March 2007 - main

A CSS and HTML question
by Eur Ing Chris Green 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

How do you know which CSS properties apply to which selectors? I.e. given that I want to change the spacing around lists how do I find whether it's padding or margin (or border?) that I need to change and/or what the defaults are? Not to mention how to know whether it's the space below the heading above or the space above the list that needs reducing. Personally I think we should throw the whole lot in the bin and start again! After playing with this for quite a while and having looked at lots of templates and stylesheets they're all a total mess of the worst sort of unstructured 'code' - it's the equivalent of the worst excesses of spaghetti code in Basic. I don't think it's the fault of the writers of the code, it's inherent in the way that HTML and CSS work. It's almost invitable that the template and stylesheet will become a horrible interwoven mess of classes, IDs and so on. Not to mention - why is it that the default spacing of HTML headings, lists, etc. is so awful? The defaults are such that paragraphs and lists are spaced equally from the things above them and below them. Surely a heading (for example) should be closer to the text/list below it that it refers to and further from what's above it? I always have to go and play games with the spacing to get what looks to me a reasonable layout that I would expect to get by default. .... end of Friday rant! :-) -- Chris Green

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RF Band for Wireless Routers?
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

Hi Folks, Anyone know what Radio Frequency Band is used by Wireless Routers? Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Mar-07 Time: 09:53:09 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Against the Day
by Richard Lewis 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

Hello ALUG, At the pub meet last night one of the bar staff directed our attention to a copy of /Against the Day/ by Thomas Pynchon which was found on the evening of the annual nosh in February in a Waterstones bag near our table. They've kept hold of it. If its yours, they would probably be happy for you to go in there and claim it. Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Question about borders in firefox or elsewhere
by Eur Ing Chris Green 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

Is there any way to change the default of tables having no borders in Firefox? I know how to change the HTML of the table to show borders but I wondered if there was a way to give Firefox a set of default table border values. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] Are there any HTML 'beautifier' programs out there?
by Richard Jordan 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

Several years ago I used to use a program called HTML Tidy. I haven't used it for ages, but it would be worth a look. Google tells me that it can now be found at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ Richard Jordan

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Are there any HTML 'beautifier' programs out there?
by Eur Ing Chris Green 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

I'm trying to understand and unpick an HTML template file, an automatic 'beautifier' would help no end, are there any out there? -- Chris Green

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[Fwd: [ALUG] I think the hard drives dead]
by Chris & Barry Chater 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

Hi again, Thanks for your tips and offers of help, as i live near King's Lynn it is too far to go to one of your kit meetings (Didn't you use to hold meetings in King's Lynn once?) I am in the proccess of getting quotes on having a new drive fitted as i am not too technical minded and may have attempted to change the drive on a desktop unit but not a laptop. This one is one of those you have to take apart unlike my wifes Toshiba which has a little removable cover. Got to get this sorted as i need a Linux Fix soon ;-) Barry Hi Would you believe it finally got Ubuntu Linux working on an old laptop, got a wireless card and got that working. then the other day computer froze while watching video on BBC site.Could not get it to shut down, so switched off

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Can one invoke mod_autoindex explicitly, or alternatives?
by Eur Ing Chris Green 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

I want a way to produce a web page which includes directory contents like those produced by apache's mod_autoindex. Looking at the apache documentation I can't see any obvious way to do this, it either displays the contents of index.html (if that's what you have set with the DirectoryIndex directive) or it will (if allowed) do what mod_autoindex is configured to do and show you the contents of the directory. I want to be able to ask for something like http://my.site.com/dira/index.html and see what's in index.html *plus* clickable links for each of the files in dira. The HEADER.html and README.html files set by the HeaderName and ReadmeName directives don't quite do what I want (though nearly). Has anyone any ideas or pointers to anything useful. Ultimately what I want is a way to have a directory where I can have a reST generated index.html file and then a list of .PDF (for example) files that can be clicked on. I don't particularly want to have to edit the index.html every time I add or delete a .PDF file. Note, it's not *just* for PDF files but it's probably for a fairly short list of file types. -- Chris Green

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Everything I do at the moment seems to end up with python!
by Eur Ing Chris Green 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

I seem to arrive at a python solution for everything I do at the moment:- I was looking for a backup solution and, after a bit of looking around (and help from here) I have decided to use rdiff-backup. It's working well. It's written in python. I've been looking at lightweight markup languages, in particular one for creating HTML with tables, so after hunting around for a while I find reStructuredText which is part of Docutils which is, guess what, written in python. Digging a bit further on from my reStructuredText investigations I found pyBlosxam which seems to be my sort of blog, python of course. Another utility I installed recently used Docutils as well. I'm beginning to think that people who use python must think a certain way which matches the way I want things to work. -- Chris Green

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Linux Format DVDs
by Ian bell 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

I have just about every Linux Format DVD from LXF20 (sometime in 2001). As I am soon to move house I want to dispose of them. Might be useful if someone wants an old distro. Happy to bring them to the next kit meet or look out any special requirements. Otherwise I'll skip them. Ian

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