Goodies to Go ™
June 28, 2004–Newsletter #291
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Featured this week:
* Goodies Thoughts – Murphy, Alive &
Well
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Goodies Peer Reviews
* Feedback Goodies
* Windows Tech Goodies
* And Remember This…
Goodies Announcement
The new Beyond HTML Goodies book
is now available!
Go beyond the basics
and learn how the pros add and use dynamic HTML features and advanced
JavaScript techniques. Beyond HTML Goodies demonstrates dozens of new and
different features readers can add to their existing Web pages using HTML and
JavaScript. The book starts with simple text and image tips, such as adding a
clock to a Web page or causing text to appear when the mouse moves over an
image. It gradually builds to more complex tricks, including manipulating forms
or working with cookies behind the scenes. Throughout the book, readers enjoy
Joe’s snappy style and “to the point” discussion of each “goody” in the book.
http://books.internet.com/books/0789727803
Goodies Thoughts – Murphy, Alive & Well
The computer at my desk is set up just the way I like it. It
took quite a long time to get it there — tweaking this option, setting that
preference loading all those programs. Then there are my data files. I have
about forty gigabytes of data in there; all nicely organized. That data includes
many years worth of work.
Naturally, I have backup after backup of everything. I have images of my system
disks (they’re mirrored & there’s no data on there!) made automatically by
DriveImage every night onto an external disk, and my data (which is on a
hardware RAID) is backed up on DVDs at regular intervals, with copies in my safe
deposit box at the bank. My work is just too valuable to me for me to risk
losing it.
Yes, sitting at my computer is a comfortable and familiar place for me to be. Of
course, having all that hardware in it makes it heavy — hence the need for me
to sit at it. I can’t easily carry it around. So, in order to allow myself some
freedom to move around, I also have a notebook PC.
In my notebook, I have most of the same software, plus a few items for
portability. It has Centrino technology so that I can op onto my wireless
(encrypted, of course!) home network or onto any of the local hotspots (our city
leaders have made our entire downtown a hotspot — it’s great!) and for when I’m
out of range of the hotspots, my Sierra card gets me a pretty reliable 80-100K
connection.
The notebook, of course, only has the one hard drive, so I don’t keep valuable
data in it (I use FTP to send stuff back and forth to my main computer.)
This past Saturday morning, I turned on the notebook and heard that awful, all
too familiar click-click-click of a dead hard drive. Just to confirm my fears,
"Insert boot media" said my computer’s bios.
Like I said, I don’t keep valuable data in my notebook. For that reason, I also
don’t have a very good backup regimen. Make that, I don’t have a backup regimen.
Ummm… I don’t have a backup!
This has to be the only hard drive anywhere near me that I don’t have a copy of!
Thanks to Mr. Murphy (no Sir, not you — the other Mr. Murphy!) it has to be the
drive to fail!
Naturally, I have all my software of the original CDs, and the stuff I have
downloaded is stored on my mail computer and its backups. So it’s not like I
actually lost anything — except the thirty hours it took away from my weekend
for me to completely reload and configure my software onto the new hard drive I
bought!
I also bought an external hard drive with a USB interface. I now have a copy of
my freshly set up notebook hard drive. That way, I suspect, I will never need
it!
And you, my friendly reader, do you have any hard drives anywhere near you that
you don’t have a copy of? Have you ever met Mr. Murphy?
!!
Thanks for Reading!
– Vince Barnes
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors.
Q. I have created a form on my computer building site that allows you to
configure which components of a computer you want to purchase. How do I have an
updating total at the bottom of the page that shows my customer how much the
current total is? Also once I have this total how would I add a $70 shipping
cost to it automatically? And finally I would like to submit the customer’s
choices to me. At the moment I have an HTML form that opens up your e-mail and
attaches the form to the e-mail (so when people send me an order it comes
attached to an e-mail). Is there a way to just have them type in their e- mail
address and hit submit and have it transmit to my e-mail without having to make
them open their e-mail up and send an e-mail? I have used HTML quite a bit and
am unsure as to how to do this stuff, so I am assuming that it is JavaScript. I
know very little JS
A. You are going to need a bit more than JavaScript. JavaScript is a
client side scripting language. You are going to need some processing on the
server.
