Recently in Computers Category

Here today, gone tomorrow... or rather... here yesterday, gone today.

After installing the beta version of IE 7 I was having problems trying to download my Hotmail mail, I was getting an invalid login error. It's been working fine for the last 4 or so years and just as suddenly it stopped. The only change I'd made to the computer was the IE7 install. As soon as I performed an uninstall my mail was downloaded straight away. I even performed virus and spyware scans trying to figure out what was up. I have a clean system at least.

Now the view from Internet Explorer isn't going crazy with the CSS on my weblogs either. I can forget about those hacks till another day. I discovered a CSS isue with Firefox and IE when I added a date code to The Playground, and the box appears up high in IE and down where it should in Firefox. It's most frustrating. Until a new version of IE is released that isn't full of bugs then I guess we have to keep hacking the code.

I came across this little game while cruising the internet and thought it would be a nice addition to my site. Putting it all together turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected. Steven Chapman over at About.com has the whole step by step process if you're interested, but for someone wanting to add it to their Movable Type blog, the process is slightly different. My MT setup made it a little easier because I use a PHP include for my header, so it's the same for every page. The script will only work on the index page if you just add it to the head section of the index template and not the archived page as well. The filename for my individual page is 000332add_a_hangman_game_to_your_blog.php. Yours will be different depending on how you have your MT set up. You can edit this page after you set the game up or add the scripts into the head of the Individual Archive Template.

Step 1: Download hangb.js and upload to your server. Save into the same directory as your index files. If you can't upload to your server, you could try adding the script into the head section of your index page. Include this line in your head section to call the script:

<script src="hangb.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> </script>

Step 2: Add the following piece of code into the body section of your page, or your entry screen, where you want the game to appear.

<script src="hangb.js" type="text/javascript"></script><noscript><div align="center"><strong>The Hangman game requires Javascript. </strong>You either have Javascript disabled or the browser you are using does not support Javascript. Please use a Javascript enabled browser to access this game.</div></noscript>

Step 3: The next step is to set up a selection of answers that will go into a script in the head of the page. Continue adding as many answers as you require. You can add up to 50 or 60 different words or phrases.

The script code for the hangman game will appear in the text box below with an additional statement being added for each answer you add. Don't worry if you make a mistake as you can always delete lines from the resulting code if you want to remove answers, just make a note of which entries they are as the answers are "encoded" to make it more difficult to cheat. If you decide you want to start over, simply refresh the current page. The image folder is the place where you will upload the images for the game, e.g./images/.

Once you have finished entering your answers, copy the code from the above text box and save it as a file called hangh.js. Save to the same place that you saved hangb.js.

You now add this script to the head section of the page where the hangman game is to appear using the following code:

<script src="hangh.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> </script>

If you are creating more than one hangman game then you can use different names for the files where you save the answers as long as they end in .js and that you modify the code going into the head of the individual hangman pages to reference the appropriate files you have created. The code that you place into the body of each hangman page will be the same for each game.

Step 4: Add the following piece of CSS code to your stylesheet.

.hanga {font:bold 14pt Courier, "Courier New", monospace;text-align:center;} .hangt {font:normal 16pt Courier, "Courier New", monospace;text-align:center;color:#ff0000;} .hangb {width:400px;height:230px;overflow:hidden;background:#ffffcc;border:#000000 1px solid;}

Step 5: The final step is to obtain the eleven hangman images that the script uses. Upload the files to your image directory. Enjoy the game!

Ever since I changed my network settings to update the software on a computer I was fixing, I've lost the Internet Connection Sharing on the home network. Great. For three days I've been fiddling with settings, and today I decided to do a system restore which has got the network up and running again. Why didn't I think to do that 3 days ago? The frustrating part was that I could get a Google search page up, and Google even returned it's million odd entries, but I couldn't get anywhere but the search pages. My AVG being unable to update was the flag that convinced me that things weren't right. Carly was able to use MSN as well - most strange. It has me stumped why some pages would load but the majority would not.

All's well now, and next time I have network problems (which seems to be an on-going thing), system restore will be the first thing I'll try.

