FCKeditor

If your project uses FCKeditor, then you may need to re-think how the FCKeditor instance is attached to the page – Firefox 3 has changed something (I’m not sure what) which causes FCKeditor to fail in some cases (not all).

The cause is not absolutely clear (the first bug mentioned above states that it relates to loading file:/// URIs, but in my case, that’s not true), but I have managed to fix a few cases by avoiding the dynamic method of on-the-fly initialising FCKeditor (var o=new FCKeditor('blah');o.ReplaceTextarea();, etc) and instead creating the required IFrames and hidden inputs manually. This is a hack – not a true solution, so hopefully someone at the source (FCKeditor) will fix the problem soon.

This bug in their Trac is probably the exact problem I’m experiencing. Note that that bug was “confirmed” by a member of the dev team 9 months ago, and has since been ignored by them.

LCD vertical lines

A few months back, my Acer Travelmate 2420 started developing vertical lines. It would have been expensive to replace the screen, so I instead opted to go for a new machine. I gave the machine to my son Jareth, who doesn’t complain too much about it.

Yesterday, while troubleshooting a sound problem, I noticed that if the screen was twisted /just so/, then the lines vanished. After a bit of experimentation, I found that pressure applied in a certain spot at the back of the screen would clear the lines.

So, there was no other option – I needed to fix it. I got my screwdrivers out, took the screen apart, and MacGyvered a solution together with some paper I had lying around – fold it into a thin strip, then fold one end of it down to form a bulky part, then slot that into place between the screen and the back cover so the bulky part is at the pressure point. When the cover was replaced, the vertical lines were gone.

I have no idea how long the solution will work for, and I am guessing that the solution is causing stress to parts of the screen which may cause a more complete failure at some point in the future, but for now, Jareth is very happily watching a DVD on his machine (Bear In The Big Blue House – Shapes, Sounds And Colours on Fedora 9, KDE4, for those interested).

Missing sound

As stated, Jareth’s laptop had a sound problem – as in lack of sound. this was eventually traced to pulseaudio simply not starting. The solution was to add pulseaudio --system & to /etc/rc.local so the sound engine would start when the machine started.