Archive for October, 2005

Thinking about getting WUS

By
Andy
 – October 20, 2005Posted in: Windows

With XP SP2, automatic updates have become a lot easier since they are generally automated and any really critical updates get installed without any user intervention. As far as I´m concerned this is all a good thing. There are however all the other updates to consider.
 
I found out about Office SP2 by reading about it in a magazine. Considering it contained important security updates this is kind of a bad way of doing things. There´s also the fact that it´s not just my two desktops and my laptops to update but every PC in the office. I´m not even going to try and get them to manage updates themselves since I can´t even get them to use "My Documents" for backup reasons.

 
To make all this easier to manage I´m considering getting a WUS Server to sort out all the updates for me. I just need to check out all the specifics for it since I don´t want to go onto Active Directory yet and most of us work remotely a lot of the time. If I can get it to work on a spare server and just push out updates to a certain workgroup or range of IP addresses then that would be perfect. Time to investigate. If I go ahead I´ll post the results in case any other small businesses are looking at doing something similar.

Bloody annoying iPod Shuffle

By
Andy
 – October 19, 2005Posted in: Hardware

I really love my iPod Shuffle. It´s small, has a good battery life, looks good and has enough space for my music (I don´t need 40Gig, the bus journey aint that long!).

 
There is one thing about it that is annoying me though. The fact that you can charge it by shoving it into any USB port is great. I have a linux server sitting on my desk with USB ports on the front and this is perfect as an over-the-top iPod charger. The problem is that once you plug it into a USB port, the iPod stops playing through the headphone socket.
 
True, I could just install iTunes and play though that, but my Linux server doesn´t have a keyboard, mouse or monitor let alone iTunes installed. I´ve got a second set of surround sound speakers in my office purely to plug my shuffle into and all I want is to be able to charge the thing at the same time! I might have to put the electronics degree to work and build something.

Popup blockers and toolbars crashing website?

By
Andy
 – October 19, 2005Posted in: Web Development, Windows

We´ve got an admin site that allows us to enter courses for some of our training sites and at the moment every time the boss tries to enter a new course IE crashes. I´ve checked it on a few other systems and it´s fine so it has to be his setup.
 
The only thing I can think it could be is that when you change a certain select box (this is the point at which IE always crashes) a popup comes up to change some other form fields. Maybe it´s his combination of toolbars and their built in popup blockers that are causing the problem? Time to investigate…

TV downloads on iTunes

By
Andy
 – October 17, 2005Posted in: Hardware

I just read on Slashdot that Disney has just made a deal to start putting TV shows on iTunes for download. The details are still a bit sketchy but the plan is to start with Lost (ace!) and Desperate Housewives and put the episodes on iTunes the day after they are shown in the US. It´s supposed to cost $1.99 per download so it´s not too bad.

 
There´s a few details missing though. There´s no mention of when they´ll start doing it. Whether the UK will be able to get the downloads at the same time as everyone else. If they´ll use DRM to make the files expire after a certain time. It´ll be interesting to see what happens though. Might even get a Video iPod when they come out

IE and full height tables

By
Andy
 – October 16, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I was knocking up a new site design yesterday  for Marketing Foundation using mainly DIVs and a few tables (I know I shouldn´t but it´s just quicker sometimes). I got it all done in an hour or so except for one little bit.

 
The right hand column had a gradient fading from grey to white as it goes down the page. I´d done this by using a one pixel column as the background for the td in css. The problem I was having was that there was a second picture that in the design just sat in the bottom of this td.
 
I decided to get around this by putting a div in the td and putting the background-image as the photo. I had a quick looky in FireFox and all was well. I then loaded up IE and suprise, suprise, it wasn´t right. For some reason the div wasn´t being stretched to 100% height like I had specified in the CSS. I started playing around with both the html and the css but after an hour I was getting nowhere.
 
I started Googling but couldn´t find anything too helpful. There where people with similar problems on the forums but no definate answer. After two and a half hours of playing around with this I started finding posts that suggested it might be the doctype and not the code. After another hour of searching I found a post saying that removing the doctype from the code might fix it. I tried this and wahoo!, it worked perfectly.
 
