stuartandnicola.com

Our new PC had (and still has!) Vista on it, and the newest Office with the weird ribbon system. At work we both use Office 2003, so we were keeping our old XP machine just to run the older office. But that machine is really playing up and is incredibly slow, plus it takes up a lot of space.

I am doing some work on a new Drupal module at the moment that will add my flash node functions to the content constructor kit (CCK) (see the FlashField project page for details). It had all been working well until today when I installed the Flash Player 10 update, and then the content no longer appeared in Firefox or Safari.

A bit of fault finding pinned it down to using the private file system, and then only private files associated with the FileField module (which my new FlashField module relies on).

When developing modules it can be useful to increase the level of error reporting within Drupal. To do this (in D6) edit common.inc and change the line

to

This will report all errors, including notices, whereas normally they are suppressed.

Dad's computer wouldn't connect to our desktop machine, but it would connect to our laptop (Vista to Vista), so I knew it wasn't the router or NAT or similar that was blocking access.

Both machines run McAfee and it turned out that on the laptop the firewall had been configured to give Windows Remote Assistance (msra.exe) Full Access, while on the desktop it was set to Outbound Only.

Changing the firewall settings for the program on the desktop to Full Access fixed it!

I don't use the Vista Help and Support tool very often, but when I opened it today there were no graphics or images, only red crosses in the placeholders where they were supposed to be.

It seems some registry settings are corrupted or missing (as described on this page). That page includes a registry file that repairs the settings.

The flash banner below is a BannerZest banner, inserted in an iframe. The banner animation is from the Aquafadas website to show that it can be done.

To insert the content on the page you need to upload the banner directory and all its files to somewhere on your webspace. Next create a node, set the input format to full HTML input, and then put something like <iframe name="bzAnimation" src="http://www.yourwesbite.com/files/banner/bzAnimation.html" width="600" height="250" allowTransparency="true" frameborder="0"></iframe>.

View the full node to see the banner in action.

I'm probably way behind here, but I just discovered Firebug for Firefox! REALLY useful for debugging the HTML / CSS etc associated with the website, and at last I've got rid of the annoying empty line at the top of the page! I always wondered why it was there, and it was an "empty" block.

Nikki's mum and dad were clearing out some old stuff and found an old flat panel monitor that I gave them AGES ago. I decided to try plugging it to our "spare" PC as whoever was working on that finds they really miss having a wide screen!

It works great - for me doing my Drupal stuff it's maybe even better than the wide panel as the combined width is even more than the widescreen, so I can have Eclipse open on one screen, and run IE/Firefox/Safari on the other for testing, or for looking up help.

This node is NOT a flash node, but it is displaying some flash content by using a flash node macro. The original flash content is actually in this node.

By using a flash node macro you can add the flash element from a flash node to any other content that has the flash node input filter configured in one of its input formats.

This is just a basic flash node and has been created to provide some content for use in this node which demonstrates how a flash node macro can be used.