Category: Technology

Enable the Debug Menu in Safari

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 reading

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;
}
Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading