December 20, 2007

Anti-Santa: Tell someone about it.

Anti-Santa: Tell someone about it.

December 18, 2007

PNG transparency for MSIE 6

I ran into an issue last week with PNG and alpha transparency. It seems that most everything you read says that IE 6 supports PNG transparency with an easy hack. Used it, worked great ... so I thought.

What the majority of the articles don't spell out is that IE 6 only supports alpha transparency in PNG-32 format. Which unfortunately creates much larger file sizes as compared to PNG-8. :(

IE 7 however will display alpha transparency correctly in PNG-8 like the other popular browsers.

The sad fact is that around 30% of people using the internet are still on IE 6 as of this post. C'mon people upgrade your Internet Explorer browsers already. That or switch to Firefox, it's much faster anyway.

December 4, 2007

Firefox scroll bar aggravation

Fixed width centered layouts jump around in Firefox if the content scrolls on one page and not on another.

html {overflow-y: scroll;} FTW.

October 23, 2007

Gov't wants to decide who can be a Cherokee

In a nutshell, the Cherokee Nation passed a tribal law that said you had to be able to prove citizenship (according to the Dawes Roll), but the US Gov't sees that as racist against Black people and so they want to 'sever relations' with the tribe. Then out of the other side of their mouths they say that tribes will be prosecuted for harboring illegal aliens if they grant tribal citizenship to Mexicans.

Please urge your congressmen to pull their heads out of their asses. http://capwiz.com/cherokee/issues/alert/?alertid=10085201

August 3, 2007

Microsoft Access 2007 MS_WSSTemplateID bug

Strange error when trying to use a subform inside an Access form to the effect of:

SELECT*,sql_variant_property(value,'basetype') AS type FROM
::fn-listextendedproperty(N'MS_WSSTemplateID',N'user,N'dbo',N'table,N'tblCas
eInfo',NULL,NULL)


FIX:
Try to minimize the ribbon.
If the ribbon is minimized Access12 doesn't send the bugged query. Makes no sense, but works.

July 12, 2007

Awstats stopped updating

Install Geo::IP Perl Module and Install dos2unix on Debian linux

DOS text files traditionally have carriage return and line feed pairs as their newline characters, while Unix text files have the line feed as their newline character. We often find myself needing to ‘clean-up’ some files saved with Win/DOS characters, and this can be done very easy with dos2unix. While RedHat based Linux distributions will traditionally include these small utils by default, on Debian we have to install them if needed.

The file logresolvemerge.pl included in the awstats package from Debian, needs cleaning up as showed by the error:

/usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/logresolvemerge.pl -bash: /usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/logresolvemerge.pl:

/usr/bin/perl^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

The dos2unix and corresponding unix2dos, are found in the tofrodos Debian package, and to install the package just type:

#apt-get install tofrodos

Once we have dos2unix installed, I can use it to clean up very easy any file that needs that:

dos2unix logresolvemerge.pl

and the offending DOS characters are gone.

June 5, 2007

Gmail search tip (spam, deleted items)

You can search specific labels by using "label:" or for mails in trash with "in:trash". Actually, "is:", "in:" and "label:" all mean the same thing so "is:spam" "in:spam" and "label:spam" will return identical results. They work for labeled email, email statuses (read, starred) and for spam and trash. To search every single email use "in:anywhere". By default Gmail won't search deleted emails and emails marked spam.

April 25, 2007

http:BL

http:BL Project Honey Pot a service that allows you to use the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep malicious web robots off your website.

Comment spamming bot blacklist (apache 2 mod).

April 10, 2007

Joomla!

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

February 27, 2007

POP gmail for domains.

It is possible to POP domain email hosted by google with another gmail.com account by using pop.googlemail.com as the server name.

February 16, 2007

Extending root level Application.cfc files

<cfcomponent extends="/.Application">
<cfset this.name="sub_application_name">
... methods ...
... methods ...
</cfcomponent>

That will force ColdFusion to look for the root Application.cfc file and retain your session management.

Since application behavoir starts in the local folder; if you use "Application" without the /. the code will fail saying something about the component cannot extend itself.

February 6, 2007

The ethanol scam

Here are some things you should know about ethanol.


  • 30% WORSE average gas mileage with e85 than 100% gasoline. Yet you don't pay 30% less.
  • Ethanol has a higher octane rating but this doesn't improve gas mileage unless your engine is knocking.
  • Since 1978, ethanol tax exemptions have cost taxpayers more than $11 billion.
  • A gallon of gasoline has about 125,000 BTUs of energy, while a gallon of ethanol contains about 84,000 BTUs, meaning that a gallon of ethanol contains about two-thirds as much energy as a gallon of gasoline.
  • It takes around 98,000 BTUs to create a gallon of ethanol, 22,000 BTUs for a gallon of gas. The ethanol industry claims that equipment will be more efficient in the future with modernized ethanol plants, but that will only get them slightly over a 1:1 ratio.
  • You may be getting short changed if your state doesn't require pumps to be labeled that they contain 10% ethanol (aka gasohol.)

Let's say you drive 20,000 miles per year in a vehicle that gets 20 miles to the gallon at $2 per gallon of 100% gasoline. Going by the ethanol price difference at the gas station down the street our example equates to $1.68 per gallon for e85. $0.32 less per gallon is a great deal right? Wrong.

  • 1000 gallons = $2000 you would have paid at the pump for 100% gasoline. $166 per month.
  • 1400 gallons = $2352 you will have to pay for e85. $196 per month.
  • You will have saved 21 barrels of oil and used 6700 bushels (375,000 lbs.) of corn.

Bottom line is that it costs more for gas, raises taxes and wastes energy. I totally support alternative fuels, but not if they are worse than oil.

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