Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with overflow

How to fix anchors in the One True Layout

grrarrgh00 — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:04:37 -0800

Overflow: hidden is causing anchor links to flip out on me. Help! In Firefox 3 on both Windows and Mac, this link is rendering just fine. This link, however, which merely links to an anchor on the same page, is displaying only the bottom section of the page, with everything below the anchor tag.

This is a recognized problem with the One True Layout solution, but I'm loathe to go back and introduce some lame background-image if there's a reasonably elegant workaround. (The fix at the bottom here strikes me as unreasonably inelegant.) I thought I'd throw this to the AskMefi community, the smartest folks I know. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Is there a way to get overflowing text to appear in a separate div?

carnival of animals — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:27:51 -0800

Is there a way to get overflowing text to appear in a separate div? My aim is to create a website layout resembling a two-column newspaper story. Ideally I'd like to have two column divs with all the copy in the first (left column), which has a set height value. Any overflowing text would automatically be sent into the second div (right column).

Is there any way to do this, or to achieve the same result another way? Is there any reason I shouldn't do this?

I'm prepared to manually adjust the copy in the columns if there is no elegant solution, but I would prefer it if I could get my CMS template to handle these columns somehow. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll probably have to do it manually though, as I haven't seen any CMS-run sites with a dual or multi-column layout where the copy just flows from one column into the next.

How do you deal with an overflowing air conditioner?

dkg — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:42:59 -0800

The portable air conditioner (an AMCOR PLM 12000EH) in my server room keeps filling up with water. It used to operate without my ever needing to drain the reservoir. What changed? How do i fix this? The server room doubles as a storage room, and is about 3m x 3m. It has a half-dozen running computers in it and other storage up on shelves. It's relatively well-sealed, and the A/C vents via a short hose into the neighboring room (a large auditorium). When the reservoir in the A/C fills up, the A/C turns off and must be drained. While the A/C is off, the room heats back up again, which is not so good for the machines. i've had heat-related hardware failures on machines in that room in the past (before the A/C was installed).

This particular A/C ran fine for 3 months without ever filling the reservoir. But two weeks ago, the reservoir filled for the first time. Since then, it's a non-stop chore to keep the A/C running. The ~1 liter reservoir fills in an hour or two.

I've gone back over the room and sealed what leaks i could find with duct tape. But i have to open the door to go into the room to drain the reservoir, so it's not like it's permanently sealed.

And unfortunately, i don't think there's a drain nearby that i can easily run a hose to, though i'm happy to explore other options.

What's causing this? How do i put a stop to it? Help me get back to doing the work i'm supposed to be doing!

How can I avoid buffer overflows with C?

PuGZ — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 06:05:30 -0800

Robust usage of sscanf and sprintf - how to avoid buffer overflows? I am sure this is embarrassingly simple, but all the tutorials I read always gloss over this aspect of sscanf and sprintf. How do I go about ensuring I don't encounter buffer overflows when using these two functions? I've read links like these that suggest truncating the data, but I don't want to do this. This link suggests using the "a" flag, but also says it's a GNU-only addition.

How do programmes that don't have fixed-length strings operate? Surely our chat clients don't use fixed-length buffers? Help, Mefi!

my design overfloweth

pinto — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 07:56:11 -0800

I set up a div with the overflow:hidden attribute and several anchors to jump down to different elements. In safari, this approach isn't working. It hides the overflow, allright, but I can't use my anchors to jump around. What gives? I googled around a bit and saw that float attributes might cause problems, but I'm not using any. (I know there are other, more elegant solutions than using anchors, but I'm still curious as to why Safari can't seem to handle this while it works in all the other browsers I've tested.)

What overflows into our cold tank?

denishowe — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:22:32 -0800

What overflows into the cold water tank in our loft? The tank overflowed itself because water was pouring into it from an overflow pipe. This continued for many minutes, until I turned the main stopcock off. It has never happened before. The mystery pipe is _not_ the mains inlet pipe controlled by the ballcock, nor is it the central heating circuit expansion pipe. It appears to come up from the garage where the hot water tank and boiler are. I can only guess that it is the expansion pipe for the hot water, but expansion pipes don't gush, they dribble surely? This was gushing cold water under enough pressure that I couldn't stop the flow with my thumb.

Sadly (and incidentally) squirrels had eaten the overflow pipe from the cold tank! So that overflowed into the loft, down through the bathroom and into the garage. Luckily we've had some nice hot weather to dry everything out.