Chrome: Web Developer's Paradise

If you have chrome and you have never gone Page > Developer > Developer Tools, You've missed half the cake. So far, almost all of my problems have been fixed using this built in 'program'. Waaayyy more powerful than firebug. I use it all the time. And I suppose all I'm saying to you is "try it out if you haven't tried it before!".

A Pig of a sub-menu drop-down problem

I was asked to make a drop-down on a website the other week. And I have spent ages trying to do it. It is a pig. Ok, the first thing I did is I went to www.sspxseminary.org (only for the drop-downs), and I had a look at how they did their drop-downs. Their drop-downs 'scroll' out and are compatible in all browsers.

So, naturally, I had a look to see if I could get their code. There is loads of scripts controlling it. Fat, big amounts of flashy code. Hated it! I gave up because of the size and the fact that I could barely get my head round it!

So, I went on to something else,something simpler. I downloaded some code of of a website and it said 'COPYRIGHT! do not remove this comment!', so I stopped using that code!

Next I decided to make my own code using Document.getElementdBybyId. And I found a simple hide element function in javasript. I perfected it with css, another function and VOILA! I had it working! The drop-down popped out when you hovered over it with OnmouseOver and went away with OnMouseOut. very Nice!

Then the problem's started to become clear! When you scrolled down and hovered over the link, it showed the drop-down in the wrong place, you couldn't reach it without it disappearing! And it didn't work in Internet Explorer! Ok, back to square 1!

So, I then(gave up!) googled 'html submenus'(or something like that!) and I eventually(eventually) found this place, and I found a multi-browser compatible piece of code. So, I messed around with that. This time, I was a little more successful.

So, this one gave me a way to have multiple sub-menu's by throwing the emement 999px to the left instead of hiding it. A little more unprofessional, but it worked! And it was also more compatible than the previous one. My first little problem with it was that it was made for lists, and my menu was in a table. So I had to put a list inside a table to fix that. Then I had to position it, that was eally a pig! But in the end it worked and this is the css I used(No javascript!):


/*Submenu styles:*/
#nav, #nav ul {padding:0;margin:0;list-style:none;text-align:left;}
#nav li ul {height:100px;width:80px;padding:3px;position:absolute;background:url(theme/rim.gif) no-repeat bottom;left:-999px;z-index:+1;}
#nav li:hover ul {left:50%;margin-left:86px;top:198px;}


I hope this help's all the geeks who read my posts(And thanks for reading them too) !

I am now a web developer!

Hello World! I am now developing two websites for two different people. I am now very happy! So, just to say, you may get a few developer's tricks from this blog in the future!

Crunchbang Linux Review

I did not expect much when it came to Cunchbang, but of course, I was proven wrong. I like the 'openbox' DE, the use of keyboard short-cuts integrated into the user environment, and I express my inner geek by saying 'it's cool'!

So, I tried out crunchbang 9.04 and 10.4 beta 1 today and I found them both brilliant operating systems(allthough I have not yet completely got my head round them!)

Bye!

Just another week

If anybody actually reads this blog. You may have realised that I haven't been posting for ages. Well, on Easter I will start up again!

The Great Cat

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, today was the first time I tried a pre-Complete OS, and guess what, It didn't work! I put the .iso of Alpha 3 onto my USB and It booted, I said 'try without installing', and in the end all I had was a cursor and a line of code. Good first impression!

kernel32.dll

I had a litlle accident the other day when I was playing around with windows. I... swapped a major windows .dll file with something I found on the web. Not exactly my greatest of experiments.

But don't worry! I fixed it. And guess what I used. Ubuntu 9.04 live cd. I booted it, got the old dll file from another hard disk that had had xp installed from the same machine, swapped the HDs back, booted the cd again, and gave the old dll back to the primary xp HD.

That better not sound too compicated to you, because it was nice and simple!

My first 8 Operating Systems

Ok, in my next few posts, I am going to summarise all the operating systems I have tried, which will be extended into a public google document.

• Debian: Ok, I don't know which version this was, and I didn't install it. But I played with it. And I liked the never-changed gnome games. The background is very good in debian but ubuntu did clean it up with it's 'debian' remix later on.
• Windows 95. WOW!! I went back in time. Well, I hope you all know what happened to that computer.
• Windows 98. This replaced debian on my 'Old Deb Machine', because I forgot the password(so secure, even the user can't get in!). I liked Windows a lot more then. I tried to make it look as close to XP as possible. But it just wouldn't do. So, as stubborn as I was, installed XP in the end:
• Windows XP: I still have this 8b hard disk, and I run fsflight on it. I's lasted ages and I have tweaked it and actually made it run faster than my 40gb ubuntu! But, I still don't use it much!
• Ubuntu 7.04. I still have the live CD for this. And it is unbelievably reliadble for system restore.  But,  back the, since I didn't understand linux, it took me a month to install it(which made me quite fed up)!
• Kubuntu 9.04. I still love the looks of KDE. But, It ran so slow on my oldd debbie, I had to replace it with:
• Ubuntu 9.04. Yes, this is when ubuntu really caught my attention. It was like the match that lit the chain(????).
• Xandros. I got my hands on that eeepc 900 and I'm still typing on it now. I liked Xandros. It worked. Did what any normal person would want it too. But, it was a bit 'too much' like windows.

To be continued...

Light Flight Simulator in Ubuntu

Ysflight. A friend told me about it yesterday and so far I've been playing it all day! It's a low graphics flight simulator that to me is just as good as Ms Flight Sim. Well! Apart from the graphics of course!

So, after I discovered it, I went to the website and downladed the ubuntu version, which didn't work at all, so I asked Ubuntu Forums, and somebody replied telling me to download this big zip file and it would work in Ubuntu.

So, I did as he said and hey presto! It worked. Setting up the track was slightly slower than the wine version but that was probably because it was a bulky 92mb versio (instead of 10mb).

The real difference between KDE and Gnome

Windows XP, apart from fixing a load of bugs, updates, and all that stuff, Windows XP really started to have some 'shine' about it.

Now that is Gnome, not the fact that it is an 'old' Desktop Enviroment but that it gives you a not to slick but not to shiny set of desktop effects.

But, then Windows ista and then Windows 7 came along. Now, that is where I would put KDE, a nice, shiny, kind of cool desktop enviroment.

Now me, personally prefer KDE. But, it doesn't run fast on my machines, and doesn't have a fast startup speed(yet), so I stick with gnome, or xfce or even icewm sometimes. Yes, I would prefer KDE, but that's for a faster PC!