Development
Site updated – Faster and better!
The upgrade of this blog from WordPress 3.3 to 3.4 on Dreamhost didn’t go as smoothly as planned. In fact it failed fairly spectacularly – unable to complete the required database upgrade. However, many clouds have silver linings. In this case it meant that I brought forward my plans to ditch the horribly slow hosting provided by Dreamhost in the USA and switch over to the new VPS provided by BHost in the UK.
📖 Posts | 📎 Development, Enterprise, Software | 🔖 Accessibility, Design, Enterprise Systems, RNIB, UI, User Interface, WAI
Enterprise System Design and Accessibility
It isn’t just web pages that are required to meet accessibility standards and laws. All applications have to. This short article is a reminder to application designers and builders regarding the standards and legal obligations they have to meet.
Diigo Bookmarks 05/12/2011
<p class="diigo-description"> “Jash is a DHTML-based window that gives you command-line JavaScript access to the current browser window. With this console you can quickly debug scripts, manipulate the DOM, view the current page’s objects, functions, and variables, execute arbitrary Javascript, enter new CSS (in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari), and much more.” – A useful tool to execute JavaScript, make live (temporary) CSS changes to a page, discover the page structure, etc.
Bug in WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types
Well this one threw me! I was trying out the new custom post types in WordPress 3.0 RC1 and could not work out why mine wasn’t working even when I copied an example from the web and only changed a few things. It turns out that there is a limitation in the naming of post types – they cannot have a name longer than 20 characters! If you use more than 20 characters, the “Publish” button becomes “Submit for Review” and if you submit, you get the dreaded: Are you sure you want to do this?
Nearest Postcode Search in Microsoft Excel
I need to find a load of addresses by proximity to a postcode. I have the addresses in a Microsoft Access database. Download Paul Jenkins’s UK Postcode csv and import into Access as a table Create a query on your own table adding the following calculated field: <pre>PCregion: Trim( Left( [My Table]![Postcode], InStr( [My Table]![Postcode], ” ” ) ) )</pre> Create a second query that joins the above query to the imported postcode table.
Cygwin BASH function to open the latest version of a document
One handy function I’ve added to .bashrc (so it is always available) under Cygwin (the LINUX command environment for Windows) works out the current working version of a document. It assumes that you keep copies that have a version number or date in the file name that will sort correctly. You can use it with an alias like this: If you name your documents sensibly such as “a-document-2009-07-20.doc” or “a-document-v01.01.doc”, then the latest version of the file will be opened in the default application
Running Komodo Edit Open Source Code Editor Under Windows 7
The open source version of Komodo’s code editor and development environment Komodo Edit is a great tool for development. I use it for PHP, HTML, JavaScript and more. However, I haven’t done any serious coding for a while so I haven’t needed to run it under Windows 7 even though I had it installed. When I did, I was disapointed to find it behaving very poorly. It wouldn’t resize properly without messing up the screen.
Copy and Paste to OneNote (AutoHotKey script)
After yesterdays OneNote tool post, I thought I’d do another while I think about it. Another annoyance of OneNote is it’s lack of control over pasting information from the clipboard. I’ve raised a suggestion with MS to improve this; you can see my comment in the newsgroup. To ease things a little if you need to copy and paste lots of stuff to OneNote, here is an AutoHotKey script to help.
📖 Posts | 📎 Development, Microsoft, Windows | 🔖 AutoHotKey, Configuration, Office, OneNote, Scripting
Setting list item gaps in Microsoft OneNote (AutoHotKey script)
Although I like Microsoft OneNote and use it continuously, it does have a few failings. One of these is the inability to set the default styles and layout for text. In particular, when you create a new paragraph or list entry in OneNote, the default – non-changeable – setting is to have no white space between the paragraphs. This is very poor design and makes more than a small amount of text quite unreadable.
Shell script to Back up critical files (using RSYNC)
Following up from my article on backing up USB drives, this recipe backs up the critical files on my desktop to remote storage (a NAS device on my network). Note that PC2 is the desktop to be backed up, SLUG1 (192.168.1.2) is the NAS device and USER1 is the user id doing the backup. I have a similar script that runs on the NAS device which backs key files on that to a remote hosting service on a different continent!
Automatically Backing up a USB Drive with RSYNC (KDE)
USB Drives of all kinds need to be backed up and the best backup is an automatic one (it’s the only way to make sure that it gets done!). So here is one recipe for doing just that using RSYNC and some BASH scripting magic. I’ve split this into two files. You don’t have to do this of course and one may well be better for you. I used two because I can run the second one manually as well.
Development Virtual Machine (VirtualBox)
I’ve been thinking ahead to a change of job recently. Knowing that I’ll be getting a new Windows based laptop and needing to have development capabilities and having developed a taste for Linux 😉 I’ve used my favourite VM tool [VirtualBox][1] (now owned by Sun) to create a sparlkly new OpenSUSE 11.0 virtual machine complete with Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. as well as office tools such as Open Office, mind/concept-mapping and diagraming applications.
Update one table using data from another
If you want to update tbl1 with information from tbl2:
