The only way I could get the div to center was to use auto left and right margins in conjunction with setting a width. However, I wanted the layout to scale gracefully if the font size was changed. The solution was to specify the width in em. This makes the div resize with the font. Quick and dirty, but it works well enough until I have time to come back to take a closer look at the problem again.

Aside from the parking situation, who starts a developer event in the Bay Area at 9:00 AM on a Saturday?

This web site appeared within an iframe on a different domain than the frame parent, and we noticed that the Google Analytics cookies were not being set in the default Internet Explorer environment with a medium privacy setting. A privacy icon also appeared in Internet Explorer's status bar, indicating that site cookies have been blocked.

Why does this cross-domain cookie issue only manifest itself in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7?

It turns out that Firefox and Internet Explorer have different definitions for "third-party" cookies. In IE, a cookie is considered to be "third-party" if the cookie's domain differs from the domain shown in the address bar (even if the domain of the cookie is the same as the domain of the page that is setting the cookie.) In Firefox, a cookie is considered to be "third-party" if the domain of the cookie is different than the domain of the page that is setting the cookie, (regardless of the address that appears in the location bar.)

Here is a summary of what you need to do in order to allow third-party cookies to be set in IE:

1. Create a human-readable privacy policy for your web site (i.e. in HTML)


2. Translate the human-language privacy policy into an XML document using IBM's P3P Policy Editor (considered to be the best free tool available.)


3. IBM's P3P Policy Editor will also generate a P3P compact policy for you.


4. Emit a compact policy and a reference to the full privacy policy in the HTTP header of your web page


5. Place your policy reference XML file (p3p.xml) and policy XML file (policy.xml) in the well-known location set forth by the P3P standard (/w3c/p3p.xml and /w3c/policy.xml)


6. If your privacy policy is satisfactory, your web page will be permitted to set cookies. This MSDN article contains a table of things that will make your privacy policy unsatisfactory.

Although the P3P standard specifies that only the XML policy files in the well-known location and human-readable privacy policy are necessary and sufficient, IE6 doesn't work that way. IE6 only honours the compact policy (and ignores every other implementation method.) IE7 behaves as expected.

Now that we've discussed the solution, we can go on to explain why P3P was created. P3P Toolbox has a lengthy discussion about the need for P3P. The main idea behind P3P is that it is burdensome and unreasonable for the average web user to hunt down the privacy policy for every site that they directly interact with, let alone the sites that they unknowingly interact with (like those displayed in iframes.) Regular people just don't do this. P3P was created to standardize the discovery of privacy policies from site to site.

P3P does not enforce that site owners adhere to their own privacy policies, it merely automates the interpretation of the legalese in which most privacy policies are written. The enforcement of privacy laws is left to the judicial system.

This conversation I overheard at the conclusion of the discussion panel summed it up best:

Girl: Oh honey, this event was so empowering!

Girl's boyfriend: As long as it was empowering for you, dear...

I agreed with her boyfriend. The event wasn't particularly empowering.

Today, I received an invitation to participate in the second OpenSocial Hackathon.

One particular mandatory field on the registration form caught my attention (mostly because it wouldn't let me proceed without submitting an answer for it.)

My first reaction was, "I am a designer and developer who happens to be female, but I don't see what difference that makes, and why this question is mandatory. Are these people sexist?"

This question makes it sound like they're willing to lower the bar to accommodate women, which makes me feel insulted. I understand that they're trying to encourage more females to come out and participate, but the messaging isn't particularly empowering.

To quote Mike:

By trying to compensate for the historical mistreatment of a group you isolate it and reinforce the definition of the differences between that group and the rest of the world

My XO laptop arrived yesterday and it's very cute.

However, I'm not sure what I would do with it after I'm finished playing with it. The screen looks really crisp in ebook mode, but I don't have any ebooks. The RSS reader is zippy, but so is Google Reader.

Although the built-in browser is based on Firefox, it doesn't support more than one window (even modal windows like dialog boxes), so Movable Type doesn't work. WordPress appears to work beautifully with the rich text editor turned off. The browse dialog is quite slow to appear and crashes the browser after spawning two of them on the same web page, so I can only upload one file at a time in the browser.

I've been using the mobile version of Flickr to upload photos taken on the XO laptop one at a time.

When I'm at my friend's house, I need to use a special tool to get onto his network because WPA isn't supported out of the box (yet.)

The XO is certainly more portable than my real laptop, but not by much since we're comparing with an ultra portable. However, it's just small enough to fit into my half-sized multi-purpose messenger bag, so it will undoubtedly travel with me far more often than any other computer that I own.

When I'm not doing any computationally intensive work on the computer, I'm usually checking email, catching up on blogs or chatting on IM. I need to install an IM client that will allow me to use AIM, YIM, MSN and GTalk.

I would also like to use the XO as a picture viewer. I've been meaning to get a portable media device so I can show photos that I've taken to other people. I haven't found a slide show program for the XO yet, perhaps I can create one.

Furthermore, style inheritance doesn't seem to work in Open Office 2.1. If you open an HTML document in Open Office Writer, top level styles will cascade down to their descendants even if you explicitly override the styles of the descendants.