't IsGoud

While working on my new blog theme I ran into some color rendering issues with Safari. The background color set with CSS did not match the color used in the background image.The background color was set in CSS as #333333, the color in the .gif was shown as #424242. The problem only occurs in Safari not in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer. The problem is also not .gif related it also occurs with .png or .jpg images.

At first I thought it was a bug in Safari but it actually turned out that Safari is one of the browsers that is somewhat ahead of its “competitors”. It reads and renders images according to the color profile stored in the image. How the color profiles are rendered is described with a ICC level indicator.

After reading several articles and being pointed in the direction of the color profile it was time to examine the images. It turned out that the image was saved with a "Generic RGB Profile".

There are several ways to solve this problem so far I found three:

• Use an image for the background instead of the CSS style
• Set the color profile to sRGB
• Remove the color profile

The first solution uses a background image instead of the background color in the CSS. It works but it feels more like a workaround than a solution. The color is defined in images, not really flexible. On top of that it looks different across browsers.

Setting the color profile to sRGB did solve my problem but it depends on the color profile of the local system. If the system uses a different color profile it could again cause color mismatches.

Removing the color profile seems to be the best out of the three options. No need to change the CSS and no system dependency. The only extra work you have is to save the images without the default color profile or strip it afterwards. Another advantage is that he size of the image is also reduced.Relevant links:
How to Avoid Background Color Matching Problems with Safari
Color Rendering Difference: Firefox vs. Safari
Fixing JPG And PNG Colour Matching In Safari
This is your Mac on drugs
Color Spaces
Why your Web content will look darker on Snow Leopard
Is your system ICC Version 4 ready?

Google collects not just the bits and bytes on the internet but it also  publishes a great deal of the data collected in the real world. This so called Geo data is used in applications as Google Earth, Maps and Sketchup.

Last Thursday Google organized the first Dutch Geo Developer Day. I attended this Geo Day together with 250 other "Geo Developers". During  this day we heard more about the new features in the Google Maps API. and other Geo applications.

In our organization we use log4net for all our .NET 1.1 applications. For our new projects we use Visual Studio 2005. At this moment there is no public version that supports the .NET 2.0 framework.

In the log4net mailing list people claim you can use the current version but this is only partially true:
It’s true, for application running with trust level full,
but it’s false, for all other trust levels.

When the trust level is set to something other then “Full” a Security Exception will be thrown.

If you want to build a secure ASP.NET Application you do not want your application running with full trust.

At the Web 2.0 conference in 2005 Dick Hardt gave a presentation on Identity Management. It's interesting in several ways.

The subject itself, identity management is food for thought. Everybody want's it but nobody has the perfect solution ... The presentation gives a nice overview of where we are at the moment and speaker's view for the future.

Dick's presentation style is a different story. I downloaded the .wmv version so I could speed up the presentation to watch it at a comfortable 1.4 or 1.6 playing speed. I'm not sure where I read about this trick but it's a time saver that's for sure. 
Anyway I started to play the presentation but as soon as Dick started his presentation I had to set the play speed back to normal. The timing of this presentation is just unbelievable. I'm not going to explain in more detail just see it for yourself.

Last night writing some HTML code I had to use one of those special characters  ….

Couldn’t find it straight away and ended up making a page with the iso8859-1 or Latin-1 Character set.