Niall Doherty » Blog

So I finally found time to add a much-requested feature to Coda-Slider: Different classes for each tab. Now you can target individual tabs and give each one a different look. In the new demo, you’ll see that I just used different background colors to illustrate this feature, but of course you can use images if you like.As this is just a minor addition, I’m calling the updated version “Coda-Slider 1.1.1″. Makes sense to me.

• Check out the demo
• Download Coda-Slider 1.1.1

Apologies again that I haven’t been able to respond to all your comments and emails regarding Coda-Slider. I hope you understand that it’s just something I put together for fun and experience, and it’s difficult to spend time maintaining it when I have paying jobs on offer.

Also, please keep sending me your own implementations of Coda-Slider. I will get a showcase together eventually, promise.

Yesterday I decided to help a friend setup a secure wireless connection on her newish Compaq Presario F500 notebook. She only has it a few months, and it came with Windows Vista. I’m still running Windows XP myself (although the Mac conversion is looming, trust me), and I haven’t had much dealings with Vista. From what I had seen and heard of Microsoft’s latest OS, I wasn’t overly impressed.

Anyway, I setup the wireless connection using the WEP key I’d gotten from my friend’s Netgear router, going about it the same way I would on Windows XP. The process is almost automatic for me since I’d talked people through it literally hundreds of times as an AOL technical support agent a couple of years ago. Everything seemed to be in the same place and I did what I usually do, but the wireless just wouldn’t hook up. It was about then that my friend noted that the machine had been running a bit slower than usual lately. Fine, I’d just untick a few things that looked unnecessary in msconfig (start > run > msconfig > startup tab) and reboot. Maybe that would get the wireless working, too.

Big mistake.

Turns out you can’t just go disabling stuff willy-nilly in msconfig on Vista. With XP you can disable everything in that list and carry on with your wonderful life, but Vista sees fit to go apeshit when you try the same. So, upon reboot, I was greeted with a bunch of “application service” errors, none of Microsoft’s Apple-cloned Vista eye candy (just a bland, Windows ME looking interface), and a very worried friend who no longer seemed so confident in my computer literacy.

Oops.

Nothing would really work either. Nothing in device manager, nothing in network connections, USB ports were lifeless. What the hell had I done?

After a few searches on my own PC this morning, I found some answers. First, from BlackViper.com:

Do not use “msconfig” to disable services, type “services.msc” in the Run box instead!

Wish I knew that earlier.

Next, I used this list from TweakHound.com to reset all Vista’s services back to their default settings. (Took a while, too. It would have been nice if Microsoft had put a nice big “Reset all to default” button in there.) I did come across a few things that don’t appear in that TweakHound list, but I just left most of those disabled or set them to manual. Use your own judgement if you happen upon this same adventure.

A reboot later and everything was glossy and see-through again. Back to where I started. Now to figure out what’s up with that wireless connection.

It’s been about six weeks since I introduced a neat little jQuery plugin called Coda-Slider. It was well received, and I was delighted to see people incorporating it into their own projects in creative ways.

However, the original Coda-Slider had some bugs and lacked some features. After numerous requests, I’ve finally found time to make some improvements, and today I’m releasing Coda-Slider 1.1. Please check out the demo, and be sure to read the rest of this post for more info and details on customization. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post from Don Albrecht of AjaxBestiary.com. Be sure to visit his sites and check out his other works.

While most of the new features in the jQuery UI package are common across most AJAX frameworks and toolkits, the new Selectables stands out as a unique and potentially quite useful interface element. Read the rest of this entry »

Just noticed something quirky today regarding jQuery’s slideToggle effect in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. (I’m guessing the use of jQuery’s slideDown and slideUp will give you the same problem.) I’ve been creating some nice sliding div effects these past couple of weeks in work and wondering why the slide animation in IE6+ was so jagged and clunky, while Firefox and Safari rendered it perfectly. Through the process of elimination and some hair loss, I figured it out.

The fix:

Be sure that whatever it is you’re sliding (usually a div) doesn’t have any associated CSS attribute position declared. It doesn’t matter if it’s position: relative or position: absolute, or if this styling is applied to the sliding element or to a child of the sliding element; just rip it out of there.

Do that and your slideToggle should look all smooth in every browser.

Just added a couple of projects to my portfolio.

First is my most recent freelance project, which was a site for the Mercy primary schools in Waterford. Secondly, there’s the Flash animation I created while at TSSG back in March.

UPDATE: (Oct. 29th, 2007): I’ve just released a new version of Coda-Slider. Check out the details here. The original version referred to in this post remains available for download.

These last couple of weeks in work I’ve been getting to grips with the jQuery JavaScript library to provide some cool effects on an interface I’ve been building. One effect I hoped to create was a tabbed sliding div type thing, like Panic have on their Coda site. I couldn’t find anything quite like that ready-made with jQuery, so I went about doing it myself. Using Gian Carlo Mingati’s excellent slideViewer as a starting point, I was able to achieve the desired effect. At the risk of getting sued, I’ve called it Coda-Slider.

• Check out the demo
• Download Coda-Slider

I’ve put a lot of info (features, bugs, etc.) into the demo itself, so I won’t repeat it all here. Feel free to use Coda-Slider in your own projects, and let me know how it works out. All the code is well commented or self-explanatory so you shouldn’t have much difficulty adapting it to fit your needs. if you do run into problems, let me know in the comments here.

