The Launch Site

Edit: Trick! This is a fake door. Go back to keep hunting.

It's quite simple to change your blog banner with most of the blog themes available. Sleek Shady Beta is no exception.

The default banners are 920 pixels horizontally and 170 pixels vertically. You should scale and crop the image you want to use as a banner to that size. You can make a smaller banner too if you want to. In my case, I made a transparent GIF image of Dr. Launch, drawn by Freek Zijlmans and used really simple CSS to put it in front of the default banner. The advantage of my method is that you can change your theme as much as you want and your banner will still look like it should.

So how do you change your banner image? By editing the custom stylesheet for your account. The custom stylesheet editor can be found by following these instructions:

• Go to your account
  
• Click Design in the ACCOUNT NAVIGATION sidebar
  
• Click the custom stylesheet link from the line below the Select a design text
  

You're now looking at the custom stylesheet editor. You're supposed to add CSS code to it to make modifications to your blog design. So how do you add a banner image of the size 920 x 170 to your design? By adding the following code to your custom stylesheet:

#top2 {
background:url(http://yourwebsite.com/yourdirectory/yourbanner.png);
}

Change the address in the code to the address to your banner image. This only works properly if your background image is 920 x 170.

But if you'd like to do something a bit more advanced, like I did with my banner image, you can do so too:

#top2 {
background-image:url(http://yourwebsite.com/yourdirectory/yourimage.gif);
background-position:bottom right;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}

Change the address seen in the code to the address of your transparent GIF image. It will appear in the bottom right part of your banner. And it's not repeated. If you'd like to change the place the banner appears, you can change the background-position value. There are some other positions you can use for the background image. Here's a list of the basic ones:

• top left
  
• top center
  
• top right
  
• center left
  
• center center
  
• center right
  
• bottom left
  
• bottom center
  
• bottom right
  

Change bottom right in my example to the preferred position from the list. You can also position the background image in a specific location. You can read more here.

If you need more help adding a banner to your blog, please leave a comment below.

Copyrights

The Dr. Launch cartoon character is a trademark of and a copyright of DrLaunch.
The image used in this blog post is a copyright of Freek Zijlmans and DrLaunch.

OK. This is a break from the usual tech related posts in this blog for an important message. Recently, there's been a protest against the military regime in Myanmar (also known as Burma), led by buddist monks. It started out as a peaceful protest, but the reply from the regime has been violence and murder. The Myanmar regime have also tried to silence the media. To do so they've cut the country's Internet connection, phone lines and stopped radio broadcasts. Hotels have been raided to find journalists and several of them have been killed. Despite this, journalists stay in Myanmar to tell the world about this event. The word finds its way out of Myanmar despite the regime's efforts.

Let the protesters of Myanmar know you support them today. Wear something red this Friday, and spread the word!

To help, you can also Digg this story, tell your Facebook friends that you're attending one of these events or these events, blog about this event... In general, do anything that shows your support for the people of Myanmar.

Credits

Image from Flickr user racoles

License

The textual content of the blog post found on http://my.opera.com/drlaunch/blog/2007/09/28/wear-red-for-the-myanmar-oposition-this-friday is hereby released to the public domain.

Office Open XML (OOXML) is a document format much like the Word document format. Microsoft has developed it together with some companies to allow it to work better with new technologies used in companies today. Office Open XML is an ECMA standard and it's proposed as an ISO-standard. But it got rejected. Why would ISO reject an open XML standard?

ISO consists of several countries and the standards unit in each country can vote for proposed ISO-standards. Most these countries voted no after evaluating OOXML. There are severeal reasons for this. And I have some opinions against OOXML my self too. Most of the countries that voted yes to OOXML have so because of corruption, cheating, because they don't mind Microsoft's market share, or similar. Most of the yes votes were most likely done because of pressure from Microsoft. Microsoft have simply attempted to force OOXML to become an ISO-standard. They've done so because a lot of their monopoly is at stake. They might lose to the free OpenOffice.org suite in the government sector in several countries. Because a lot of governments don't want to depend on a single software vendor like Microsoft.

We already have a ISO-standard for the exact same thing. It's called ODF or Open Document Format. It's the document format used mainly by almost every competitor to Microsoft. Most of the public sector in most countries have a obligation to use ISO-sertified formats like ODF. A lot of them might switch office suite too unless Microsoft's OOXML becomes ISO-certified. Microsoft's monopoly is at stake, so of cource they're trying to force it to become ISO-certified. But why do people vote no? Obviously, the way Microsoft is forcing it to get ISO-certified explains this to a small degree. Because it wouldn't get certified once the standardisation units in each country find out what's going on. The official OOXML specification isn't very good. In fact it's really bad. It's 6000 pages of almost unusable specification, repeatings, references to older formats and broken XML. Yes. XML is a strict standard and the OOXML specification contains several examples of broken XML. It's a document designed to confuse everyone. ODF is shorter with just a few hundred pages, but it's much better specified. ODF is interoperable almost like HTML, while OOXML is not. OOXML also depends on a lot of Microsoft's patents, so a software vendor might be infringing Microsoft's patents by implementing it. The XML part of the name is just a gimmick added to make people think it's an open standard. The only company capable of implementing it properly must be the creator themselves, Microsoft.

So in short, Microsoft is trying to force a bad standard through the ISO-certification, while we already have ODF, before anyone understands what they're up to in order to retain more of its monopoly. So, unless you work for Microsoft, or really want them to have their viritual monopoly, you should be against OOXML. There are simply better reasons to be against it than to be for it.