Remember...
Enough shovels of earth a mountain...
Enough pails of water a river.
Master Chen Hai Yang

I've been given a computer to free up some space on and instead of it being a simple task it has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. For a start, the computer is riddled with trojans and sypware. One particular program, WinFix 2006, has been a real headache to remove. I've installed my two favourite cleaners, Spybot Search and Destroy and Spyware Doctor, and though they've both cleaned the computer a couple of times, the problems are still there the next time I run them. The computer is running Windows 98 and is so slow. My first recommendation will be to buy some more RAM.

The second big problem was that the CDROM drive won't work. I've tried everything to get it to read a disk, even getting in the box and re-inserting all the cables. Windows says there's no problems but the drive is not recognising any disk I put into it, and it freezes up the computer. I was hoping that when I got rid of all the crap, it might work properly, but no such luck. My next option was to hook up my laptop with a network cable. Because the laptop is running XP there was a few problems just viewing the other computer, but much fiddling with settings and I got this working okay. I was able to insert the CD with all the cleaners on the laptop, share the drive, and could then install on the 98 machine.

After running Spyware Doctor in safe mode (yet again), and discovering another 82 infections when I thought there were none, I think I've finally cleaned the computer of all the nasties. The original problem was to free up some disk space. I tried compressing the drives, there's a logical drive too, or perhaps I should just merge the two partitions, because nothing is installed on the drive. There's 1g of space and it would do better to be on the C drive. That means installing another product on an already full disk.

Okay, I've installed Partition Magic and AVG Free. No antivirus software is installed!! I don't know how many times I come across this when fixing people's computers. It's no wonder their computers are sluggish and full of spyware. Anyway, the partitions are merging as I write, and then the last thing to do will be to update all the software I've installed. Which means hooking the machine up to my main computer, because I can't get past the laptop in the network.

All this work for two bottles of Chardonnay! Let's hope it's a nice drop.

I've discovered a new easy way to share photos on the net. Webshots has made it easy to add links to photos you can upload to their site. This is a great idea if you need web storage elsewhere, and the links can be added to emails, blogs, websites, etc.

Sky of Fire by torretab

Squirrel Behind Bars by bellasproofs2

I've used two examples from the Photo of the Day at Webshots Blog site. There's a good selection of photos from several categories. With over 300,000,000 photos stored at Webshots, it's easy to find something new and different to look at every day!

Remember...
Better to believe too much... .
Than nothing at all.
Master Chen Hai Yang

Things at work have been quite hectic this week following the bushfires around Junee on New Year's Day. So far the tally is 7 houses lost, with huge stock and fodder losses, machinery and sheds. Those poor farmers have come through the last 5 years of drought only to have lost everything to the fires. I take my hat off to people on the land. There's lots of appeals and raffles and all sorts of fund-raisers going on around the district, and we all try to help out where we can.

I've had lots of problems with the website at work. We're trying to get all the information about meetings and help available on the site so people have easy access to all the information, but the software has been very unsympathetic towards our efforts. We use NetObjects Fusion to work on the site, and it's not friendly when it comes to multiple users, but on Friday I finally solved the problem and (fingers crossed) we'll have no more problems. It all had to do with how we initially opened the site: in particular, the path of the file. The original setup was through a W drive that not all computers at work have set up. When we've installed NetObjects on other computers and people have gone to access the main file, if the correct path wasn't followed then the whole site had to be fixed up (stretching lines to 100% width has been the main problem), but the menus were very touchy too. Since changing the path to the main file, I've managed to get it working properly on the two computers and everything is working good again. Publishing is now only a 15 minute exercise, where with the previous settings it took two hours to republish. I feel like I've overcome a huge hurdle.

I wasn't overly impressed with the NetObjects package when I first started using it. I'm used to hand-coding all my web pages and therefore having total control over the design. NetObjects does everything for you with an editor similar to a word editor. It's difficult to implement forms and search boxes unless you want to pay for add-ons for the program. That got my back up. You buy a program, and pay good money, only to have to keep paying out for things that should come with the original package. There is a way to insert code and I'm learning about that, but it's a big learning curve and I'm not getting alot of help. I have the manual and the help files to teach me so it's also a slow process.

Here's another timely reminder about the dangers of viruses and spyware. This particular one seems especially nasty because you're dealing with a reputable company that many of us take for granted as being safe. How many sites have you visited that don't have Google Ads?

My thanks again to Experts Exchange for their wonderful emails. If you don't subscribe, then perhaps you should. You'll get all sorts of interesting info delivered to your inbox. Alternately, you can read about the latest news on the Community News page.