.

I just love sub-standard sub-compliant browsers. If you are running with IE 5.0, consider upgrading to Mozilla. You’ll get better browser without virus threats and a lot more features, such as tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and so on.

I updated a few guides in the Money section: added Google AdSense to Online Advertising article in the Web Business Guide, wrote about keeping your visitors to Getting Hits, also in Web Business Guide. I wrote a new article about blogging in the same guide.

It has been brought to my attention that Safari (a Mac browser) is knocked out with the text size change link. As I don’t have a Mac — at least not yet — I’d appreciate if somebody knowing more Safari could cast some light on the issue. I’ll fix the thing immediately after I understand the root cause.

Nomadig.com was accepted to Google AdSense and now the ads are seen on the pages, too. I tried to place them in such manner that they are not too obtrusive. Hopefully you can agree here.

This is the first step in earning with the site, hopefully Google provides interesting ads — and I can write compelling content to attract visitors and build the community.

The plot continues to thicken around the Salvador Dalí exhibition scam here in Helsinki; police has arrested the organiser and he is suspiced of two forgeries and two frauds. The police suspects that the forgeries have been done in Helsinki.

Two other people have been arrested, too, but they have been now released. Over hundred works of art (of total over 400) have been taken into custody for closer inspection.

These are sad news for admirers of Dalí’s art, as you really can’t be sure of the authenticity of the works. Maybe I should consider Picasso instead…

If you are interested in Dalí’s art, it may be best to buy known reproduction, for example, from allposters.com.