Several days ago, I finally could not resist it any longer – I bought an iMac. After having overcome the first shock regarding the obscene price of this device¹⁾, I am really loving to work with MacOS X.

Even more so after I found out that, by using MacPorts, I can install a great part of my beloved Linux applications.

I also installed the Gimp that way (although I found out later that there's a complete package to be found here: http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net). The only problem with the Gimp version from MacPorts was that somehow it required me to start X11 manually before running it – while for all other X11 software, it seems to launch automatically.

After some tinkering, I found the problem to be the start script of the Gimp, provided by MacPorts. I guess it makes some stuff that is no longer necessary in Leopard; especially trying to run “open-x11”, which is not present in Leopard (at least no on my system). But it's fixed easily by editing the file /Applications/MacPorts/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/script and deleting (or commenting out) all lines except the following:

#!/bin/sh
 
CWD="/opt/local"
cd ~/
exec "$CWD/bin/gimp" "$@"

Now it works just fine: X11 is starting right before the Gimp.

After some weeks of hard work and equally hard hours of procrastination, the new incognitek homepage is finally finished. Here and there are a few touches to make, but all in all I think everything should work just fine now.

I wanted page updates to be as easy as possible; that's why I used a wiki engine for the complete content. The most simple and elegant wiki solution out there is, imho, DokuWiki, so it was a no-brainer to use it. The only problem was that none of the existing templates seemed to be suitable for the incognitek page (yes, I am picky when it comes to such topics). That's why I made the effort to create a whole new template. As soon as I had re-activated my rotten CSS knowledge, I found it relatively easy to create the template – until I loaded it in Internet Explorer 6 (aka “The root of all evil 6.0”).

I won't start telling you all the things that went wrong with that browser's page rendering; if you are a web develeper, you already know. If you are not: believe me, you do not want to know. Just do not use this browser.

First I thought I might skip support for IE6 altogether, but then I had a look at some statistics, which say that it's still used by about a third of all internet users. Well, I did not want to lock out this huge amount of people, so I included hack after hack to allow the site to be rendered in this browser as well. If you are viewing this page in IE6, you will miss several subtle hover effects, and the main content box does not have a drop shadow; but all other parts are working.

But if you are really viewing this page with IE6: Please use a modern browser, like Firefox, Opera, Safari, or even IE7. You will love the features of those modern browsers, and will be more secure, as well.

By the way, if you like this template, you can easily find it in the projects section of this site.