The Designspace

Safari error: Web pages are not responding.

Since the last update of Safari, I've been seeing way too much of this error:

"Webpages are not responding. To visit the selected webpage, all webpages in other tabs and windows must be force reloaded. Do you want to visit this page?"

Once this error shows up, usually several windows will start reloading on their own. The error seems to happen only when I have a lot of tabs and windows open in Safari, but since I almost always do, it's hard to pin that down as a contributing cause.

Apparently many other people have the same issue, as indicated by the lengthy discussion thread here: "This aspect of Safari 5.1 is really lame!".

Apple does have a technote that addresses such problems in general, while making no admission of guilt or of a wider problem:

Safari: Unsupported third-party add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues

They suggest removing (not deleting) any third-party addons (not extensions or plugins) to see if that cures the problem. Then you can put them back in one at a time and test Safari.

Unfortunately, there is no interface to do this. You'll need to locate the items in one or more of these folders:

• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
• /Library/Input Methods/
• /Library/InputManagers/
• /Library/ScriptingAdditions
• ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
• ~/Library/Input Methods/
• ~/Library/InputManagers/
• ~/Library/ScriptingAdditions

Despite the recommendation that extensions are not part of the problem I found the occurrences of forced reloading to be reduced when I turned off some extensions.

An article in MacWorld that addresses this issue suggests that the behavior is a side-effect of the new architecture of Safari.

Prevent float drop in IE

Internet Explorer's propensity to drop floated elements adds time to site development, and sometimes causes a page to appear blank if the floated content drops below the window "fold". Ignoring the problem and designing only for standards-adhering browsers is not always possible, particularly in enterprise environments where IE (and not always the latest version) is the only officially supported standard. Of course, other browsers are being used as well.

I've finally came across a fix that appears to work well cross-platform, thanks to Thierry Koblentz in the YUIblog.

Here's an example of a set of floated tabs which look fine in Safari, Firefox and Chrome...

... but break badly in Internet Explorer 7.

The HTML for the tabs is shown below. The last tab is highlighted in violet. Each tab is an <li> element, floated in a row. The tabs expand to hold their text labels.

Per the suggested fix on YUIblog, I added an element style to the final tab in the row (highlighted in violet):

style="position:relative;margin-right:-100px"

The resulting view from IE7 shows the tab has popped back into place. Safari, Firefox and Chrome's rendering of the tabs were all unchanged.

ODBC Driver Error: [ODBC Driver Manager] Driver's SQLAllocHandle on SQL_HANDLE_ENV failed

If you try to connect to an Oracle Database using the Test Connection button in the Data Sources (ODBC) Control Panel, and get the error [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Driver's SQLAllocHandle on SQL_HANDLE_ENV failed, try the following suggestions:

Assume Oracle Client in c:\OraClient folder and web folder as c:\inetpub\wwwroot

1. c:\inetpub\wwwroot must have Read and Execute privlege for IUSR user.
2. c:\OraClient must have Read and Execute privlege for IUSR user.
3. The environment PATH variable must have C:\OraClient\bin included.
4. Don't forget to restart Web Server

Movable Type comment error: "Text entered was wrong. Try again"

After I added some new commenting features to this blog, this error started to appear when comments were submitted:

Comment Submission Error Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again."

This was because the Comment, Captcha, Registration and Spam settings were in conflict with each other. I fixed it by using the settings shown below. Try turning off Captcha, make sure you have upgraded to Movable Type 4.37 or later. Then adjust settings as shown below.

You may have to temporarily turn off all commenting, and save, then turn it on again after adjusting settings to get it to work.

Many thanks to Mihai Bocsaru for the solution.

OS X: Manually index a drive with Spotlight

sudo bash

mdutil /Volumes/AFPvolumename -i on

mdutil /Volumes/AFPvolumename -s

C:\Program Files\PHP\v5.2;

C:\PHP\;

; doc_root =

C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\fcgiext.dll

[Types]

php:/W3SVC/364137164/Root=PHP52_via_FastCGI

php=PHP52_via_FastCGI

[PHP52_via_FastCGI]

ExePath=C:\Program Files\PHP\v5.2\php-cgi.exe

InstanceMaxRequests=10000

ActivityTimeout=600

RequestTimeout=600

EnvironmentVars=PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS:10000,PHPRC:%ProgramFiles%\PHP\v5.2