Also, I’d really appreciate feedback on any bugs anyone notices. Suggestions for improvement are also welcome, although I likely won’t have time to implement any for a while.

UPDATE (Sept 21st, 2007): It’s been brought to my attention that there are some issues with Coda-Slider in Safari 2.04 on Mac. I’ve have no timescale for a fix; I may not get to fix it at all. Please take this into consideration if you plan to use Coda-Slider in your own projects. As of this writing, almost 2% of web users are using that version of Safari (source). Safari 3 is reportedly out of beta next month, so I’d expect usage of Safari 2.04 to decline after that.

I have a lot of pet peeves when it comes to web development. There’s unexpected pop-up windows, auto-play music, sites that tell me what browser I should use to best view its pages, resizing the browser window, screwing with my browser scroll bar, PDF links that aren’t labeled as PDF links… I could go on and on and on. Indeed, some people have taken the time to list many similar grievances (like here and here).

One that I rarely see mentioned but really bugs me is mailto links. These little feckers are supposed to open up your email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird) and have a readily-addressed blank message waiting for you to fill out. Problem is, I don’t use an email client. I use this thing called Gmail, and I’m guessing there’s a few dozen other people with a preference for web-based email too.

I’d actually like to see a breakdown of web-based email users vs. email client users. I assume web-based email is much more popular these days, primarily because it’s so much more accessible. Your emails are stored online and you can get at them from any computer with a connection. Additionally, not having a client means one less piece of software installed on your machine, which can’t be bad

So when I need to get in contact with those faceless folk behind a website and I’m presented with a mailto link, it’s 50/50 as to whether I’ll even bother anymore. A simple contact form is a far better approach, and has the added benefit of not revealing your email address to the spambots.

Oh, and yes, I’m aware that I don’t have a contact form on this site. It’s on my to-do list, promise.

I have Eircom’s 1mb broadband package at home, and it’s been driving me absolutely mad recently. The connection is so unreliable, that trying to spend a chunk of hours working from home is pretty much impossible. I haven’t even bothered calling Eircom about the problem, because I know what the problem is. Our house is too far from the local exchange, resulting in what they call a long line issue. This means the signal is very week by the time it reaches us, and we therefore get cut off whenever there’s a heavy load on the line.

I worked at AOL broadband technical support for a while, and this was a common problem for rural customers. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. The only thing the ISP can really do is try get the line upgraded, but I’m sure there’s a lot of expense in that and it probably isn’t worth their while doing it just to satisfy a handful of nagging customers.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to work on a project this week, and the Eircom connection here has been about as reliable as the weather forecast. It got so infuriating that this morning I decided to look into this mobile broadband that companies like 3, Vodaphone and 02 have been shoving down our throats with recent advertising campaigns. At first glance, 3 appears to be the fastest and cheapest mobile broadband provider, offering speeds of up to 3.6Mbps for just €19.99 per month. I went in to the 3 store here in Waterford and spoke with a very helpful sales rep, who gave me a bunch of info about the package. The interesting stuff…

• The modem costs €129.
• It is possible to hook the modem into a router or hub and do the whole home networking thing so you can connect to their network on multiple computers at the same time. However, 3 does not provide support for this, so you have to figure it out yourself.
• There is coverage for the service in my neck of the woods. (You can actually check your local coverage on 3’s website.)
• You must sign a 12-month contract.
• There is a 14-day money-back guarantee.

That all seemed reasonable enough, and I would have taken the plunge then and there except they didn’t have any modems currently in stock. No worries, I’d call back later.

In the meantime, I’ve been online with my shitty Eircom connection (which has dropped a half dozen times as I’m writing this) and done a little research on 3’s mobile broadband. The reviews from here and here caused me to reconsider availing of the service. The key complaints…

• SMTP is not supported. Fucking genius.
• Problems accessing secure sites. For example, Gmail, which I usually have open whenever I’m online, is supposed to be completely inaccessible on 3’s broadband network. Not good.
• No FTP, which might cause a slight problem when you have clients waiting for websites to be launched.
• Very inconsistent speeds, and average speeds seem to be closer to 1Mbps than the advertised 3.6Mbps.
• Numerous compatibility issues with the modem. It seems that McAfee, Napster, Cyberlink and a bunch of other software can cause the modem to explode drop frequently. 3’s technical support apparently recommend that you uninstall everything on your PC apart from the operating system to ensure the least amount of conflict.
• Friendly, but not very helpful technical support.

So I’ve decided that trading one infuriating broadband connection for another may not be the best course of action. If anybody actually reads this and can recommend a good broadband provider for rural customers at a reasonable price, let me know.

Earlier today I was looking for a quote which I believed spilled from the mouth of George Costanza in Seinfeld. It’s a classic…

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating…

…and you finish off as an orgasm.

Amen.

As it turns out, this verse of genius did not come from George Costanza, but from comedian George Carlin. I didn’t know much of Carlin’s work, but some quick YouTubing and Googling has fixed that. I had come across his war quote before…

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

One of Carlin’s videos on YouTube had me shaking my head in disbelief rather than holding my sides in laughter. This, my friends, is just an amazing performance…

One small problem with Mr. Carlin, however. For all his genius, he never thought to hire a professional to build his website.