Trond Ulseth's Blog

Alternate row colors with jQuery

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:22:00 -0600

I was in the need of a script for alternating row colors in a table on a web site I'm doing. I've done this before, but since I'm getting into jQuery these days I thought I'd try to find a way of doing it using this. Well, a little Googling and I came upon this website. This is an excerpt from the book Learning jQuery. Need to try and get my boss to buy that one.

The IE6 Peekaboo bug - solution

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:29:00 -0600

I was doing the closing check on a clients web site before posting it live, and so I was testing to see that the site looks and works ok in all major browsers. This of course includes the dreaded monstrosity of a web browser IE6. For some unclear reason some parts of the content did not show. It was just gone. After some googling around I found that this is a pretty well known phenomena, and is named the Peekaboo bug. Now if you google "Peekaboo bug" you'll find plenty of help. The first solution that I stumbled across that helped me was to add a line-height attribute to the element surrounding all the content that was disappearing. To give propper credit, I found the solution here.

Dealing with IE6 and png's - part 3

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:37:00 -0600

This entry will look at a couple of problems that might arise when using the methods outlined in part 1. Let's look at what we did. We had this part of css...


#banner {
height: 114px;
background-image: url(/images/header_bg.png)
}

...where the transparent background png would not work in IE6. What we did was change it to this:


#banner {
height: 114px;
background-image: url(/images/header_bg.png)
}

/* IE hack */
* html #banner {
background-image: none;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='/images/header_bg.png');
}

Here we use a IE hack to set background to none, and uses the IE only AlphaImageLoader filter to provide the png background. So far, so good.

Problem 1

The #banner element has a set height in our example here. But if you try this on an element which have no set heigth, the background will not show. What usually makes the trick here is to add height: 100%; to the fix like so:


/* IE hack */
* html #banner {
background-image: none;
height: 100%;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='/images/header_bg.png');
}

Problem 2

When using this fix you will often experience that url's will not be clickable, and form elements and text is not selectable. What I have found to work is to first create a inner element. So if your html code was so:



Some text and/or images here.

This needs to be changed to:




Some text and/or images here.

Then change your css to something like this:


/* IE hack */
* html #banner {
background-image: none;
height: 100%;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='/images/header_bg.png');
}

* html #innerbanner {
position: relative;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
z-index: 10;
}

The most important thin here as I understand is the relative positioning of the innerbanner element, but the other attributes might help as well, so I always leave them in there.

Problem 3

The code css code above is ugly, messy and it will not validate. I suggest you make a separate css file called something like ie6_or_less.css and put the IE hack css into it. Then in your html template call it like this:

This conditional statement within html comments makes sure that only IE browsers version 6 or less will load and use the ugly code. That wrapps it up for this round.

Comments & Captchas a little "bananas" on my blog

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:26:00 -0600

Some time ago the captcha image would not show when you wanted to comment a post on my blog. When I found out I just disabeled captchas. Today I found the same problem had occured again - so in to the admin I went, and captchas were enabeled - "Darn, how did that happen" I thought. So I disabeled them again. Then I went to check. Now the captcha image was there and working, but I just disabeled it??? Not sure what is going on here. I'm in the process of moving to another host (yet again) - I'll probably put a new version of BlogCFC on the new server, and just see what happens then.

Learn a new language today - for free

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:32:00 -0600

Ok - I'm not talking about a programing language, but an actual spoken language. Mango is a free language course application (in Flash), now open for public beta. Being married to a Lithuanian with Russian as mother tounge - and kids who also talk Russian I've long time had as a goal to improve my Russian skills - but always put it of until "tomorrow". Maybe this time I'll manage :) You can register and take one or more of the following courses: Spanish
Russian
French
Italian
Mandarin Chinese
German
Japanese
Brazilian Portuguese
Greek
English for Spanish Speakers
English for Polish Speakers The url is http://www.trymango.com.

I'm a Cool Non-Nerd

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 05:16:00 -0600

File Explorer issues in CFEclipse soon history?

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:25:00 -0600

I have the Trac page with the File Explorer issue in CFEclipse automatically opening in one of the tabs when I open my browser. Until recently nothing was there except the bug report itself. But now it seems something is happening. Someone with the username burnsra has posted a fix, so now I guess we'll just have to wait for the fix to make it into a upgrade. Have a look at the Trac page here.

Jump on the OO bandwagon now!

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:51:00 -0600

During the last years there's been very many really good blog posts on all levels on programing CF OO style. I even had my own "Object Oriented Blog Process" series - which turned out not to be so good :) But at the time there are two series of blog post that aims at teaching you how to get on with OO. The first one is Charlie Griefers (aka CJ) "going OO" series, documenting a OO noobs journy into OO territory. It can be found here. The other series take another approach as it is clearly written by someone who knows his stuff; "Object Oriented Coldfusion" by Adrian J. Moreno. I don't know who Adrian is from before, but he writes great stuff. Find it here.

