On HP Laptops, sometimes F11 will get you into the recovery partition. However if this fails and you can still get into a runnable Windows you have an option. Run compmgmt.msc (Computer Management) in Windows and select Disk Management. Then mark the recovery partition (usually D) active by right clicking on the drive’s icon. Then restart. Don’t press any keys and if the partition is still good it should boot up the recovery partition so you can get your computer back to factory condition. This was verified on a HP Pavilion dv6000 series laptop.

I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why my website was only printing the first page when there where clearly multiple pages worth of content to be printed. IE would print just fine, but FireFox would not.

I finally found the culprit. I had a container DIV that was assigned a CSS attribute of “overflow:hidden”. This is old code I took on, so no idea why it was there. But after removing it, I got all my content to print.

There’s a bug documented by Mozilla here.

Whenever I develop in Flex, I’ve always used ServiceCapture. It is a commercial product that inpects all type of traffic including Flex’s AMF, a binary format based loosely on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). ServiceCapture runs about $34 per seat. It allows me to see what traffic is being sent back and forth between my ColdFusion Server and Flex for debugging and QA purposes.

I was made aware today of a new player in town that integrates into FireBug for FireFox. It’s currently experimental, but seems to work nicely. Check it out.

FCKEditor will stop working with FireFox 3.5.7, 3.6 and future releases. There is a “Year 2010” bug that breaks the regular expression method they use to find what browser you are using. I found this in FCKEditor v.2.6.4.1. ColdFusion 8 and 9 appears to be okay, however I would double check them.

The issues lies in the file fckutils.cfm located in the FCKEditor root install directory. It checks for your useragent such as “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6”.

The glitchy code can be found on line 47:

stResult = reFind( "gecko/(200[3-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9])", sAgent, 1, true );

Replace this line with:

stResult = reFind( "gecko/(20[0-9][0-9][0-1][0-9][0-3][0-9])", sAgent, 1, true );

This will give the expression another 90 years of matching. You can also pass “checkBrowser=false” to the FCKEditor component to disable this check.

If you don’t have a fckutils.cfm file, a similar line can be found in fckeditor.cfc.

Another “fix” is to upgrade to CKEditor as it’s a Javascript only add-on.

Apple released the Apple iPad last week. Other than a horrible name, I thought it was a great design and am very tempted to buy one. Three things I think will make this device:

1. It’s thin, it’s lightweight, and looks good (hopefully they don’t break too easily)
2. Battery life is up to 10 hours (we’ll have to see real-world numbers though)
3. A simple, easy-to-use OS

But I wondered, what about Adobe Flash support? Jobs said that “you will be able to see the web as it actually is”. I figured I’d read about it in a few days. The answer was no. Jobs gave two reasons:

1. Flash will eventually die and give way to HTML5
2. Flash is one of the largest reasons why a Mac crashes. (Really? I thought a Mac doesn’t crash :() )

According to Adobe, 99% of all Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices have some version of Flash installed. While taking into account a little marketing tweeking, it is still used by the majority of everyday web users.

HTML5 is still being developed and accoring to Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5 specification, the expected W3C Candidate Recommendation stage will be in 2012 which means Microsoft will likely not pick it up until after then. So what are we going to do until then? Two choices. One being make the end-users see a broken flash placeholder or second being make and maintain two versions of your website. Neither are a good solution.

HTML5 is aimed at reducing the need for proprietary plug-in-based RIA technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX according to Wikipedia. HTML5 will introduce native 2D drawing, media playback, drag-and-drop, messaging and more. So does Jobs expect that everyone just drop the millions if not billions of Flash apps out on the Internet now and try to convert everything to HTML 5? Besides, flash is still rapidly evolving with new features and frameworks like Flex. It’s just not going to die, anytime remotely soon.

Right now Apple seems to have it out for Google. But Google did one thing right with their Chrome browser. They managed plugins that break. So if Flash crashed, only the specific block of the webpage would show a broken-flash placeholder and you could either reload and try again or go on to the rest of the webpage uninterrupted. So wouldn’t that be a little more reasonable solution for Apple? In Apple’s mobile browser, mimic this great Chrome feature and Jobs second reason would be void and the end-user would benefit greatly.

Jobs needs to step up and not hide behind whatever agenda he has against Adobe. So, I will probally wait to buy another competitor’s Tablet until Jobs can get in gear. Not to mention it’s limited to AT&T for 3G wireless service again. Ug.

Other resources:

• Adobe Responds: Enabling innovation isn’t magic
• Facebook: I Want IPAD to Support FLASH
• TheFlashBlog: The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?
• False Apple Advertising: iPad Promotional Video and Images Show Properly-Displayed Flash Content

As a programmer I’ve had to deal with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 since, well… since it first came out. Non-standards driven, needing multiple hacks to make things show up right. It costs me frustration and time and the client time and money. But today is a good day. The big-wig of the Internet, Google, is stepping up and saying it’s had enough. According to cnet’s News site “As of March 1, Google will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services…”. Recently a flaw in IE6 was exploited and allowed access to Google’s network. Perhaps this will force a few more IE users to upgrade their browsers and make my and countles other developer’s life a little easier.

For years I’ve done my best to explain to new designers, customers, or just people in general that it’s fairly hard to make a webpage look really good on your screen because everyone sees it differently depending upon your screen resolution. Then they ask what is screen resolution and just get lost. Give them 800×600, 1024×768, etc. and they just walk away muttering “geek” under their breath. Well Google has come to save the day once again. Thanks to my co-worker Jason for letting me know about this, check out http://browsersize.googlelabs.com. This will show you what the average percentage of viewers will see on your or someone else’s website with an overlay. You want to make visible what is important to the most amount of people right away without scrolling. This puts it into perspective. Enter your website address on top and check it out. A great design tool. Hint: If the website is centered, resize your browser window horizontally until only the main content section is left, otherwise you’ll see incorrect overlay.

At the risk of sounding outdated to some — I have found a brilliant way of combining a website and social media advertising. What if you could take your website – and squish it into YouTube? (betting you’re saying “huh?”).

BooneOakley has found a way. They where recently featured in the Adobe Edge Newsletter and have seen more than 400,000 view in a matter of weeks.

So how do they squish a website into YouTube medium? It starts out with a video clip that takes advantage of YouTube’s framework. This allows viewers to click links inside the video, just like a webpage. You are then taken to corresponding video, which tells you about what you just clicked on, or allows for deeper navigation.

What will people think of next? Check them out at http://www.booneoakley.com/

I was recently engaged in a short discussion regarding Amazon’s S3 Storage Service. This reminded me of a great backup solution I use for my personal computer.

Most people do not backup their computer for a number of reasons; too complicated, too cumbersome, too costly, “I need to backup?”. But fate comes to play, and poof! there it goes. All those family photos, legal documents, music, etc.

Here’s a cheap, easy way to backup your computer. Download, install, signup, and forget. Introducing Jungle Disk (and no I’m not getting paid to promote this). It cost me $20.00 upfront with lifetime free upgrades and 15 cents per GB-Month of storage used, plus a little for data transfer. All-in-all I’m getting charged about $3.50 to backup all my photos, some videos, personal website projects, documents, and more.

The software Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s S3 Storage Service to store my data, keep it encrypted, automate the backup, and make available on Amazon.com’s datacenters for high availability.

So unless your bank account is at zero, there’s no reason not to backup your computer anymore. What’s more is you can actually use it like a network drive if you want and you only pay for what you use.