Beginnercode.com

Recently I’ve been helping out friends and relations reformat a few computers. They are older, but are speedy enough for their basic needs. One of the sick system hogs (I’ve found) is the adobe update manager.

Most browsers come with update managers, so I feel the update manager is bloated and not necessary. It likes to place its services in the startup causing unneeded processing power.

When it came to reformatting my own laptop, there was no way I was going to install acrobat reader from adobe using their typical download page. Which incidentally, if your not careful will also install a toolbar. You need to uncheck that option.

Adobe does have a page where you can download directly without the ridiculous manager. Hat tip to Walker News, who provided me with the adobe direct download link. (http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/).

UPDATE: This no longer works. I now run older versions from old version.com

So enraged at the bailouts I bought myself a nifty yardsign from cafepress. I’ve had several passerby’s knock on my door and ask where I got it. Even a few cars stopped and inquired.

Last Friday night we had just crawled into bed (was a rough week), and there was a knock at the door. It was one of those "Are you kidding me?" moments. Anyhow I went to the door. As I approached it I heard my next door neighbor lady giving a scolding. Now I was curious.

I turned on the porch lights and found her surrounded by 4 teenage boys, and she was still ripping them a new one. She spotted a strange vehicle parked along the road and had observed the teens yanking and ripping my sign from the ground. She basically arrested them, and brought them to my door. Most of them had a "ruh-roh" look in their eyes. She had asked them if they knew what "restitution" meant. One of them who seemed to care less what happened to them attempted to answer.

Then it dawned on me. It was getting colder, and the leaves on my silver maples finally fell, and I have been incredibly busy with life lately. Perfect! I suggested to the young men that 1/2 hour of raking from each of them would cover the expense as well as the inconvenience. However, it was late at night. My neighbor reminded the boys that she got their license plate. I asked them to return the next day on their honor to come and rake. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of mischief in my youth. So in a way I was thinking "awww you are sooo busted". Then I thought about the $30 the sign cost me, and how I don’t work for someone else to throw my work away. So then I was getting upset, especially since the sign was specifically about bailouts.

Much to my surprise 3 of the 4 showed up while I was at work. My wife handed them all rakes and away they went. I just want to say how proud I am of the young men who showed for their correction. These boys will go far in life if they continue to abide by such morals (which certainly means they don’t fit the bill for a congress person).

My wife gave them all bottled water. My toddler even went out and talked with them. One of them was aspiring to be a dentist. Funny how it struck me. At first I could care less.  After the whole thing was finished I realized it worked out exactly how it was supposed to. No bailouts for them, no grudges on both parties. Just facing the music, like men, and moving on.

As for the one that had no spine… I’m quite sure that he will someday be forced to grow one, but it’s too bad that it will probably be in a much severe way later in life. If he doesn’t learn life lessons now, he’ll end up in congress.

I’m so glad there are people like my neighbors and that there are young men like this.

I ran across an interesting situation where some users of mine were complaining that a form I created “didn’t work”. Kind of strange to get this complaint after almost a full year of operation. I remember testing the xhtml and css design in both firefox and IE browsers and it all checked out. What I didn’t think of checking was the behavior of browsers when one presses the return key. With the help of Fiddler (thanks to Casey Williams for the Fiddler suggestion) this is what I discovered:

(For a larger, more detailed image click here)

As you can see, when my IE users were pressing the return key, the button itself was not being $_POSTed. So what right? Well what if you were checking if the submit button was pressed before doing any processing? Like so…

< ?php
if(isset($_POST['button_name'])){
    // validate the user entries...
}
?>

This would fail if the user hit the return key in IE7. I haven’t tested earlier versions.

View the example. Test it in both browsers.

Right now the only thing that was suggested to me was to add a hidden field to mimic the submit button in your form like so:

<form ...>
    <input type="hidden" name="button_name" value="whatever"... />
</form>

That works just fine.

From perusing irc and several forums, the only response as to WHY this happens are comments like “It’s IE, what do you expect?”. I’m already annoyed that IE doesn’t think it has to adapt to web standards, but this ont really caught me off guard.

I’m wondering if any readers might have some input on my inputs ;P

Ahoy there!
Just a reminder that today is talk like a pirate day! Arggghhh!

All posts and comments for today will be translated in to pirate speak by using the nifty text plugin from Dougal Campbell. It looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while, but it still works. At least in version 2.1.3.

So what are you waiting for people!? Let’s have some fun in the comments!

I was searching my Vista accessories for hyperteminal and stumbled upon a built in screen shot tool in Vista called Snipping Tool. I’m sure to most it’s nothing new, but coming late in the game leaves for more surprises!

You can find it in the start menu -> all programs -> accessories.

By default there is an outline around any window space that you choose to grab. This can be turned off by clearing the check box in the options ->“Show selection ink after snips are captured“.

You can take snips of menus and the like this:

1. Open Snipping Tool
2. Press Escape
3. Navigate to the menu, or start menu area
4. Press Ctrl + Print Screen (PC)
5. Use the snip tool

Of course to take screen shots of the snipping tool, I needed to use the old stand by Screen Grab Pro. Otherwise it took a selection of the desktop behind the app.