schussat

I think that Raul's right on here -- it should be no sweat to export your mdb tables to either SQL directly, or to ASCII which can be imported into a SQL table. Export options aren't always easy to find in Access; you should probably check under the "tools" menu, which I think has what you want.

Validating is a great suggestion, Lisa. I have been meaning to do it, but never got around to it. You may be on to something -- I'll work for a while on validation, and will let you know how it goes. -Alan

Wow... Yeah, I have no idea what's going on there. That's the right link; I don't think it should make a difference. You sure seem right about that. What I mean is that that stylesheet, the content, and the page structure are all called by Textpattern from a SQL database. Because I've never had this problem using Firefox, I can't imagine that it's a backend bug. But that said, I'm not aware of any IE-specific issues that would make for this sort of inconsistent rendering. Thanks again. -Alan

Yowza! I wonder what is happening. The site is dynamically-generated, so there's nothing to re-upload that would make any difference -- especially since it seemed to work for VI the first time. Strange. Boxturt, you're actually seeing the right typeface: I use a serif font for the main column, and Helvetica for the sidebar. I think maybe Bruce forces a sans-serif typeface on his browser. I'm stumped. I tried another machine with IE, and didn't see the original problem, but when I use blockquote, that element is always bumped down below the last line of the right-hand column. IE also isn't displaying the bullets in my li lists, either. Thanks to all of you for your feedback. This is a weird one. -Alan

Thanks, Bruce! Huh, I wonder if my wife's machine has an older version of IE on it. I'll look into that. In the meantime, I'm happy to think that it may show up properly for most visitors. -Alan

I recently worked on a redesign of my blog, and was very happy with it, until yesterday, when I loaded up the site in IE on my wife's computer at work. The left-hand (main) column doesn't begin until the bottom of the right hand column, and I'm not sure why. To make matters worse, IE still seems to offset background images a little strangely, so the edges of my background graphic don't quite line up across the two columns. Anybody have any potential fixes? I know there are a number of IE-specific rendering issues, but I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with them. Thanks-

It's been a long time since I used Pine, but I remember going through the same process of trying to figure out the remote server options. Here's one page I came across that may have a model you can adapt: http://seanic.net/support/pine.htm Best of luck!

I think so. I have MT-blacklist installed, and I don't think I needed to get any extra modules for it.

Good suggestion, Raul! Adding the unit to the short form line seems to do the trick! I don't have any idea why it works locally without the units specified, but fails when it's remote. At any rate, it looks like I'm good to go now. Thanks for the help.

Hi all- I became discontent with my old blog design, so I've been tinkering with a new one that you can see at schussman.com/testbed. I'd love to have any feedback! But the real purpose of this post is to share a strange CSS situation. To format paragraphs in the main column of the new design (the gray column on the left) I have this code: >#maincolumn p { margin: 0 230 10 10; padding-top: 5px; text-align: left; } This works perfectly when I mock up the site on my local PC. The margins are all good. But I have found that when I put the site online, the "margin: 0 230 10 10;" line doesn't work. I've had to replace the above code with: >#maincolumn p { //margin: 0 230 10 10; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 5px; text-align: left; } in order to get the margins that you see on the testbed page. Has anybody ever encountered something like this? I wonder if Textpattern does something strange when it puts the page together -- but, that doesn't seem likely, as all Txp does is load the stylesheet, as far as I know. I'd be interested to hear any suggestions as to why this takes place, and, of course, I'm really interested in hearing if this design totally breaks your browser! -Alan

I've found a lot of good photos at stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu) -- it's a free stock photography site. Good place to check out.

Hey Robert, now that it's been several months, how about a follow-up review of the Dell DJ? How's it holding up, etc? Bellringr, thanks for the info. I have yet to try to do any burning with iTunes, so I haven't encountered those problems -- yet?

Bellringr -- What sorts of problems have you had? I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I like using iTunes on Windows. (I'm increasingly using it for ripping, too; though it has taken me a little while to come around, I like ripping directly to my music library.) If you're not going to use your Pepsi downloads, I'll trade you some gmail accounts for them! =)

Under Windows, I use Exact Audio Copy to do all my CD ripping. It's free and produces high-quality output.

Ack. It was late at night, can I blame it on that? The sun got in my eyes? No? Look, the Goodyear blimp! <runs away>

Does that mean you got it working? If so, great!

Hi Nicholas- I'm running Textpattern without problems, so I can confirm that it's doable. Off the top of my head, your config.php file looks okay, but try this: Some folks at the textpattern support forum have reported that extra blank lines at the end of config.php will cause problems -- these might be introduced by your editor, so open up config.php and remove any newlines after the close ?> tag. That might just do the trick.

