Author: ellen

How to override the !important CSS style attribute using Javascript

I’ve worked on a few projects where a CSS style on some page element has been specified as “!important” and it interferes with the way the page functions. Ordinarily, I would just change the original style, but sometimes I don’t have control over the stylesheet or script that is generating the style. One example is a recent project where an embedded Captivate player is written to a custom HTML wrapper at by the javascript SWFObject.js. SWFObject writes style attributes to the page dynamically to hide the Captivate player as required until it is fully loaded:

object, embed {
              visibility:hidden !important;
}
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Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate: Should I publish in ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3?

Captivate 5 removed the need to answer this question: it only publishes in ActionScript 3 format, and correspondingly limits the compatibility of the published SWF file in certain situations as described below.

But if you are using Captivate v. 4 or earlier, you may still be wondering which to choose.

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Spam prevention on Drupal sites

I run a Drupal site with several thousand users. Users self-register, and there are no other moderators but myself, so it needs to be virtually maintenance free to be sustainable.

And for years, it was! Since the site’s members are well-behaved, the only major maintenance besides keeping the Drupal installation updated was cleaning up spam posts. Usually, there weren’t many to clean: perhaps a few per week, but nothing that took a lot of work to get rid of. Early on, I had installed the Anti-spam module which provides three anti spam services to choose from. I selected Defensio, which offers a free filtering service for sites with less than 25,000 posts/month.

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XCode 4 installation fails with error

XCode, the developer tools suite provided by Apple is available to registered Apple Developers for free. If you are not a registered developer with Apple, you can still get XCode for a small fee through the App Store. But unlike many of the app store applications, clicking the “Install” button under the XCode description does not directly result in a working application appearing in your dock. The icon for an XCode installer shows up there instead. And that can installer isn’t trouble-free.

When I tried to run the XCode installer, it failed when it was nearly done, and displayed a message to go look for an error in the log (/var/log/install.log) where I found errors like this:

Xcode install Underlying Error=(Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain…

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