That is going to take some PERL, PHP or ASP. Basically what you need is a
shopping cart. There are many shopping carts but you need to know what your
server supports. If you are using Microsoft Frontpage and have Frontpage Server
Extensions installed on your server you can use that to send the form.
It will not do any figuring of the shipping for you though.
http://www.code4u.com — this is site has many links that may help you find what
you are looking for.
[You might also want to check out the Goodies Thoughts in these Goodies To Go
newsletter issues:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/225.html
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/226.html
– Ed.]
Q. When I try to insert a snippet of Java Script into an already
completed HTML page everything gets scrambled up and I have to delete the Java
Script portion to get it working again. How can I put a Java Script somewhere
other than at the top or bottom of an HTML page, without disrupting the HTML
coding?
A. As long as you use the script tags it should not affect your html
(unless that is the script’s purpose). The script tags look like this:
<script language="JavaScript">
some java script statements
</script>
Q. Is there was a way to position a background image in the center of a
page regardless of screen resolution?
A. This code will position the image in the center:
body {
background-image : url(image.jpg);
background-position : center center;
background-repeat : no-repeat;
}
To position in the center of a table, try using this (be sure to replace __ with
the height and width of the image):
<body>
<table height="100%" width="100%">
<tr><td valign="center" align="center">
<table height="__" width="__" background="image.jpg">
Any text on the background
</table>
</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
Q. I would like to have two functions occur when a button is pushed. This
is how I have it written:
<INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Submit" onClick="send()" onClick="openindex()">
You probably know that only the first event happens. How do I make the other
occur at the same time?.
A. You can perform more than one function with one event such as the
onClick by separating them with a semicolon. Try Changing your code to this:
<INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Submit" onClick="send();openindex()">
Q. I want a mouse rollover where I will have a table with a picture and
the mouse rollover will change the picture to text with the picture in the
background.
A. You can do a simple tooltip by using the "TITLE" property on the image
text like this:
<img src="pic.gif" title="My Picture">
If you want something more involved then here is a link to some search results
I found at Internet.com:
http://search.internet.com/cgi-bin/search.webreference.com?
method=mainQuery&numresults=0&batchhits=25&IC_Summary=1&IC_SortBy=&DB12=WebRef&
query=tooltip
Q. I can never get an image flip to work. I try to do more than one flip
on a page, but it only flips one picture, and the rest remain the same. Also,
when
I put on picture in, it was replaced by another picture. Then, when I put my
mouse over another, it changes, but it changes to the red X in the white
square, when I’ve quadruply checked to see if it was there. I just can never get
it to work. Any suggestions?
A. The best I can do is give you an example of one way to accomplish it.
Here it is:
<html>
<head>
<title>Image Flip</title>
<script language="JavaScript">
function flip(img,imgn)
{
document.images[imgn].src=img
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<a href="somepage.html" onMouseOver="flip(‘1.gif’,’pica’)" onMouseOut="flip
(‘0.gif’,’pica’)">
<img src="0.gif" name="pica" border="0"></a><br>
<a href="somepage.html" onMouseOver="flip(‘3.gif’,’picb’)" onMouseOut="flip
(‘2.gif’,’picb’)">
<img src="2.gif" name="picb" border="0"></a>
</body></html>
You will notice that when I mouse over the image it passes to the function the
image to display and the name of the img tag that I want to affect. The
function called flip is rather simple in that it uses the image array to change
the image by specifying the name of the image tag.
News Goodies
Malware Attack Thwarted but Danger Lurks
[June 28, 2004] Critical IE vulnerability remains unpatched.
Click
here to read the article
Sun Opens Up Desktop Code
[June 28, 2004] JaveOne — Project Looking Glass and Java 3D are slated for
a GPL of their own.
Click here to read the article
EC Suspends Microsoft Sanctions — For Now
[June 28, 2004] The EC agrees to keep Windows intact, leaving business as
usual for the software maker in Europe.
