mysiteonline™

Be carefuly when using an unfamiliar coding language

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-12-03T21:30:16Z

So, I was learning a scripting language awhile back to help automate and secure some things with our public computers. The scripting language is for use with an application called "AutoIT", which is, well, both a compiler and run-time for the scripts themselves.

I needed to detect if an application window was present on the screen, and if it was, take appropriate action. So, looking at the following code documentation:

WinExists
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Checks to see if a specified window exists.
WinExists ( "title" [, "text"] )

I wanted to make sure that things were working as they should, so my test for this was as follows:

The problem, which I was unaware of, is that I apparently can't make the test (value) comparison in the manner that I did. The proper way to use this method was as follows:

What a bummer.

Recent Book Purchases (about 20 minutes ago)

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-12-03T16:52:15Z

I'm not much of a traditional reader. Ever since I was jaded from using my actual imagination by my father, I had completely lost interest in fictional writing, and I never had an interest in history. My primary reading interests now focus only on technology, programming, and things related therein. So, although my reading habits may be boring, I'm still excited about my recent purchases.

I've been needing to use Subversion for awhile now, and although I have it set up and installed, running, and have used it a few times, I really don't know the actual power and capabilities to truly use it, so...now hopefully I will with the following book.

...and in the honor of trying to keep up with the current trends, I also purchased a book to show how to use (and the reasons for using) Git:

...currently on pre-order, the book is released at the end of the month. Until Git is easily installable on Windows without a lot of pre-requirements, I don't see this being very helpful to me though, but it's always important to at least have a working knowledge.

Now, as a somewhat interesting book that I've felt I would be able to use well in my market, I came across (quite by accident) a little treasure entitled "Selling to the VP of 'No'".

Here's the book's description:

He might be your sales prospect, your boss, an investor, or the chairman of the board. He is also one tough dude. He has to be. Every hour of every day, someone tries to sell him something. He has one way to deal with them: Say "NO." It’s brutally simple, but it works, because most people are simply a waste of his time. Selling Stars know how to break through that tough exterior and get the VP of NO to listen to their story. In this short, visual book, you will learn the secrets of the Selling Stars: how to turn the VP of NO into the VP of GO!

Awesome.

Statistics on answering patrons' questions.

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-11-20T19:34:47Z

So I've been asked by the Adult Services department head to come up with a means to retrieve and store statistics for "Questions Answered at the Public Service Desks". Currently, they're using a pen and paper approach from a template created in Microsoft Word. Each staff member (reference librarian) at the desks (currently using the paper document) has to print out one sheet per day (therefore, the Reference Desk has 2 sheets each day, Information Desk has one sheet) and will tally (slash slash slash slash, cross) the number of questions asked, separated by hour(s) (9-11, 11-1, 1-3, 3-5, 5-9). There's also a section for notes such as "We need the following items...", "Interesting Questions", and "Suggested books/items to order".

He mostly wanted a way to reduce the paper trail and become more "green". All those papers are then returned to his desk at the end of the day. He tallies the results at the end of the month. That's approximately 3*5*4 = 60 full pieces of paper to go through to count (by hand) all of the stats, as well as read (all at once) the comments and/or notes. Granted, I don't know if he keeps a running tally (one would hope), but either way, that's a lot of unnecessary work.

Since other desks/departments may find this useful, I've extended the schema in the database that will hold the information to account for that. Although it can all be managed via a web page (and is currently working as such in skeletal form -- thank you, CakePHP and 5 minutes of time), I've opted for a better solution. Since it'd be unruly to require a webpage to be open at all times, or dealing with load-times on a webpage from a favorite or desktop shortcut, I'll be developing a dynamically created UI using Adobe Air to allow for a desktop application. All it will require from the staff member is to either click on a button (and then verify -- requested from the department head), or fill in a text box. Upon installation the application will verify which public service desk it is at and use that information from then on.

The department heads in charge of each service desk (in case any other departments wish to use this) will then be able to view reports and statistical data from a staff intranet page, as the database will be maintained on our webserver. I'll probably integrate it with Open Flash Chart like I did on a personal project - it turned out really nice looking and was easily stylized (with a little understanding of its settings).

Hopefully when all done I can post some screenshots of the first draft of the final product. It's meant to be very simple, but nice with features...we'll have to see if I deal with connection issues to the database (as Adobe Air also has a local file store and can check on server responses). Either way, I have a lot of reading ahead of me on Adobe Air now that the database schema is complete. The statistics will come last...but we should have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly break downs.

Your Dirty Mind

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-11-06T01:55:35Z

Saw this on YouTube after doing a search on motivational posters of the same title.

Website Scaling Issues with EMs (CSS) and IE6/7

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-10-30T18:41:32Z

When the Saratoga Springs Public Library website was redesigned, although I used a static width (set to something like 720px wide) for the content area, I intended for it to be easily resized with supporting browsers. I made sure to set everything (else) to size with EMs in CSS (similar to percentage).

