Yes. It’s 1:26 am, and I’m working on stuff. Really, I’d like to be in bed. Asleep. And I’d like to stay there for three days.

But alas, instead, if you are having problems with dropdown JavaScript menus appearing BEHIND a Flash object, try adding this to the parameters you’re passing to the Flash object:

wmode="transparent" 

Or if you’re using SWFObject, you can do something like this instead:

var so = new SWFObject("crappy.swf", "crappy_swf", "100%", "100%", "9", "#ffffff");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.write("flash");

Maybe that will save you some headaches. It saved me some.

There is an awesome article over at seattlepi.com containing the text of an email written by Mr. Gates regarding his experience trying to download and install MovieMaker on his computer. The email really cracked me up, and I think it’s worth a read.

It’s probably also worth noting, that instead of all that rig-a-ma-roll, one could just buy a Mac (which happens to include iLife, which includes iMovie). The Surgeon General agrees that my strategy would keep your blood pressure a lot lower, and increase your life expectancy by about 10 years.

I got a good laugh yesterday at the Amazon reviews page for the Denon Ultra Premium Link Cable (aka – 1.5 meter CAT5) – selling for the MSRP of $499. That’s right, $499.

If you need something to laugh at on this rather grey-looking Tuesday, I highly recommend the amazingly insightful reviews over at Amazon, including what this gentleman had to say:

After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.

Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house.

Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever.

What’s more, the atmosphere inside my home became 93% oxygen and virtually no carbon dioxide. In fact, I now exhale oxygen.

One heck of a cable.

Didn’t notice any improvement in audio quality though.

The $800 Apple iCable is clearly superior.

If any of you read Inc.com you might have already seen this, but for those of you who don’t – read on.

One of the reasons I’m publishing this is to encourage people to lend money to entrepreneurs around the world using Kiva. A second reason is that this is an awesome story out of a country that was probably my favorite place in the entire world to visit.

Cambodia is a war-torn country, and the people still seem to live in daily fear that at any moment the Khmer Rouge could return to destroy and oppress once again. So seeing this glimmer of hope from an entrepreneur in Cambodia really seemed to make my day. And if the fact that this family is able to make $400 per month in their business seems like peanuts to you, remember that most of the population lives off of about $350 per year.

If you’re using CodeIgniter on Mac OS X, and you have a .htaccess file that looks something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

If you’re finding that it doesn’t seem to be working, and you’re getting 404’s when trying to access any controller other than the front controller, you might want to check on your main httpd.conf file to make sure that you don’t have an AllowOverride None that is preventing your .htaccess directives from being executed.

The main apache configuration file on Leopard is here:

/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Hopefully this saves someone a couple of hours and a couple of Tylenol.