dougrdotnet

My company, Douglas Reynolds Consulting, provides RIA development services, business systems, and Executive Administration services to our clients.  We depend heavily on our systems in order to provide services to our clients.  In many cases we work with our clients via remoting which reduces costs and increases productivity.  When a computer goes down, it is of critical importance to us that we get the system back up and running as quickly as possible.  This last week our Executive Administrator’s primary notebook had an issue arise with the DC power input board which rendered it unable to charge, as a result it wasn’t able to run once the battery dissipated.  In many situations I would simply replace a defective board or other component in order to repair a machine.  In the case of notebook computers, this is something that we would normally send in the the manufacturer for repair.  However, working with the manufacturer can take weeks for turn-around and we cannot wait weeks.  Our options are really to replace the unit or to find a way to get it repaired quickly.  Enter Brian Mergen, down at BK Systems Circuitry & Design. I called up Brian and explained what we had going on.  Brian is an expert in computer electronics, circuitry, and design.  He said, “Bring it in, I am almost positive what the problem is”.  I had the notebook in on his desk about 30 minutes later, he had a quick look and said, “I’ll have it fixed tomorrow”.  The next day, early afternoon, he called and said I had options.  I made a decision, he said, “I’ll have it ready in two hours”.  Two hours later he calls and says its ready.  Our Executive Administrator had her machine back and was again working with clients on her notebook, instead of our desktop, in less than 24 hours.

If you ever have any electrical, circuitry, or electronics design needs, be sure to give Brian a call.

BK Systems Circuitry & Design
2854 SW 153rd Drive
Beaverton, OR 97006
503-520-1000

Last time, I completed detailing the steps needed to clone a disk image to an external drive using SuperDuper.  The process was quite seamless and very simple, SuperDuper did a great job and stands up to its name.  We ended up doing some general comparisons between the old and new drive and are now ready to remove the new drive from the external enclosure, remove the old drive from a MacBook, and install the new drive in its place.  We’ll then boot up with the new drive to see how it went.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

I left off in Hard Drive Upgrade with an external drive prepared and ready to receive an image of my existing primary drive.  That article discussed backup strategies, a list of items needed in order to perform the data migration and what is needed in order to get started. We then stepped through the process of formatting and partitioning an external drive.

In this article, we are going to go through the process of using SuperDuper.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

An external drive is an excellent way to create on-site backups of your data.  External drives are quite small and can function perfectly for taking your data with you and sharing on other host computers.  Often times, organizing large files, such as video projects, images, audio, etc. are more conveniently stored on an external drive, especially when local disk space is a consideration.  Using an external drive is one of the easiest ways to transfer a disk image to a new drive in the effort of upgrading one’s primary drive.

For my personal situation, which was to create an image of my existing drive and transfer it onto an upgrade drive, I decided that an external drive was better, faster, cheaper.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

Have you ever battled with trying to get a header to run inline with your paragraph text, as is common with print-style publications?

Getting Your Header

  inline with your paragraphs is really easy and here is a cross-browser compatible way to do it using standard HTML and one CSS rule. I will keep typing here for a bit so as to make sure we wrap, that way you can see how the paragraph text flows as normal since we are working off of the same baseline. However, if you want to throw a header inside of a paragraph then you will effect line spacing due to the increase in size of the header’s box. So if I do

this

then the spacing between this line and the line above will be different than the remainder of the paragraph.

Here is the inline (no pun intended) code which I used for the example above:

Of course you could remove the inline styles and place them in an external sheet – Here is the HTML:

And here is the CSS;


.inline {
display: inline;
}


\

Couldn’t get much easier than that.

Hopefully we will get some CSS2 support for the run-in element, at this time I think it is only supported in Opera 9 (correct me if I am mistaken).