...an issue with the top navigation cropped up on some computers that I could not identify, nor could I figure out how to solve. For 95% of browsers I tested, and 100% with a vanilla install of Windows, everything worked fine. For those others, the navigation links at the top of our site just didn't seem to align. I thought it might have something to do with DPI or visual settings, but I had no idea how to accommodate for that.

Well I completely accidentally ran in to William Kolean's solution of fixing this issue with Microsoft's CSS expression engine. As the issue was only seen in Internet Explorer (and I already had an IE-specific stylesheet to fix tiny issues), this was a perfect solution, and I put it in to use (just now, actually). I can verify that it worked (on my first and only test) so I'm quite happy. I thought I'd post this for my own records, and to help others too.

http://www.williamkolean.com/williamblog/?p=18
Thanks, William!

15daysofjquery.com -- updated?

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-10-29T16:07:11Z

Jack Slocum, someone who intends to make money off his knowledge and expertise (and why shouldn't he?) over the jQuery "framework" (is it a framework or a library?), has updated his 15DaysOfJQuery website. If anyone's looking for a good place to start learning jQuery and hasn't yet delved in to this very helpful codebase, I found this website's introductions helpful. They're very basic and get you going, "Oh cool!" right away.

AAAAAAAAAnyways...like I said, Jack's updated his site and is now selling a DVD with 2+ hours of video tutorials showing off jQuery. He's also promised some new and updated tutorials to show off interesting techniques with jQuery, as well as some of the popular plugins. He may even be so kind as to create and release a plugin of his own creation! Yay...

Check out his post on the topic for more info and possible updates.

LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-10-10T02:27:17Z

Libraries, and many other institutions, have a difficult time leveraging the ability to allow customers access to communicate with them easily, using one of the most popular online communication tools available: Instant Messaging.

There are many problems, such as:

Multiple Protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, GIM, Jabber, IRC, MSN, etc...)
Inability to transfer conversations to another staff member more capable of handling a question or issue
Software compatibility
Operating System compatibility
Web-based communication tools for these protocols

So what's left out there?
Continue reading "LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging"

VBA (Excel 2007) Hide empty columns

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-10-08T16:42:16Z

An online friend asked me for some help in hiding all empty columns for every sheet within an Excel workbook. I figured I'd share the code:

(also on pastebin)

Perhaps someone else will find it useful for some odd reason.

Cool CSS Trick with IE6 Bugs

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-09-29T16:21:52Z

I was creating a replicated PDF form in HTML/CSS for work today and needed to get a portion of the form (signature field) to rest at the bottom of the page, whichever page it was. This was easily accomplished in CSS-friendly browsers by using position:fixed; bottom:0; ... however, IE6 does not support the "fixed" position with CSS. Not good...not all of our staff members in the building have been upgraded to use IE7 - most have, a couple have not.

Stu Nichols has found a way to "trick" IE6 in to allowing something almost entirely the same by way of using another CSS bug. It's a bit hackish, but it's not an actual hack. I used IE's conditional CSS to make sure it didn't mess up any other browser's rendering, but the link (and demo) is below in case anyone else needs the same functionality.

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/fixed.html

Ironically enough, this doesn't seem to work in Safari for Windows properly (haven't tried it with my Apple). Thankfully for me, I don't need to cope with that issue for this form on our intranet. I imagine it's actually a bug in the browser's rendering (only for print, it works just fine for online display).

CoverFlow Fun at Work

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-09-19T15:39:02Z

I had some fun mixing a couple different JavaScript technologies and web services together to create something "interesting", and helpful for our Children's Room.

Introducing the Saratoga Springs Public Library's Children's Room Photo Gallery!

For the services, I am using Google's AJAX API to serve up my jQuery library, rather than me having to deal with keeping it upgraded and gzip/compressing it. You can read more about it here. For the photographs, I am using Flickr, as many other libraries do. It was one of the easiest and quickest that I could use with a nice desktop-based management tool that also didn't hog network bandwidth while searching for new photos (ala Picasa, or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery). Now staffers in that department can create their own photo sets (or photo categories) and manage their own images.

For the JS effects, I am using two separate libraries. Since I'm using Google's AJAX API to serve up jQuery I'll start with that one... I'm using ThickBox to show a larger version image of a thumbnail when clicked on. The nice things about Thickbox is that (1)it integrates with the other script I'm using, (2)it automatically resizes the images to fit (if too big for the viewport), and (3)is very versatile in its use of modal dialog support. The other library I am using is something called "ImageFlow" written by Finn Rudolph, which is one of the best JS-based CoverFlow implementations I have seen. The Official ImageFlow website isn't as fancy as someone else's implementation, so you may wish to check out the version that also has YouTube integration, and automatic rotation/slideshow.

