Anyone got some recommendations for hosting? (“Network Failure” was a trending topic on Twitter this morning for a good reason.)
I need to host this blog, another WordPress powered site, a MediaWiki powered site, some basic PHP pages and some static pages across 4 domains.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
When pop-up blockers go bad
Posted on in Browsers, Computers, Work.We have an web application at work that’s used by thirty or so people, many of whom are non-technical. The application runs in the browser window and is a mixture of standard HTML forms and Java applets.
The most comment “it doesn’t work” message I get from users is caused when the application displays this message:
Unspecified error invoking method or accessing property “showWindow”
The pop-up blocker built into Internet Explorer seems not to like Java applets trying to launch new browser windows. It blocks these by default even though they are “requested” by the user via a click and not launched automatically by a sneaky script. I guess IE can’t or won’t work out what’s happened inside the applet before it calls out to create a new window.
Not once have the users noticed the yellow bar at the top of their browser window informing them that a pop-up has been blocked.
I can see the problem for browser producers – if you make the notification too prominent it becomes as annoying as the pop-up would have been; if you make it too subtle it goes unnoticed when the pop-up needs to be noticed.
Compounding the issue is that Internet Explorer seems to maintain three separate lists of trusted/permitted sites for privacy (i.e. cookies), security, and pop-ups. Would a master list of trusted sites with the ability to fine tune options on a site-by-site basis as an advanced option be easier to use? Or is the interface just leading me to the wrong conclusion? Oh well, maybe IE9 will streamline things.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the Google Toolbar’s pop-up blocker…
Gotcha
Posted on in Computers, My Life, WWW, Work.I think I’ve found the root cause of why some date pickers are behaving oddly.
<c:if test="${criteria.startDate eq date and criteria.startDate eq null}">
criteria.startDate is a date object, however date is a calendar object representing the current date and should never be null. Hence, it’s impossible for the above test to return true.
The code is total garbage and I wrote it. 
I wish I had an excuse – I was still learning JSP, we were in a rush, it didn’t crash anything, but frankly I should have spotted the dumbness of it before now. Oh well, on with the fixing.
Very True Mood: 
aggravated
aggravatedOut with the old…
Posted on in Computers, My Life.So at the risk of turning into an old NewsBiscuit story I’ve been sorting out the box, and the carrier bag next to the box, full of “computer bits”. I think there may be some more elsewhere in the flat as well.
(Some are things I haven’t seen in a long time so I’ve been dragging names of some of these cables and connectors from the depths of my memory/Wikipedia)
- 1 AC adaptor for a scanner I threw out five years ago
- 1 unidentified AC adaptor (Canon, I don’t recall owning anything made by Canon that would need an adaptor)
- 2 kettle leads
- 1 keyboard with USB cable (would be okay if I hadn’t spilt olive oil on it this one time…)
- 1 keyboard with PS/2 cable
- 1 AT-PS/2 adaptor
- 1 AT cable
- 2 mice with PS/2 connectors
- 1 mouse with 9 pin connector
- 1 PS/2 to USB connector
- 1 USB to mini-USB cable
- 1 9 pin serial cable
- 1 parallel switchbox cable
- 1 parallel printer cable
- 1 5m Cat 5 cable
- 2 RJ11-phone cables
- 1 RJ11-RJ11 cable
- 1 RJ11 to phone connector
- 3 micro filters
- 2 sets of rubbish mini-speakers
- 1 mini-TRS to RCA cable
- 1 mini-TRS to mini-TRS cable
- 3 chargers for mobile phones we no longer own
Oh, and a 14″ Philips CRT monitor, hardly used. I suppose one of the kettle leads belongs to this.
I think I’ll be keeping 1 spare mouse, 1 emergency Internet connection kit, anything with a USB connector and the kettle leads, and ditching the rest. Now, which types of things am I not supposed to just chuck in the rubbish?
A drive by any other letter…
Posted on in Computers.On Thursday my hard drive died. Not the important one, just the one with Windows on it.
So one trip to PC World and many hours spent watching progress bars later… I have an odd situation.
I used to have a C: drive with Windows on it (part of the original configuration of the PC) and an X: drive with all my data (which I had added later). When I inserted the brand new drive in the first bay and started the Windows install it recognised that the drive in the first position was unformatted and the one in the second was formatted. Good stuff, so I told it to format and install on the first drive.
Except now it sees the first drive (the new one with Windows on it) as D: and correctly sees it as the Boot drive, and the second (i.e. the old X: drive with may data on it) as C: and sees it as a System drive.
