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For those not familiar with working with Cascading Style Sheets for use by Microsoft Office product, some of the rules of the road can prove cryptic at best.  Case in point is the ” series of embedded styles.  These can sometimes appear to conflict with other styles in the same declaration, for example:

<span style='font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;color:navy'>

The font-size is a standard CSS declaration, but the next declaration is particular to Microsoft:

The “mso” part is, of course, the abbreviation for Microsoft Office (since Microsoft almost always abbreviates its name as “ms” in code).  But what does “bidi” mean?  I hunted everywhere, but had to resort to deep Googling to dig up the answer from the Windows Internet Explorer Blog. In a post dedicated to the issue of bidirectional text behavior in MSIE 6 vs. 7, the IE gurus explain:

When text is presented in horizontal lines, most scripts display characters from left to right. However, there are several languages (such as Arabic, Divehi, Hebrew and Syriac) where the natural ordering of horizontal text in display is right to left. Ambiguities can arise in determining the ordering of character display when text flows in two directions (hence Bidirectional) is present.

So the “bidi” means “bidirectional” and tells the Office-based application that declaration affects the display/print of bidirectional fonts, such as those for Arabic or Hebrew.

Therefore, the “mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt” declaration means “Microsoft Office Bidirectional Font Size:12 point ” style and allows the setting of a 12 point font size in the event of a bidirectional font appearing within the bounds of the declaration

Hopefully I just saved some of you a bit of Googling.

For those who aren’t aware, it appears that by merely posting a photo on Facebook you grant (but not give up) full copyrights to Facebook and anyone with whom they partner. Lovely. Photography attorney Carolyn E. Wright has the full coverage: Facebook Can Use Your Content for Promotional Purposes

The good news is that the Facebooks “rights” to your content goes away when you take down your work.

Over on PhotographersHandbook.com commenter “jan sonnenmair” poses a good question: “Will facebook be liable if they use an image for ‘commercial, advertising, or otherwise’ if they don’t have model releases for the people in the images? Especially children.” Good catch. Hopefully these types of ramifications will cause Facebook to re-think and re-write their Terms of Service.

Bottom line: Don’t post anything on Facebook that you don’t feel like giving away, for any reason, with absolutely no control. If you have, take it down.

I can’t remember where I found it, but I ran across a fascinating time-based graphic depicting the growth of WalMart.

Ever since taking the “Presenting Data and Information” course from the venerable Edward Tufte, I’ve been interested in information and statistics presentation (eventually contributing my minoring in visual communications). Representing numbers and data visually is very hard, especially when the goal of visual presentation (i.e., to demonstrate how the data relates to itself) often gets lost in our desire for glitzy over-production of whiz-bang PowerPoint.

So this brings us to the site FlowingData.com. Check it out, and don’t miss their 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year.

OK, have to rebuild a ColdFusion 5 site for CF7 (convert modules to components. update HTML and CSS, blah blah). Yup, it’s late-night programming-o-rama for Phil.  There is only one approved food for midnight geeking…

Nachos Bel Grande a la Taco Bell.

Well, maybe not.  Wow. But still, I only do my best coding on the worse junk food. I’d have lost my career long ago if Hostess Donettes (chocolate of course) didn’t exist, but a box of Ding-Dongs will do a pinch.

A developer at work has a sign: “Programmer: An organism the converts caffeine into code.”  Yup.

I’m hittin’ da’ Bell.  G’nite all.