I know there's currently no way to get from that page back to our home page or other areas of our website. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned about that at the moment, I have many more pressing non-web-related projects of higher importance (at work) to work on, unfortunately.

Update: Apparently ThickBox is not being fired with the newest photoset, and I'm not sure why...it worked before a staff member updated the textual descriptions of the images, because I tried it. No idea why it's not working now - anyone have any ideas?

Twine: The Semantic Puzzle (RDFa Group)

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-08-21T14:46:51Z

From my new subscription to the Twine (data?) service, I subscribed to the RDFa group to hear, and read about new (or interesting) technologies around the web. It's been quite some time since I had heard about Freebase Parallax (last read about in the Web4Lib digest), and when reading over the article in my Twine digest email, I took a second look. The video demo really showed its power. But, to understand the Semantic Web (RDFa), I'd suggest anyone interested read over that article first. It discusses ideologies on how one should be able to find information and data over the web.

A Good Data Browser Allows You to Navigate the Knowledge Space by Car
...and...
Twine, if you're interested - currently in private Beta.

Browsers and minimum CSS overflow on Windows XP

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-08-01T17:47:11Z

The title of this post is a bit misleading; I was trying to stuff it for SEO keywords without it being too long.

I ran into an issue with regard to the CSS property of "overflow" that I had set to "auto". When I set some test text of about 100 or so continuous "Hello " words, the scroll bars worked just fine. I then tweaked my node's height, and text and continued, but... The scroll bars weren't showing up, and my text was outside the bounds of the box (and therefore clipped)! Oh no! Tragedy of tragedies!

Through a little experimentation (in the end, this took me about 30 minutes to track down, and then test in all the browsers), I was able to determine what the problem was.
Continue reading "Browsers and minimum CSS overflow on Windows XP"

Sharing an Internet Connection with a Cell Provider

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-07-18T17:29:58Z

An interesting question came up on the Web4Lib daily-digest today. I replied directly to the author (I think, never understand how listservs work) but I thought I'd share this anyhow as it's not a hugely sought-after solution. Note: there are probably other, better ways to do this. Comments and other solutions are welcome. I am under the assumption you are using Windows XP (if anyone wishes to make alterations for Vista or another OS, you're more than welcome in the comments - if Linux and not using the shell, please specify which distro).

The question:

Has anyone tried to network an internet connection that involves a Verizon PC card in a laptop. Ideally I would like to be able to have 2 or 3 laptops sharing that one connection, but I have no idea where to start!

Hopkins County - Madisonville Public Library

My response:

You would need 2 other components:
- 1 crossover cable (it's a CAT5 cable with slightly different wiring)
- 1 "splitter", so a hub, switch, or router.

If you use a wireless router, you'll only need the one cable. If you use a hub, switch, or regular router you'll need a standard CAT5 cable for the other computers to connect to.

Connect the crossover cable to the LAN port on the back of the laptop.

Connect the other end of the crossover cable either in to a single computer, or the "splitter"'s "INTERNET" port.

In Control Panel, go to "Network Connections".

CTRL+CLICK on the two network connections you want to be sharing (the Verizon, and the Local Area Connection).

Right click on one of the two, choose "Bridge Connections". (I can't verify what to do to finish the bridge as I only have one connection on my PC at the moment. A quick internet search could probably tell you.)

If the "splitter" you were using was powered on, you may have to wait a moment for it to get an IP address, otherwise you can always power cycle it to renew its IP. The same goes for the PCs if you don't know how to force it to get a new IP.

I *think* that should do it. If I missed something from memory of when I did internet sharing, you can just do an internet search for examples or tutorials on "network bridging winxp". Switch out "winxp" for whatever OS you might be using if otherwise.

I hope this can help someone looking for a solution - or at the very least, get them on the right track. I am assuming here that the cell provider is not using the LAN port (either a USB or PCMCIA port).

Update: I believe I've enforced some stricter SPAM filtering on my blog (i.e.: any at all). At the very least, I guess I'm now more popular? Sorry for any inconvenience. Comments are enabled once again.

I18n and L10n in PHP

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-07-15T17:29:06Z

There was recently a nice posting from PHPDeveloper.org linking to an article by Florian Eibeck, where on his blog he discusses some solutions to these extremely fun situations.

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/342-Multilingual-Websites-with-PHP.html

Firefox Download Day

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — 2008-06-17T21:06:34Z

Today is the release of Firefox version 3.0. The world over plans to celebrate the release by pledging to download the browser in an attempt to create a Guinness Book of World Records entry for most downloads of a single product on its release day. Although there are no other holders for this entry, the Mozilla Corporation intend to beat Firefox 2's record set a few years back. Join in if you are a Firefox user!

In other news, Opera v9.5 is out, and is sporting some fancy CSS3 additions!