So far only one program has been stupid enough to install itself to C:\Program Files\ rather than D:\Program Files. And googling the subject brings back lots of advice saying “if Windows installed itself with these drive letters, don’t try to change them”.
I’m not too fussed about C: and D: being the “wrong” way round, but why is D: being seen as a System drive? And what are the possible conseqences?
As my dad used to say, “Je suis tres knackered”
Posted on in Computers, My Life, Work.13 hour day at work. Bad servers. Not much with the brain. So as far as a NaBloPoMo post goes this is a token effort and made of fail.
Very True Mood: 
tired
tiredThe fat lady sings?
Posted on in Browsers, Computer Games, Computers, My Life, WWW.This wasn’t the post I was going to write tonight, but whilst double checking my facts (What? Come on, no on fact checks these days!) I discovered that the problem I wanted to write about was in fact limited to the one browser that I had been using to at the time – Opera.
I’ve been using Opera as my primary browser for a long time, since version 3 in early 1998. Back then it was like a breathe of fresh air compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer – so much faster, so more more secure, so many customisations possible. Subsequent releases added features that have gone on to be adopted by almost every other browser.
But in the last year or so, something has gone a bit wrong. I now find myself using Firefox to read Gmail at home (but, oddly, not at work) because neither of the two ajax powered interfaces work reliably in Opera. Likewise I post to this blog using Firefox because the plugin I use for crossposting to Live Journal breaks the ‘write post’ page interface in Opera. If I’m trying to geocode a batch of photos in Flickr then Opera will often hang or refuse to display the maps.
The problems are not consistent (as I said, I can use Gmail at work but not at home) and can’t really be pinned down to a fault with either the browser itself, the coding on the sites or my set up. It’s just a combination of all three which is making Opera increasingly unreliable when it comes to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
Look at the release notes for recent versions of every major and you’ll see that performance, especially RIA performance, is a major goal at the moment. Opera is rightly famed for its overall performance and speed on normal web pages but it seems to me that the performance with ajax requests is lagging behind other browsers.
Will I switch to Firefox anytime soon? I doubt it. I have ten years worth of experience with Opera – I know its quirks and secrets and it has so much that I need available straight out of the box – how many Firefox addons would I need to do the same? Is there even an addon that replicates something as simple as Opera’s “paste and go” function?
The fat lady isn’t singing yet; but she is warming up, just in case.
Very True Mood: frustrated
frustratedLaptop woes
Posted on in Computers.I have a four year old Acer Aspire 1680 which yesterday refused to boot, complaining about a missing hal.dll file.
This laptop came with a system recovery disk but not a Win XP install disk.
The laptop didn’t see the system recovery disk as bootable. So no chance of repairing or reinstalling it from that.
I stuck in the Win XP disk from my desktop and went into Repair mode. This couldn’t detect any installations of Windows on the laptop. So no chance of repairing it that way either.
I installed Windows from the desktop’s disk and then stuck the laptop’s system disk in to install drivers, etc. This worked and I now have a working Windows system; but, of course, I can’t activate it as the laptop’s product code doesn’t match the desktop’s install disk. And there’s no wireless at all despite isntalling the correct drivers, and no LAN either – it always says the cable is unplugged.
Any ideas of where to go from here?
Install linux instead? How much pain will it be to find wireless drivers that work?
[Update] – Got the wireless working, and the LAN works sometimes, but the DVD drive has packed up. How useful will it be to phone MS and explain that I have two legitimate copies of XP but only one working install disk?
Very True Mood: frustrated
frustratedXPath puzzle
Posted on in Computers, WWW.Any XSLT/XPath experts out there? I’m a little bit stuck. I have a stylesheet that is effectively transforming XHTML into XHTML (best not to ask) and is matching any element with select = "xhtml:*". However, sometimes empty a elements creep into the original XHTML and get copied across to the output. These can play havoc with the CSS and JavaScript used on the final web page so I’d like to supress them.
How do I modify the select statement above to select all XHTML elements except for a elements that have either no text node children or have text node children composed solely of white space?
In other words if the input contains <a></a> or <a /> or <a> </a> then it should be skipped (assume for now that any attributes are irrelevant and that we’ll deal with the case where it contains another element node but no text nodes later).
I tried select = "xhtml:*[not(self::a[not(text())])][not(self::a[not(text() = ' ')])]" as a first stab but as well as being very ugly it doesn’t seem to be working. Any ideas?
Ain’t technology great?
Posted on in Computers.Heavy rain and other extreme weather conditions can affect the speed of your broadband connection. In some cases this may also cause connection problems. You should bear this in mind before reporting a broadband fault.
Very True Mood: 
confused
confused