Solving technology problems, one at a time
If you have change the IP address that an IIS website is pointing to, then find that when you try to restart IIS services you get the error:
The network location cannot be reached.
…you may need to use a utility called httpcfg to tell IIS to listen specifically to the new IP.
Continue readingA couple of weeks ago, I was working on a custom HTML wrapper for Captivate quizzes that would behave one way if a score were already stored for that quiz, and another if the score were non-existent or zero.
So, how best to test for the existence of a score? Usually I test for the existence of a value with
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if (typeof foo != "undefined"){do something}
A customer called me the other day with a problem with Adobe Presenter. Video imported onto a slide would not play, no matter whether imported by Powerpoint’s insert functions or through Presenter’s own import functions.
To fix this problem, first update the Flash player to the latest version.
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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 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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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.
Continue readingI 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.
