On this day in history, the sun rose. Yeah, pretty amazing, right? Strangely enough, it happens every day. Anyways, I’ve come to tell you about funny things and to post this video. This video has a great explanation of a historical event. It’s really interesting, and it has some humorous parts.

ANYWAYS. Moving onto the stuff that matters. On this day in history, the Warsaw Pact was formed. I’m not really sure what a warsaw is. I talked with a few intellectuals about it, and they had conflicting points of view. One said that it was a weapon used in maid-evil times. It was used to cut down trees, and sometimes to cut down people. Another said that it was some sort of sea creature, almost like a walrus or a seal or a juniper. A third said that it was the capital of Poland, before it disappeared. The last was dead. He wasn’t very talkative, but he was a GREAT listener and good with kids. Although I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

After doing some research on the internet, I found that the Warsaw Pact was when a group of sea creatures with maid-evil weapons that lived in Poland (once again, before it disappeared,) got together and made a pact. This pact said something, but I’m sure it was. Anyways, Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. I wonder why he thought truth would have its pants off…maybe he was still angry about it sleeping with his wife? I dunno. Anyways, I thought I’d take this time to say that Lawl-wrench of Arabia died on this date. But nobody cares about him. To wrap things up, have another link.

LOL LENIN!

Over 18 million Xbox 360s have sold through since the console’s launch in November 2005, but just how many of those are still working? Squaretrade, a company that specializes in providing warranty support to purchasers of electronic goods from various manufacturers, claims 16% of Xbox 360s experience a hardware failure within six to ten months after a warranty purchase. Three out of every five failures were for the infamous “Red Ring of Death” general hardware failure error, a problem often linked to overheating.The Xbox’s figures compare poorly to competing consoles, which have a failure rate of around 3% — and if anything, the Squaretrade figure underestimates the scale of the Xbox 360’s reliability issues. It’s a good bet that some buyers of Squaretrade warranties went straight to Microsoft after experiencing hardware issues and don’t factor into the 16% number. On its company blog, Squaretrade pointed out that failure rates are “certain to go up” as the machines in their study group grow older.

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Podcasts are one of my favorite types of media to consume, as they are both informative and usually humorus in some way. What is a podcast you say?

Wikipedia defines a podcast as: a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. The term, like “radio“, can refer either to the content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

I would say that a podcast is a weekly or daily radio show that is only released digitally and can be found through iTunes or the site of the respective podcast. The show can be ported to a slew of portable devices easily such as an iPod, Zune, or an Archos. It can also be watched on a computer. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most annoying things I find in a website is a search bar that says “Search Here…” or something of those likes, because when you click in that box you have to manually erase the text, it is not a big thing but it is very easy to solve. All you need to do is copy and paste this code into the <input /> tag.

Code Snippet:
onfocus="this.value=''"

Full Code:
<input type="text" name="test" value="search" onfocus="this.value=''" />

Example:

Now this won’t work if the user has Javascript turned off, but that is their fault not yours. This only works on <input type=”text” />

Look for my article on the basics of CSS soon.

I use Skype and listen to music a lot in Songbird, the opensource media player by Mozilla. I wanted the music I am listening to to be shared with the person I was talking too so my friend suggested scrobbling from Last.fm. Natively, Songbird doesn’t support this feature, but making it work is easy. I thought scrobbling was only for Windows Media Player, iTunes and Winamp. I was wrong. Find out how to do it after the break.

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PHP redirects are better than Javascript redirects because it is done server side and there is no possibility of the user having JS turned off and not being redirected. The down side is that you need PHP on your server.

It is quite simple:

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.php' ) ;
?>

Just make sure you put it before the doctype and the <html> tag.

So, here is the back-story. There is a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey which allows the user to build a library of scripts that change web pages. They automate tasks, and creating a script for Greasemonkey is much easier than writing and publicizing an extension.

Apparently there is now a script called Netflix Download Links which automates the long process of finding, hacking, and downloading a Netflix streaming movie.

DISCLAIMER: Download these movies at your own risk. This is a questionable process as you pay for the service, but are still violating copyright laws. In addition, it is possible to get your account banned for this. Don’t come crying to us if this doesn’t go well.

Now that we’re past that little bit, let’s get in to the details. You DO have to have a subscription to Netflix to do this. The script claims that it works on all platforms, but if you’re using Vista it is reported to have problems. The non-windows user will need to set the variable "IAmRunningWindows" to false, and you’ll still need a Windows machine or a Windows emulator to remove the DRM. For more help with this, you might want to look through the comments on the article that I heard about this from.

I’m not sure exactly how this works, but its a pretty cool trick!

The most basic of all layouts is the one column layout. It has a small navigation above the header, a header, a navigation below the header, the content and the footer. This is a perfect design for a small organization or church, or a site where you don’t need a sidebar, or you have a lot of static content. I use a one-column layout on my personal site http://www.gorgefamily.com/alec and it works great!

We will make a fixed width version for this but you can make it fluid if you want.

Okay, let’s start with the basic tags.


<div id="wrapper">
<div id="top-nav"></div>
<div id="head"><h1>This is the header</h1></div>
<div id="nav"></div>
<div id="content"></div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>

The wrapper allows us to center the content and get some separation from the top with the following CSS.


#wrapper {
width:790px;
margin:auto;
margin-top:15px;
}

What this does is it makes with entire website 790px wide and it centers it on the screen. This allows the page to be viewed at all popular resolutions. What the margin:auto part does is the browser renders a object with a margin that is the same on each side, thus centering it. Now let’s fill in some sample content:

<div id="wrapper">
<div id="top-nav">
<a href="#">Test Link 1</a><a href="#">Test Link 2</a>
</div>
<div id="head"><h1>The <span>header</span></h1></div>
<div id="nav"><a href="#">Test Link 1</a><a href="#">Test Link 2</a></div>
<div id="content">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
</div>
<div id="footer">Copyright blah blah blah</div>
</div>


The post gets really long after this so here is a break. Read the rest of this entry »