Miva Merchant 5.5 add to basket display confirmation

Added to:

1) Pages > Category Display > Category Display List Layout (for adding when viewing all items in category)

2) Pages > Product Display > Product Display Layout (when viewing individual product page)

(add < > before and end of mvt lines):

mvt:if expr="(g.action EQ 'ADPR') AND (l.settings:product:quantity GT 0)"
This item was just added to your basket
Please click the Basket or Checkout links at the top right when ready

/mvt:if

This will display on the same page after clicking 'add to basket'

Dreamweaver Crashing Randomly Fix

Dreamweaver CS3 crashing has been getting worse over recent weeks. I remember fixing this before and thanks to a reminder from: http://www.netevolution.co.uk/blog/?p=49 it is now fixed again.

The problem is due to a corrupted cache. Delete the following and all is well again:

The corrupted file is called WinFileCache-[random_numbers].dat.

On Windows XP, it’s located at
C: Documents and Settings Application Data Adobe Dreamweaver 9 Configuration.

On Vista, it is found at
C: Users AppData Roaming Adobe Dreamweaver 9 Configuration.

overflow hidden displays in Internet Explorer

After several attempts at a fix, finally found the good advice here:

http://www.defusion.org.uk/archives/2007/04/02/when-overflow-hidden-doesnt-hide-in-ie/

The advice was:
So in my case swapping that out for position: absolute; on the child and overflow: hidden; position: relative; on the parent worked a charm. Now IE 6 plays nicely like its other browser friends.

In my case, position:relative could be left on the child div so all containers and child have the same relative positioning. I used this with the jquery animate function to slide a panel of content text into display area of new client website (GY).

asp session and cookie variables lost in frameset

The joys of Internet Explorer...

I have an application running on IIS server, the client wanted to link to it via a masked redirect. This was put in place and tested (in Firefox on PC and Safari / Firefox on Mac). The original URL was also tested in IE.

Phone call from client saying that they can't run it or get past the login page and I find that IE is not storing the session variables when part of a frameset. Several Googles later, add this to the top of the page (or in an include for neatness):

<%
Response.AddHeader "P3P", "CP=""CAO PSA OUR"""
%>

Suddenly IE can write/read session and cookie variables without a problem! 2 hours to find the fix. 5 minutes to implement - a familiar working day?!

PC file recovery

found this great free application for scanning an entire hard drive and creating a list of files available to recover:

http://dmitrybrant.com/diskdigger

MySQL / PHP database testing server setup in Dreamweaver

When setting the testing server for PHP / MySQL database connections in Dreamweaver the testing server settings are very similar to the remote info / FTP server except the following:

1) Ensure that the Host Directory is set to the root of the main site pages (e.g. htdocs/)

2) Ensure the URL prefix is set to http://www.domain.com and not http://ftp.domain.com (Dreamweaver sets this as ftp. automatically but this has to be changed to www. for the auto connection definition to install and connect correctly.

how many hours to master a skill?

A friend recently mentioned that it took a certain number of hours to master any skill. I couldn't remember how many hours he said so one Google search later, found this great article:

http://www.lifeclever.com/five-steps-to-skill-mastery/

So, 10,000 hours it is. Breaking this down if you spend 2 hours a day dedicated to your chosen skill then 5,000 days = 13.7 years! Of course, it would be easy to half the time by doubling the hours per day.

If it was a full-time job, 8 hours a day then it comes down to 3.4 years. So, I guess I should regard myself as a master of programming and web development. As the article point out:

"As you probably know, the better you are at something, the worse you think you are, at least in the early stages".

Up until reading this I still thought I was a novice programmer! Time to start thinking expert and not novice...

burn iso disk on Apple Mac

How to burn an ISO CD on an Apple Mac using Terminal command line:

Given an ISO file (image.iso, for example) in the current working directory, use the following command to burn it to a disc that you’ve inserted into a recordable drive:

hdiutil burn image.iso

* Be sure to change directory (cd) to correct dir containing the ISO file before running the above command

margin auto for centralising divs

another note to self:

css centre main div:

margin: auto;
width: 990px; (or whatever width you need!).

fckeditor images not displaying in drupal

found that I was using 'filtered HTML' rather than 'full HTML' in the Input Format section of the editor page settings. I know I knew this before and will hopefully remember it again!

Posted a reply to someone else with the same problem on the fckeditor forum:


http://www.fckeditor.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13275

humax pvr9150 not displaying BBC channels

Okay, not quite IT or webdev related but...

Humax PVR having problems displaying BBC channels, checked cable, aerial position, signal strength (twice), two visits to the roof, set an automatic search on all channels, switched off, switched on, rescan, still no BBC!

The obvious thing (should be for an IT professional!) - Menu > Installation > Default Setting > (reset?) Yes

and all is now well. Posting this in case it is useful for others after trying to find a fix on the web.

php displaying question mark icon

found that odd question mark icons in the display of MySQL database content through PHP was due to the http encoding setting in the HTML header of the page:

Standard entry was:
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /

changed to:
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /

and, as if by magic...the icons now display correctly (e.g. em dash characters).

time machine mac backup over network

Found this article online and hopefully an easier solution to allow Time Machine to 'see' network drives:
http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/2007/11/23/forcing-time-machine-to-use-a-network-drive/