How do I figure out the IP address of my computer? How do I find the Mac address?
Posted by jerothe in 
Like we did yesterday, we are going to first start by opening up a MS-DOS prompt. Refer to what we did below if you have forgotten.
This time, instead of changing directories to get to a specific one, we are going to be able to type a command from the pwd, or present working directory.
At the prompt, type this command;
ipconfig or ipconfig /all
The first command (ipconfig) will spit out the IP address, Subnet Mask, and Gateway Mask of your computer.
The second command (ipconfig /all) will spit out the DNS Server information, your Mac address, as well as a myriad of other information.
Pretty neat information either way, you should just try it out.
How do I delete a file from my computer that won't go away? Erase a file from your Windows Machine using the MS-DOS prompt!
I had this video file at work, a funny commericial, that every time I click on it, the windows explorer would crash. I could not delete this file for the life of me, but it was a large file and I wanted the space.
There is a way to get rid of the file using an MS-DOS prompt, so let’s run through those steps to see how.
Step 1: Open a prompt. On the Windows machine;
Click (Windows Key) + R
or
Click Start and choose “Run” on the lower right side. When you do, you will see a dialog box that looks like this;
Step 2: Type cmd. This will bring up an MS-DOS prompt.
It should put you in a certain directory name. In my case, my pops mine into this directory on my computer. C:\Documents and Settings\Jeff Rothe\>
Step 3: The directory I need to get to is on my C: drive, and is called “Music”. So from this directory path I need to type this in;
cd ../../
Basically what this is saying is Change Directory and each set of “../” means go up one directory. This should bring you up to the prompt that now says C:\>
Step 4: Now type this and afterwards hit enter;
cd music
This should now display C:\Music>
Let’s take a look for the file we are looking for. What we need to do is type this command and after hit enter;
dir
Very quickly all of the files you have in that directory will show up and go whizzing by your face. Make sure the file you are looking for is in the directory.
When you find the file, type this at your C:\Music> prompt and after hit enter;
erase /F /S /Q (filename)
So in my case, I am looking to delete a file called Commercial.wmv. I would type this in;
erase /F /S /Q Commerci*
The asterisk that I have added at the end of the filename prevents me from having to type out the whole file exactly as it appears. Basically was DOS does is searches through the directory for any files that start with Commerci and deletes them. This can be bad if you have more than one file named similarly, but in this case, I only had one file that started with Commerci, so the erase function deleted only the file I wanted to.
And for those of your who got this, but want to know what the /F /S /Q stand for, here you go;
/F = Force deleting of read-only files.
/S = Delete specified files from all subdirectories.
/Q = Quiet mode, do not ask if ok to delete
So, basically this means, delete all files with this name, from all subdirectories, and don’t ask me if it’s ok.
Final Step : To exit out of the the MS-DOS window, you can either close it, or you can type exit and that will close out the window as well.
Mambo Setup – My own pitfalls and problems.
This is a new design section, that I am hoping I will write about more, but who knows. Right now I may be just curious, and forget all about that in the near future.
I am accustomed to writing about things that I find out or learn, but in this case, I am going to post my problems, and then if and when I solve them, post those solutions. So it will be a little backwards, but hopefull will help me learn and remember.
First, real quick. Mambo is an open source software for CMS. Oy, technical jargon. Basically it is a program that anyone who knows how, or understands enough, can edit and make work for them. A CMS is a Content Management System. So what that means is in theory, I could set this up for a client so they could manage as much or as little of their own website as they wanted. With a little basic training of course.
So I moving along in the process right now. I got through uploading and unzipping the correct files. I then went through the setup and made chmod’s on all of the directories that needed it. (See the Linux section to find out what a chmod is.)
The automatic installation with the Mambo installer finished, I realized that I didn’t run my chmod’s Recursively on some of the directories. That means that all of the files inside the directories needed to be changed to the same chmod or Change Mode.
Now I am getting a big ugly message in the default template file for the Mambo site called rhuk_solarflare_ii, and that message says;
Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ” (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’).
I think the problem is that it is looking in the wrong directory for where php is installed, since I have installed mambo into a directory one level deep in my site, instead of the root.
So I am currently looking for the solution to this problem. A good place that I have found is on the forum site, which unlike Interchange, has a lot of traffic. Visit the forum site here.
Solution!
The error message I was getting was some sort of included library news file in the upper left of the template. So I read some through some threads online, I found out that maybe my problem was that I never did go through and finish up the rest of my recursive chmod’s to some of the directories.
So I did a ;
chmod -R 775 – on Mambots and Components folders located in the root of Mambo, and everything seemed to chill out.
This was the thread that helped me solve my problem with the php include library error message.
New error – configuration.php is : Unwriteable
I wanted to go in and edit my configuration file in my administrative panel, but it was saying that it was unwriteable.
