Author Archives: molecularbear
jQuery: disable the submit button, but still send the button’s value
Solving the old user-hits-the-submit-button-twice problem is fairly easy using JavaScript and even easier using jQuery. Setting up a sequence like the following is no problem: User clicks the submit button Button becomes disabled The values of the form’s inputs are … Continue reading
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold scored the 1995 Hugo Award for Mirror Dance, one of the many books in her “Vorkosigan Adventures”. I enjoyed this one so much that I’m tempted to explore the rest of the series, but I want to … Continue reading
Nintendo DS roundup II
Continuing from my first roundup, here is another batch of DS game reviews ordered from best to worst: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords How does a Bejeweled clone (albeit with a few extra mechanics) keep me interested for scores … Continue reading
Slow printing to Lexmark C522 from OS X 10.4
After a user complained that a 28-page PowerPoint document was taking an hour to print on our networked Lexmark C522, I narrowed the problem down to OS X 10.4 (in my case, 10.4.11). Solution: use this PPD. In other words: … Continue reading
Using EDID data in xorg.conf
I have two Hanns-G JW199D (19″ 1440×900) LCDs connected to an nVidia GeForce 8400 GS video card. They worked great until I upgraded from openSUSE 10.3 to 11.0; Xorg seemed to have problems configuring the LCD connected to the video … Continue reading
Norton Nightmares: Windows cannot connect to the Internet using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP
The Problem: following a Norton Internet Security uninstall, I could ping IP addresses and hostnames, but not browse to either. Running XP’s Network Diagnostic gave me something like: “Windows cannot connect to the Internet using HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP”. The … Continue reading
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
UPDATE: removed statements falsely accusing Scalzi of borrowing ideas from Joe Haldeman. After trying to fight through some tough literary jungle, I was happy to find myself blazing through The Ghost Brigades (2006) by John Scalzi. This book lasted me … Continue reading
Mac OS X (10.5.6) Spotlight search results are crippled
Open a Finder window, run a search, and you’ll see that the results are presented in three sortable columns: Name, Kind, and Last Opened. You might expect to be able to adjust those columns to include/exclude whatever file attributes you … Continue reading
Software RAID performance on various IDE configurations
I have two 500GB IDE drives that I will use to create a software RAID1 (mirrored) array. How should I connect them to maximize performance? I’ve used software RAID on my personal file servers for years and ask myself that … Continue reading
openSUSE 11.1 > Ubuntu 8.04 server
Ubuntu seems like it’s the latest and greatest in the world of Linux distros, but it just didn’t measure up to openSUSE during my install fest last night. I run openSUSE at work so I figured I would get some … Continue reading