Roberto Cosenza

When using png images as background, you need to apply a trick to make Internet Explorer 6 to display the background as transparent: [source:css] filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='http://robcos.com/img.png', sizingMethod='crop'); [/source] I realized though that if Internet Explorer caching setting is set to Every visit to the page , the png file is dowloaded multiple times if you have the same picture more than once in the same page and, in some cases, even ofter if you are doing some DOM manipulation. The solution is to add the Cache-Control header to the http response serving the png. In apache, you can for instance do it using the following directive: [source:xml] <FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$"> Header set Cache-Control: "private, max-age=21600" </FilesMatch> [/source] after having loaded the module "headers". See this nice post on how to do htaccess Caching

The Swedish company ÅF has been looking for consultants. To gain some visibility they built a flash based website on which you could solve some programming exercises. Besides getting a wider spread of candidates, they surely succeeded making the "job application" more interesting. They said they were going to offer a job to the first 100 in the list and give out some prices. I was not looking for a job but I could not resist the temptation and I had to spend a few hours solving the problems. At the end I got to the 120th place (too bad...they will not offer my a job which I could have refused :-) For those who are curious, at the end, to get into the list, it was not a matter of being able to solve the problems but to solve them fast. Surely the guy who got into the first place succeeded in automating the procedure somehow. You can see the list on www.welcometothelist.com