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Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Disabling the Return Key in Forms

February 15th, 2007 ^Lestat No comments

I had a few forms that included a delete button, and also a submit button together. Having filled out forms myself I have a habit of hitting the return key. I dug up an old form I made a few years ago and found this bit of javascript to disable the key. It doesn’t disable it 100%, but only when it doesn’t have focus. So it can still be tabbed to and then the return key will work. A mouse click will do at any time…

<html>

   <head>

   <!-- disable return key -->

   <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

	   function checkCR(evt) {
		   var evt  = (evt) ? evt : ((event) ? event : null);
		   var node = (evt.target) ? evt.target : ((evt.srcElement) ? evt.srcElement : null);
		   if ((evt.keyCode == 13) && (node.type=="text")) {return false;}
	     }

	    document.onkeypress = checkCR;

   </script>

   </head>

<body>...

</body>

</html>

javascript, forms, return key

Categories: General Interest, Programming Tags:

My Free copy of Vista has arrived

January 30th, 2007 ^Lestat 5 comments

Back in November I spent a little time watching videos to get a free copy of Windows Vista. (Thanks to Things That Make you Go Hmm! ) I did watch all the required video, but maybe MS is only giving out one or the other? I’m sure there were limited copies.

I had since forgot I did so. Last Thursday when I arrived home from work a discreet brown envelope arrived from Microsoft with my name on it! Heres the goods!

I’m always leary of upgrading anything, especially an OS. I hardly have enough time to upgrade, let alone troubleshoot or “un-upgrade”. But I was curious and also a bit excited. So, I decided to upgrade my laptop. Shortly after throwing in the disk I was presented with the agreement screen, along with the new looking backdrop.

Next I was presented with an option to use the upgrade advisor (optional) to see if my system had what it took. Of course it required the .NET framework to be installed in order to use it. This I really disliked. It forced me to the web to install it. This makes me wonder if I wasn’t yet connected, if it would offer to install it from the disk? After some blinking and flashing the advisor gave me the go-ahead.

Shortly after accepting this and proceeding with the upgrade Vista ran a compatability check on my hardware to see if there would be any confilcts. Most of my hardware seemed to check out. The items that didn’t were dell specific. At this point I wondered if Dell is aware of this. I also wondered “Why isnt the OS just backward compatable?”.

I had a loading screen for about an hour and a half with a note on the bottom stating “It can take a few hours to upgrade your computer”. Good thing I had other things to do!

If finally loaded. I knew right off the bat my Dell programs weren’t working right because the volume keys worked, but the visual display of it on my screen did not. It was getting late and didn’t have too much time to look it over really. I looked quickly at the nifty 3D screen chooser, and the new look of the explorer. It also came with a few gadgets running by default. It seemed to have more of a Mac look and feel. Especially explorer. It also seemed to have a larger memory footprint.

I did have a moment while trying out an MMORPG where the system suddenly shut off. When I turned it back on, there was some text on the screen complaining of temperatures, and something possibly blocking the fan. Never have seen this before. I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the dell BIOS, or software talking with Vista properly…

Vista, Windows

Categories: Computing, General Interest, Windows Tags:

3rd Party Service Annoyonces

January 25th, 2007 ^Lestat 2 comments

There’s one thing that not only annoys me, but makes me worry a bit. Any services that are offered at an online service. In this case it’s a hotmail issue. I was in the middle of an intense, time sensitive email conversation, where we were mailing back and forth. I was notified of the new mail and… AGHHHH!!!

I’ve been leaning a bit on del.icious.us lately a bit too much for comfort too. What happens if the server there gets “too busy”, goes down, or worse yet – decides to completely shut down and remove itself from the web?

What web services do you rely on? What services are you leary of?

Categories: Computing, Internet Tags:

Google homepage, RSS Update

January 23rd, 2007 ^Lestat 2 comments

A nice surprise this morning when I logged into my google home page. My RSS feeds had a new feature. They now include a little + symbol indicating that there is more to read on the feed. It gives you the first few lines of the feed. Pretty cool…

Categories: Computing, General Interest, Internet Tags:

World’s First Open Source Movie

January 5th, 2007 ^Lestat 1 comment

Watching the youtube My PC IS On Fire- Dell Laptop Tribute video I was intrigued at the video behind the silly song. After checking into the credits at the end of the show They took the video from the opensource movie called elephants dream and put a song over the top of it.

Elephants Dream is created by the Orange Open Movie Project, co-production of Montevideo and Blender Foundation both of which are located in Amsterdam.

The film is created by using totally open source software. One of them that they used was a program called Blender. I checked it out today and it looks like something I would really like to get my hands on. There are plenty of tutorials to boot. I will probably give it a good workin over within the next few months.

The Elephants dream site says:

the secondary goal is to research efficient ways to increase quality of Open Source projects in general.

The film itslef is really neat in itself. (Why do we still call them films??). At their site you can download the movie in several formats including an HD version. They also have “The Making of” series, and production videos. There is “making of” already posted at youtube.

Stop by and check it out!
Elephants Dream, open source, blender

Categories: Computing, General Interest Tags: