Monday, March 15, 2004

How to use an outhouse. On the first day of Boy Scout camp, scoutmaster Bob Marshall, who wore a scoutmaster's hat and a whistle around his neck, gathered the troop around the outhouse to tell us how to use it.  He said, among other things, to never put toilet paper in the urinal.  On my first sit in the outhouse, I pondered this rule and came to the conclusion that the thing I am sitting on must be the urinal because there sure wasn't anything else in that room that resembled a urinal.  I therefore decided to throw my toilet paper into the convenient metal receptical on the wall of the outhouse.  It looked kind of like a trash can. The next day, scoutmaster Bob gathered us around the outhouse for another lecture.  He pointed to the metal receptical.  "Someone stuffed toilet paper into here.  Don't ever do that again, or we are going to have real problems"  I must point out that he never gave clear instructions on what, exactly, to do with the toilet paper. So, on my next sit, I had to come up with some method of disposal of my used toilet paper.  I carried it out to a pile of boulders about 10 feet away from the outhouse and carefully stuffed it down there as far as I could. The next day, scoutmaster Bob called us back up to the outhouse for a lecture.  He pointed to my toilet paper wedged down into the rocks.  "Who put that there?", he asked  No one said a word.  I didn't know much about outhouses, but I knew not to admit guilt by asking where to put the toilet paper. So, on my next sit I decided I was just going to toss it down the crapper because it would soon become unrecognizable anyway.   8:54:07 PM    comment []

JavaScript Disable Links Here is the javascript function I used to disable the link that people often click more than once:  function disable_links(){  // this function disables all the links on the page    for(var i=0; i < document.links.length;i++)   {       document.links[i].onclick=function () { return false; }       document.links[i].title = "The exam has been submitted. Please wait for results page";   }   return true; } 12:52:50 PM    comment []

Scott McGerick reports on the "diggers" that he sees when he looks out his front door: http://mcgerik.com/scott/archives/salvation_army_thrift_store_sun_14_mar_2004.php 12:42:39 PM    comment []

For two weeks I had this really frustrating problem: When users submitted the online fisheries exam, sometimes they would get an error page while the results would be emailed with no problems. I kept testing it and never got the error. I wondered if the database was crapping out because of too many open connections, I wondered about browsers caching error pages. Then I watched someone submit the exam. They were like, "it sometimes takes several clicks before it submits"..... click click click. It is second nature to me not to submit a form more than once, no matter how long it takes the server to process the form.  So, when testing, click all the buttons more than once, because it's a sure bet your users will. In any case, there should be some code that handles this problem, but I didn't write the thing, I just inherited it. 9:39:39 AM    comment []

new radio tools Roger's Cadenhead, the author of the excellent Radio Userland Kickstart, has released the first version of his workbench.root It has two scripts: Workbench.viewCategories(), a script to display category links on your home page template and other pages. Workbench.viewPostIndex(), a script to display links to your posts in reverse chronological order 8:16:13 AM    comment []