Solution
I did a chmod on the configuration file. This is what I typed in;
chmod 777 configuration.php
Mozilla announces "Seamonkey" version 1.7 is the final release.
I admit, that I never really liked the Mozilla browser. It seemed big, gray, and ugly, and in terms of standards compliant testing, Firefox was much more appealing to the designer in me.
So even though maybe I should be more upset, I don’t really lament that Mozilla has announced that they are turning over development of their browser platform, called “Seamonkey” (Which I did not know until the other day) to the design community for upkeep. Their team will be instead working now exclusively on Firefox.
Version 1.7 was released quite a long time ago, and there was speculation that 1.8 would be released, but then Mozilla would need to support that version release also. Instead they will be working with the current versions and compatibility and will helping the push of Firefox to take over Microsoft in the browser wars.
If you would like to read more about the reasons behind the demise of Mozilla’s Seamonkey, you can visit their site to read the news release.
I am getting an unexpected space between my graphics with I use the "object" tag to embed Flash movies.
I had come across a problem in one of our clients sites the other day. I noticed that there was an ugly space between two tables, the top table containing a small flash movie intro, and the bottom table containing content.
Naturally I thought I would double check the padding margin in any classes involved in the table rows or tables themselves. But the only declarations I used in the styles were for background properties. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on, and after the rough week I had had this week with strange CSS problems, I thought I was losing my mind. But working backwards I figured out the problem.
When I removed the <object> tags from the embedded Flash movie, the gap disappeared in Mozilla Firefox, which was my problem browser.
First off, I decided to set the margin and padding of the <object> element to 0 like so;
object {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
But after that did not work, I decided “When in doubt, make it xhtml compliant”. I made sure that this section of the site was xhtml compliant code, all the css was written in shorthand as much as possible for loading considerations, and I replaced the containing table with a div container instead.
Then, to make sure that every part of the site was xhtml compliant, I decided for the second time to use the “Satay Method” from Alistapart.com. I had used this on EVSMinder.com to make that a fully compliant CSS website and had good success. But I still have my reserved feelings about using it for large amounts of Flash on any given site.
I wrote about the method a little while back which you can find in the Flash section. But basically what it says to do, is to get around using the proprietary <embed> by using certain attributes of the <object> tag and “param” data combined with loading the final Flash movie into a container .swf of the same size. It should load quickly since the container will have nothing in it and will be around 1k.
As soon as I set this up and removed the duplicate tag, or as the Satay Method calls it – twice baked, (embed vs. object) the gap disappeared.
It was the end of the day, I didn’t get to research this, but I intend to, and I intend to follow up.
But if I am lucky enough to have any of the design community read this, hopefully they could post a comment with an explanation about this problem I was having.
Internet Explorer 7.0
This past month, Microsoft has announced that it will be releasing version 7.0.
This new release will not coincide with the release of Longhorn scheduled for next year sometime. Originally, Microsoft swore that they would only have new browser releases with the OS, but now seems to be going back on it’s policy.
I think that most designs could care less. IE is ok, but doesn’t have some of the new age ideas that some of the newer, better browsers have. Firefox has integrated term searching, color coded and formatted HTML code, and tabbed browsing. Microsoft hasn’t done anything major to Internet Explorer for a couple of versions now.
The design community also cringes as MS says that it is going to continue with the security updates it started in IE with Service Pack 2 (SP2). We think of a browser that isn’t any better, and is rushed to release, which is supposed to be sometime this summer.
But I will say this. For those who swear up and down to Firefox, the main reason that it is so big, is because it isn’t that big. Microsoft is huge, and is that much more prevalent. If that was the case with Firefox, those developers would be working night and day to try to stay one step ahead of the hackers.
March 15th, 2005
A little bit of a follow up to this article.
Here are some of the features that are speculated in being included in IE 7.0.
March 17th, 2005
Another follow up to this article, here is a IEBlog posting by the lead program manager for IE 7.0 at Microsoft, Chris Wilson. He is calling on all web designers to voice what they would like to see fixed in the newest release of Internet Explorer and to be specific. Want to voice you opinion? Well, head on over to Microsoft and tell them what you want to see fixed or implemented in IE 7.0.
New version Firefox (1.01) Released
Not a major release since version 1.0 was released back in November of last year.
This version fixes some security bugs, hopefully solves any known crashing problems, and fixes problems web users were having with their domains being spoofed, now domain names are displayed in Unicode. Be darned if I understand what that means exactly.
I just know I am pretty psyched about the release of Firefox 1.3 which is scheduled for later this year. In version 1.3, there should be incorporation of CSS 3. Some of uses of CSS 3 are; application of styles to images from one directory, wider implementation of first and last child selectors, and even built in rounders corners on containers.