Solving technology problems, one at a time
For a recent project I created several sets of Windows scheduled tasks that generate iCal files and FTP them to another server. Each file-generator task executes an ASP script that creates the customized iCal file.
Continue readingWhen installing Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion or Parallels, if you get the following error: The unattend answer file contains an invalid product key” simply open the VMWare Settings or in Parallels, select Virtual Machine
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I find the new debugging tools in Safari almost as useful as Firebug. There’s a Web Inspector that lets you see exactly how the HTML is formed, a Javascript console that lets you see errors and debugging messages written into the code and much more.
But to use them you must enable the Debug menu in Safari. Open Safari preferences in the Safari Menu, click Advanced, and select Show Develop menu in menu bar.
Continue readingSometimes a web app hits it square on target for me, and for once, Google Docs has done that with its new Drag to list to upload functionality. It’s as direct as dragging something to a folder with no intermediate step. Nice!
Continue readingIn Adobe Captivate, if you check Allow User to Review Quiz in the quiz settings in Preferences, a button should appear on the Score page that allows the user to go back and see what they answered and any available feedback for each question slide. Sometimes this button doesn’t display, even if this setting is checked.
Continue readingIf clicking on a link containing a javascript results in a white page contining nothing but the word “true” or “false”, check the link to see if it is written in the form:
<a href="javascript:yourfunction();">link text</a>Continue reading
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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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.
Continue readingWhen XML data is sent back from a web service, it is in the form of a stream: there are no line breaks or indents to make it easier for humans to read. The example below is typical: the entire XML result is one continuous line. This makes it very hard to troubleshoot your application: you need a utility to put the indents and line-breaks back in.
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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