On 7/18/2007, Frank posted this:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:53:39 -0700, in 'rec.video.desktop',
in article work on a laptop.,
Gene E. Bloch wrote:

On 7/18/2007, Martin Heffels posted this:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:42:42 -0700, "nappy" wrote:

C'mon nappy. Don't keep as all so excited!
What's on your liver?

-m-

He's experimenting on a new font, white on white.

BTW, it can be very hard to debug a program that doesn't show any
output, when the problem is that the programmer (c'était moi in at
least one case!) accidentally set the output colors that way :-)

In cases where the text is selectable, just select (highlight) it with
the mouse and it usually becomes readable.

This was not on a GUI with mouses...

I was supposed to see a message on the screen and it didn't show up. I
tried a lot of things before I noticed the foreground color .EQ. the
background color :-)

Specifying identical text and background colors is done as a trick on
some Web pages. The author includes a long list of keywords in the
hope that doing so will improve page ranking in the search engines. Of
course, over time, the search engines have gotten wise to this trick
and these days will generally rank such a page lower then it would
otherwise have been ranked, thus producing an effect opposite of that
which the author intended.

It was a trick of my own brain...Or maybe i was trying to help one of
the other programmers, who didn't know know why *her* message didn't
show up on-screen. This was ~0.25 century ago, so the details are a bit
hazy in my blobware archive.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")