Technorati Tags: CSS display inline

I am a bit behind in installation of IE7, I don’t enable automatic updates, I don’t install brand new MS products, and I use IE somewhere around 20 percent of the time when I have to as a daily browser.  However, I always test my developments with IE – Why you ask? – because it matters.
As of November, 2006 IE7 for a 2006 release already owns 7.1% of the browser market, IE6 holds 49.9%, and IE5 still maintains 2.9%.  This is compared to Firefox’s 29.9%, Mozilla’s suite of Safari, Konqueror, and Gecko’s combined 2.5%, Netscape Navigator’s 0.2%, and Opera 7, 8, and 9 which in the same month held a 1.5% share (W3Schools, 2006).

Last month I finally updated to IE7 on one of my days where I had time to perform system maintenance tasks and software updates. I have to say that at first glance I was very happy with the visual appearance. Enhancements, to IE6, such as RSS, tabbed browsing, plugin support, and developer tools brought IE7, albeit tardy, to a much more usable development platform. Microsoft reported early on in the IEBlog just following the beta 1 release that they were being proactive in many areas. Areas such as Security hold top priority to the development team. Following security at a close second, the development team emphasizes the importance of “removing the biggest causes of difficulty for web developers” (Chris Wilson, 2005). Mr Wilson also mentioned “that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 (2.1, once it’s been Recommended)” (Chris Wilson, 2005). Sadly though, he goes on to state that “it isn’t even intended, in my understanding, as our priority” (Chris Wilson, 2005) in response to will IE7 pass the Acid2 Browser Test..

Basically, we have a long way to go.

I have a tendency to share sentiments with Ryan Stewart as he discussed his displeasure with IE7′s CSS support. He stated “It’s a shame because the IE Team really had a chance to step up and make IE a contender” (Ryan Stewart, 2005). Later Mr. Stewart published a follow up after reviewing the IEBlog entry referenced above. Still, I tend to side with Mr. Stewart’s original view that IE could have been more and agree with his follow up that CSS is important to us.

On the other side of the coin, I have been reading over at Position is Everything about the new issues developer’s are facing as a result of IE7′s conformity to CSS standards and the effect this has had on legacy developments for IE5 and 6. Now that IE7 has repaired numerous issues developer’s are concerned that their legacy code which was hacked for IE5 and IE6 no longer works in IE7.
I just have to ask that maybe we should assess weather or not we should be hacking fixes in the first place? If the development community would have taken a stance and never begun to develop work-a-rounds in the first place, do you think IE would have taken a different path toward W3C standards?

Since I have installed and been testing in IE7, I have to say that the intentions of my CSS layout have been better rendered in IE7 than that of Firefox. Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox! Firefox brings me joy, usability, and an overall good feeling. I just find it interesting that things are looking pretty darn good in IE7.

Technorati Tags: CSS, IE7, W3C, Acid2, Firefox

Inspired as an idea from Robert Owen and some research at Community MX I worked up a cool CSS alternative for popups which require nothing but basic HTML and CSS.
That’s right, no JavaScript!

What I have below is pretty simplified but there is allot you can do to spice it up and make it work with your site’s look and feel.

Robert’s JS example brings up a a new window popup using a standard href and is a great way to provide, as in his example, a particular item’s details”.  In my case I was looking for something that stayed in the same window yet still provided additional information using a simple hover and gave the visitor an option to open a new window if they desired even more detail.

Here is the CSS with some formatting:

a {position: relative;}

a span {display: none;}

a:hover span {
background: Silver;
border: 1px solid darkblue;
display: block;
font-size: medium;
width: 300px;
top: 5px;
position: relative;
height: 100px;
left: 75px;
text-align: left;
font-family: ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif;
color: navy
}

And here is the HTML

<a href=”#”><img src=”myImage” /><span>My Popup Content</span></a>

Note that the image and the popup (tool-tip) are both links where you can assign a URL of your choice for a related information page or whatever suites your purpose.

You can also use the alt atribute of the image tag but be sure to align your Popup accordingly.

Technorati Tags: CSS, Popup, Tool-Tip,Span