While waiting for the File Explorer to be fixed in CFEclipse

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:10:00 -0600

It's been a while since I made the transition to CFEclipse as my full-time CF coding tool. However, even after Mark's heroic efforts after me bugging him the FTP functionality in the File Explorer left a little to be desired. This I could live with though. But now that the File Explorer itself has stopped working, so I can no longer open any local files that are not part of a project, that is worse. We have a "zillion" clients in work and to create a project to fix or update small things is not something I want to do. But I came up with a temporary work-around: Created a project called "temp" and pointet it to wherever. For each location on your computer or (as in my case) the local network, right click on the project and choose "New > Folder". Name the folder something like "Our smaller clients" or whatever suits the location you are interested in. Then click the "Advanced" button on the bottom and check the "Link to folder in the file system" check box, and browse to the directory you need. This way you can still have access to all the local files you need without opening a new project each time. - - - ps - you can keep an eye at the situation with the File Explorer at http://trac.cfeclipse.org/cfeclipse/ticket/332 pss - Mark you're still my hero, and well deserve the break you've taken of from CFEclipse. However, when you get back to it, and wonder where to start of, you know where my vote is ;)

What's happening with newBee? (Kind of a Roadmap)

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:14:00 -0600

According to riaForge the newBee page has been seen more than 3600 times, and the framework itself downloaded 60 times. That is much more than I would have thought. I've not heard from anyone who has downloaded and tried it though, so as far as I know I'm the only one who have developed applications/sites using this framework. However I still plan on developing the framework further, and also promote it a bit more once it reaches a 1.0 release.

Here are the things I would like to do before calling it a 1.0 release:

Whitespace controll Look into how much whitespace controll I can do within the framework without affecting how you would code a newBee application.
Assigning results to scopes This would make it easier to make multiple step forms, save login information etc.
Save named views A little "rip-of" of how Model-Glue does it.
More and better documentation
General code cleaning and commenting the code better

I'm sure there was at least one more thing I had on my mind..... Well, well - that's the list for now

I'm also planing a website for the framework.

EDIT: Now I remember the last thing I wanted to do: Error catching. And maybe some debugging output as well.

I'm on YouTube

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:00:00 -0600

Recently I picked up the guitar after a 8 year break in playing. The 13th of July was the first time playing live with my band Cephire. We gathered 6 bands ourselves included and arranged what we called "Metal Night" which we plan to make a recurring event - next one planned for November. But I'm going away from the topic. What I wanted to say is that a clip from our first consert has found it's way to YouTube (thanks to our bass player). You can check it out here. If you wonder - I'm the one to the left with the blue guitar.

A couple of "advanced" ANT (in Eclipse) questions

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:35:00 -0600

I started with ANT today. I see a huge potential in it. However I have now used the whole day trying to get two tings to work - and simply can't find the answer. I hope some ANT experts will take the time to answer the following questions: 1. Can I create a new Eclipse project with a ANT build? If so, how? 2. I get an error trying to create a database for my project with the following code:






		
CREATE DATABASE idlmedia02_${var.port}

The error: CREATE DATABASE statement not allowed within multi-statement transaction. Is there a way to use CREATE DATABASE statements from within ANT? As always when I ask for help - I would be really thankful to anybody who can shed light on these subjects.

Eclipse: I need help with the File Explorer View

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:53:00 -0600

I have no clue why, but all of a sudden browsing the Local Filesystem in the File Explorer View stopped working. I had hoped this would be corrected when I upgraded to Eclipse 3.3 today, but the problem is the same, even though I made a clean new install of Eclipse. See bellow to see how it looks when I try to browse my c: directory. If someone has any idea on how I can fix this I would be most grateful.

Aptana with AIR support

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:10:00 -0600

I decided to upgrade to version 3.3 of Eclipse today. I went for a clean install, and then add the plugins I use. So after installing CFEclipse first (of course), I went on over to the Aptana website to get the Aptana plugin (which I mainly use for CSS), and there on the front page they announce that Aptana now supports AIR. I've not checked it out my self yet. Actually I took the time to write this post even before downloading the Aptana plugin. So go check it out your self at: http://www.aptana.org/air/.

New FarCry form builder plugin released

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:47:00 -0600

With this plugin you can let users of FarCry add custom forms to their websites. Each form submission will be emailed to an address that is defined for each form, as well as being logged and available from the FarCry administration. This is the full version of the plugin that was started in my FarCry plugin tutorial. A pdf file with documentation is enclosed in the download. This plugin is open-source under the Apache License, Version 2.0 If you have questions or would like to contribute in further enhancing the plugin, please contact me. Also if you use the plugin in your FarCry projects I'd love to hear about it.

DOWNLOAD

This plugin is released by IDLmedia AS