Click
here to read the article
J2SE 1.5: A Tiger By the Tail
[June 28, 2004] JavaOne — The Standard Edition is slated for a
fall release via the Java Development Kit (JDK).
Click here to read the article
From Big Blue, a How-To on SOAs
[June 28, 2004] JavaOne — Service Oriented Architecture:
tutorials, tools and pointers for programmers.
Click here to read the article
64-Bit Comes to Xeon
[June 25, 2004] Intel’s Nocona and its related chipsets mark a new direction
for enterprise.
Click here to read the article
A Spec to Spike Spam?
[June 25, 2004] The latest anti-spam effort by the four largest U.S. ISPs is
a joint specification to eliminate spoofed e-mail addresses.
Click here to read the article
802.11i Security Specification Finalized
[June 25, 2004] UPDATED: The long awaited standard for Wi-Fi-based LANs
has been ratified by the IEEE — and arrives with some new features.
Click here to read the article
Malware Hacker Attack Linked to Spammers
[June 25, 2004] Experts warn that a highly sophisticated malicious hacker
attack could turn millions of PCs into spam zombies.
Click here to read the article
Red Hat Whips Up Storage File System
[June 25, 2004] The Linux software maker readies a cluster file system
designed to help customers concerned with compliance house data in one
location.
Click here to read the article
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Top
Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:
Using Open Source .NET Tools for Sophisticated Builds
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/040621.htm
This article describes a sample build environment and shows
how Visual Studio and a number of open source .NET tools can
work together to make reliable, predictable, and value-added
builds.
*** AND ***
Min / Max ASP.NET Sample Code
http://www.asp101.com/samples/min-max_aspx.asp
This script is a ASP.NET version of our Min / Max script.
The actual finding of the minimum and maximum is a lot
simpler then the classic ASP version thanks to .NET’s built
array sorting, but because .NET is more picky about type
conversion, it spends a little more time setting up the
arrays.
Top
And Remember This . . .
On this day in…
1969 The Stonewall Riot
A little past three in the morning on June 28, 1969 police raided
the Stonewall Inn, a gay club on Christopher Street in West
Greenwich Village in New York, supposedly for selling liquor without
a license. The gay community in New York was weary, however, of
being targeted by the police, and tempers
were short. A crowd gathered and watched as the Stonewall staff
members were arrested. When three drag queens and a lesbian were
loaded into the paddy wagon, they became angry and started throwing
bottles at the police. Despite reinforcement arriving, the protests
spread into neighboring streets and kept
growing until New York’s riot police arrived. The riot was followed
by several days of demonstrations. The incident led to the creation
of the Gay Liberation Front and other gay and lesbian civil rights
groups. It is regarded as the first major civil rights protest for
homosexuals.
Today was also the day that in: 1770 the Quakers opened a
school for blacks in Philadelphia; 1838 Queen Victoria was
crowned in Westminster Abbey; 1859 the first dog show was
held (Newcastle-on-Tyne, England); 1894 Labor Day was
established as a US federal employees’ holiday; 1905 Russian
sailors mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin; 1914 Serbian
Nationist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the throne of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife
Sophia, precipitating a war with Serbia and eventually starting
World War I; 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed,
officially ending WWI; 1940 Romania ceded Bessarabia to the
Soviet Union; 1956 the first atomic reactor built for private
research went on-line in Chicago, Illinois; 1964 Malcolm X
formed the Organization fro Afro-American Unity; 1971 the
Supreme Court overturned the draft evasion conviction of Muhammad
Ali;
1975 golfer Lee Trevino was struck by lightning at the
Western Open in Illinois; 1982 Prince Charles and Lady Diana
named their baby William;
Born today were: in 1491 Henry VIII of England; 1577
Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens; 1906 US atomic physicist
(Nobel, 1963) Maria Goeppert Mayer; 1926
comedian/actor/director Mel Brooks; 1946 comedienne Gilda
Radner; 1954 country singer Ava Barber; 1966 actor
John Cusak; 1966 actress Mary Stewart Masterson; 1969
actress Danielle Brisebois; 1971 actress Aileen Quinn
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!