Hi Charles- I think that something like this should work: >redirect permanent /2004 /archives/2004 redirect permanent /2003 /archives/2003 redirect permanent /2002 /archives/2002 ... Putting that code in your .htaccess file should redirect requests to the root-level 2004 directory to the directory within your archives directory, and will do likewise for 2003, 2002, and whatever other directory trees you redirect. This way, external links, or links that are hard-coded within your MT entries should be redirected to the new location (as long as you have the /archives/... tree set up!). Give it a test to see how it works.

Bellringr, that's exactly right. Once you've identified what you think is a hotlink, you can confirm it by searching your log for additional instances of the referer -- usually, there will be lots of them, all for the same image and with the same referer.

When an image is loaded by a genuine visitor to your site, the log should show your own URL as the referer, so you can detect hotlinking by watching your logs for accesses of images using a remote (ie, not from your own URL) referer. You can also watch for spikes in bandwidth and scan through the "last visitors" list, as it will sometimes show a pattern of an image or file being repeatedly accessed. Finally, I think there are some log tools that scan automatically and detect likely hotlinking, but I don't think that AWStats does this.

Thanks for the pointer, Bellringr, I had missed it. It's a good discussion, but still leaves my main issue unresolved: I don't know why what looks like correct code prevents some (legitimate, non-hotlinking) visitors from being able to view images. Anyway, I have a working interim solution for now. It would be nice to make sense of the problem at some point, but it's not an ongoing concern right now, at least. Thanks!

Hi guys- Here's a followup from my end. I continued to poke into it, and eventually tried using the following code: >RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?schussman.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^-?$ RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] The second line of which should allow blank referers -- which I thought was the problem. When I used that code, some viewers encountered a new but still not-quite-right phenomenon: no images were displayed inline on my site (ie, banner images and thumbnail images got 403, forbidden, errors), but when they click on the thumbnails to popup a jpg, the popup image appeared properly! Freaky, and I can't figure it out. Is this due to some weird firewall or cache on the other end, perhaps? Is there some other way to to hotlink protection, other than using mod_rewrite? Would the presence of my other rewrite lines >RewriteRule ^index\.xml$ index.php?rss=1 [L] RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ index.php?atom=1 [L] cause the preceding lines to go haywire? For now, I've resorted to watching my logs for hotlinking and then manually restricting the offending referers. This works fine, but is of course not as easy as just stopping all hotlinking.

Before leaving on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I found someone linking to one of my images from a remote forum. I turned on hotlink protection and thought the issue was resolved, but now that I'm back, I realize that some visitors to my site are unable to get to images and even certain plain html pages. I'm seeing lots of errors that look like this: >s216638-1.savvis-internet.uslsan3-bsn.savvis.net - - [02/Aug/2004:12:10:00 -0500] "GET /images/37.jpg HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" Now, I understand that without a referr from my own site, the 403 is the correct response given that I'm using hotlink protection-- at least, I think that's the way it should work. However, as far as I know, these images are being called from a popup window generated by my own site. You can see it in action (or, at least, try to see it in action at this address (which is just a blog post with some popup jpgs): http://schussman.com/article/793/strawberry-ca-pop-150 The twist is that both from home and from work, I can get to the photos just fine. My wife can't get to them from her office, and apparently other visitors can't see them, either, as someone posted a comment to that effect. So I'm sort of stumped -- why would this 403 error appear only sporadically? I'm guessing that turning off hotlink protection will resolve this, but I'm not sure I want to do that. For reference, here's what I think is the relevant part of my .htaccess: >RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://melissa.schussman.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://melissa.schussman.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://schussman.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://schussman.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.melissa.schussman.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.melissa.schussman.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.schussman.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.schussman.com$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] RewriteRule ^index\.xml$ index.php?rss=1 [L] RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ index.php?atom=1 [L] I'd love to hear any suggestions! Thanks-

There's the kernel compile game -- it's a little like Minesweeper, but with more serious consequences. Actually, like Raul says, there are a lot of options, but the commercial offerings are relatively limited. However, there's a reasonable amount of pretty good stuff available, and I use linuxgames to keep track of it. One game that shows a lot of promise and is already very good is The Battle of Wesnoth (wesnoth.org). It's a turn-based strategy wargame with a ton of community involvement, and the game manages to put together a pretty good story, too: Through the course of a game you develop champions and heroes who carry over their enhanced attributes into subsequent challenges. It's not too complicated, but has a good element of strategy to it, and it's a lot of fun. It's a good example of a working and fun open source game.

Another vote here for Textpattern. As the kids say, it's the bomb. (Do the kids still say that?)