Damn, Internet Explorer is shit!

Finding out more about AJAX

By
Andy
 – October 10, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I´ve been reading a few articles recently about AJAX and how it all works. It´s a really good idea in that it allows client server interaction without a page refresh in the browser. This lets you code web apps and stuff that can go and get more information from the server and then create more page elements from the retrieved data. There´s a few examples out there that mainly consist of populating form elements based on some other data a user has entered. There´s also Google suggest beta which generates a drop down list of search terms based on what you´ve already typed.

 
I was sitting around last night thinking about things I could use it for and the number one site that came to mind was our automated reminder system. This has a lot of forms for data entry and a lot of this data is stored and re-used.
 
An example of this is when you go to send a text message. At the moment it works by having a popup link that opens their contact list and then lets them browse based on the letter their name or surname begins with. This works but has a lot of page refreshes and data sent back from the server. I´m gonna start working on a version that just has a simple text box and when the user types into it it fills in the names in a list similar to Google suggest. This can then be used to insert the ID into a hidden field which means less data is sent back to the server but also puts it in a format that´s more useful.
 
I´ve never done any AJAX coding before and my JavaScript is generally shit so it should be interesting. If and when I get it working I´ll post up an example and the code if anyone wants it.

XP File and Print Server

By
Andy
 – October 6, 2005Posted in: Windows

I´ve had a trial version of Windows 2000 Server running on an old box as the main office file and print share but since it was a trial and I didn´t need a full blown server installation, I decided to take a look at other options.

 
When the server died for no reason last week because the hardware is getting on a bit, I decided to get a spare XP box I had and use that. It only took a couple of hours to set up and replace the other server so I don´t think I´ll bother with the Server OS in the short term.
 
I would have gone with a Linux box since it works at least as well and is free, but this one was already lying around, plus it lets me run windows apps on an "unused" PC if I need too.

My Four Favourite IT Phrases

By
Andy
 – October 5, 2005Posted in: Uncategorized

Although I´m supposed to be a web developer, I always get all the IT problems of the entire county heading my way as well. Just to prove how awkward I can be I thought I´d put up my four favourite IT sayings instead of fixing PCs for people:


  • "A little knowledge can be dangerous"

  • "RTFM" (Read The Fucking Manual)

  • "Stop leaving passwords on postit notes you pleb!"

  • "Sod off. I´m napping"

The last ones my favourite…

TInternets working

By
Andy
 – October 5, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking

After pissing around for an hour or so I finally got my new ADSL modem/802.11g access point/router working. After going through the helpful setup programme a few times I thought, sod it I´m going advanced so fired up the web admin panel thing and started playing there.
 
After changing all the settings from the defaults (like the VCI from 35 to 38) I finally got it to give me a Force 9 IP address in the status window. Problem was that nothing would go through. All ping requests were coming up as Detination unreachable.
 
I headed back to the beginning to check I wasn´t doing something stupid and turns out I was. Instead of using PPPoA as you should for ADSL in the UK, I had left it on PPPoE. I changed this, restarted and the nice yellow "Internet" light came on router. Excellent!

Watch out for milonic downloads

By
Andy
 – October 4, 2005Posted in: Web Development

We use the Milonic DHTML menu on a clients site and since it´s the commercial paid for one we get an email when they release an update or security fix. I got one of these a couple of days ago and clicked on the link to download the new file and then extracted the new javascript files over the current ones, uploaded them to the server and then went and did something else.
 
A few hours later I had to check the site to update one of the pages and noticed that instead of the two nice drop down menus that should have been at the top, there was just a couple of links to the Milonic website. Luckily I knew that this happened when you were running the menu without a licence and a link to the milonic site on your site. A quick trip to the members area of the Milonic site and I found the latest download again which this time had all my membership info in the files and after copying them over the other ones and uploading them, everything was working fine again.
 

Since they produce such a magnificant piece of software as the DHTML menu, why they can´t get the link in the email to go straight to the members area and the version with the member info in, I´ve no idea. At least I´ll know to check for next time.

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