Helpful Coder

Well, not really clicks... But first some background - noticed this happening on a site I work on last week. Two small flash animations that when clicked go to a different page of the site inexplicably stopped working. They still were animated - but nothing happened when they were clicked on. They hadn't been changed in over nine months. So I replaced them with static images for the time being and started testing. Asked a coworker, and he brought up the page, and they worked for him! So for me, they didn't work in Firefox and IE on Windows XP. For him they did work on IE and Firefox, under linux. After some digging around, we realized it was because he was using an older version of the flash plug-in than I was. We were both using 9.0, but I was using 9.0.0.124 and he was using 9.0.0.22 (if I recall). And then I recalled that I'd updated my flash plug-in a few weeks back while testing something else. I wasn't sure what to do next, but while testing I noticed that if

Ok, I don't generally use iTunes. (don's apple fanboy-proof suit). To me, it's like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, serious overkill to just play mp3s. But I also have a podcast, and since that's what most people use to listen to the show, I installed iTunes on my new vista machine so that I could check to make sure the new episodes show up right. Well, since installing it, I've noticed that it just randomly will start up, for no apparently reason. Certainly not when I actually start it... I'll just be doing whatever, then I'll notice - hey, itunes just startd up for some reason." Now, I think it's related to when I download an mp3 file - like through Juice, which is what I use to track podcasts. Although itunes seems to start at other times as well. I've dug all through the damn itunes options and turned off anything that seemed to have anything to do with letting it "automatically" discover music or whatever. No luck. I even turn

Just a quick tip, it's been a long time! I've been sick and busy, which is definitely not a good combination... Making the first column right-aligned Suppose you need to make the contents of the first column right-aligned. An easy way to do this (assuming you have a special class/id for the table) is to use the first-child selector: table.mytable tr td:first-child { text-align: right; }

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Having problems with Firebug in Firefox 3? I was - mainly with things not highlighting in the browser window when you moused over them ihe code, and the "inspect" button was rarely working, if at all. There's a new version of firebug (1.2) which seems to have fixed these problems. Whew!

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go