Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

"Padding-" and "Margin-" – What’s the Difference?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Many intermediate and begginer CSS designers get confused when it comes to padding and margin values. What’s the difference? They both just shift stuff, so why the different names? Don’t they do the same thing?

Although the behavior of margin- and padding- is very similary, there is one important difference: margin- is on the outside of the element, and padding- is on the inside. What this means is, one will apply the whitespace shift “after” the element begins (padding), and the other will apply the whitespace “before” the element begins (margin). Many times there is no visible difference, but sometimes there is – a big one.

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US Military Unveils Working Heat-Ray Gun

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

The heat-ray gun previously discussed on Slashdot back when it was first certified for use by the US Military in Iraq against civilians and rebels has been officially unveiled. The “millimeter wave” technology it uses causes the skin and body tissue to react in a way similar to that of being exposed to extreme heat – without the temperature. It’s being released as a “highly effective nonlethal crowd-control system;” whatever that means.

The “heat ray” is mounted on a Humvee or other vehicle, and has a range of up to 500 meters – which is 1,650 feet or one-third of a mile – that’s a long way.

The only problem is, this “non-weapon” hasn’t been tested by anyone other than the military. Needless to say, it’s not FDA-approved, nor is it likely to give it’s creators the Noble Peace Prize. The military claims its safe, and only the military will ever be in a position to find out – at least so long as it’s deployed in Iraq and the Middle East, and not back at home.

How long before this becomes standard riot-squad gear? How long until it can be inconspicuously mounted mounted on the back of that Ford Explorer used by the local police department? And the biggest question of all: how long until we find out what this really does to the human body, and just how many previously-unknown ailments it can produce. After all, all that energy has to go somewhere, and if it’s not a visible burn (according to the military, that is), where does the damage appear?

With these kinds of “tools,” the damage is usually long-term. Who knows, in 10 years from now everyone ever shot at with this thing could experience some severe form of cancer or even something worse and never-before-seen – but the Military isn’t waiting. Just like a child on Christmas, they have their new toy, and they’re not waiting to read the instruction manual, they just want to have fun!

Wikipedia Takes our Money & Links, Gives Nothing Back

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Wikipedia has just completed it’s annual Fundraising Drive – a million dollars in pure cash have found their way to the Wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia used to be cool, and donating to a non-profit organization like Wikipedia was definitely one of the most altruistic and philanthropic deeds one could do. But in the past, Wikipedia used to take money from the community, and use it for hosting and other expenses. But now Wikipedia takes something else too, and this time, it doesn’t give back to the community. Wikipedia wants you to link to it, but it’s now officially unwilling to “link” back to you.

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“Technorati is borked right now!”

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

There’s something thrilling about seeing a big server down on its knees. It probably has something to do with the complexity of an IT Managers job: no matter how many redundancy tiers you have and how hard you work to keep it up, something is going to go wrong, sometime. Along side famous error messages like those of Digg and Flickr, Technorati’s fits right in:

A Country without Internet for a Week or So…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

Imagine having no internet for a day. It can’t be that difficult, can it? You can find things to do, offline work to get finished, people to talk to, books to read, TV shows to watch, etc. Now try to imagine a business without internet – obviously one that makes of the internet normally. Again, they might be behind on the day’s news, miss out on a couple of stock changes, and lose touch with some contacts and/or offices – but they’ll live through it. But what if it wasn’t just one person or business, and not even two, but an entire country without internet for a week! What would happen!?

Today, we were unlucky enough to find out. Actually, it turns out we were the “lucky” ones, at least according to the Jordan Telecom customer service manager we spoke to. In a nutshell, we’ve been having internet problems for the last week or so, and we didn’t have internet at all for most of today. The conversation went something along these lines:

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WordPress 2.0.7 Fixes the FeedBurner Bug

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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For the first (and hopefully last) time ever, we’re glad to hear that WordPress has a major security vulnerability. Why? As a result of a security vulnerability that affects WordPress 2.0.6 and below on certain server configurations, the WordPress Developers Team has released a new version of WordPress that incorporates both a security patch for the detailed vulnerability, and a fix for the FeedBurner Bug that we reported for 2.0.6. You can download WordPress 2.0.7 or see the list of affected/changed files here on the WP Development Blog.

Originally, the WordPress team had refused to patch the WordPress 2.0.6 FeedBurner Bug on the premise that it was too soon to release another version of WordPress for a “minor” bug – which we disagreed with. However, you can now download WordPress 2.0.7 and hopefully this time there aren’t any surprise bugs that need immediate patching. We highly recommend everyone goes and downloads WordPress 2.0.7 immediately in order to avoid anyone compromising their blog/site via the security hole in WordPress 2.0.6.

Correction: WordPress is released and maintained independant from Automattic

Windows Forces you to use UAC to Add a Printer

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you want to use Windows Vista and you want to be able to print to a network printer, you’re going to have to use UAC. You turned it off? Turn it back on. You’re using the in-built “Administrator” account? Log-out and log-in as a normal admin. Microsoft says you have to use UAC to get a printer installed. If you don’t, you get this ugly message:

“Windows cannot connect to the printer. The specified print monitor is unknown.”

Exactly why this message shows up isn’t clear, it has nothing to do with the printer you choose to use or the process you take. This particular message is displayed when trying to add a printer via the wizard:

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Ultimate Tag Warrior and WordPress 2.1

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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For anyone trying out WordPress and interested in keeping their tags alive: don’t. Ultimate Tag Warrior is completely broken with WordPress 2.1 and you can lose all your tags by upgrading to WordPress 2.1. In the more recent SVN revisions of WordPress 2.1, any time a comment is added, deleted, or unapproved, you lose all the tags for that particular post. It’s a damn shame, because UTW is an excellent plugin, and WordPress 2.1 is a big improvement over 2.0.

Bunny’s Technorati Tags is a more basic tagging solution, but it’s verified working on WordPress 2.1. If you can figure out how to switch from UTW to Bunny’s TT you can easily switch back when Christine releases a new version of UTW that’s compatible with WP 2.1 via her import from custom-field feature. Just be very careful, make database backups, and use Google when you get stuck.

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The Need for Creating Tag Standards

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Web 2.0, blogging, and tags all go together, hand-in-hand. However, while RPC standards exist for blogs and the pinheads boggle over the true definition of a “blog,” no one has a cast-in-iron standard for tags. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the internet — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they’re not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.

To Space or Not to Space, that is the Question

This one is probably the most obvious obstacle and the most destructive when it comes to tallying tag popularity or making those pretty tag clouds: Can tags have spaces in them or not?! If tags don’t/shouldn’t have spaces, then what do you do with multi-word tags that you just can’t shorten? Do you replace the spaces with underscores, dashes, or just take ’em out? Does it matter?

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Windows Vista Forgets its Name – Again

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The worst bugs are those that you can’t fix without formatting. Most people – before they knew any better – used to recommend formatting as the “tool” of choice for fixing any bug or issue with the operating system or even a piece of software. But as people learn and experience new things, they find alternative (read: less painful) ways of dealing with these issues and making them go away. But what about the bugs that can’t be dealt with otherwise? Like this one: You install Windows Vista, you give it a computer name, you join a domain and change it. Two weeks later, Vista forgets its name, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s a bit complicated when taken out of context, but just look at the image below (click it for a hi-res screen capture), it might make things more clear.

Basically, Windows Vista reverts to the “automatically determined” computer name internally, while all settings point to the name you gave it. The name it uses is the default name provided during setup, whether or not you accepted it at the time. This was a reported bug during the beta, and it’s still driving us crazy now.