Using formulas in Microsoft Excel CSV files

2008-08-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

Did you know you can use Excel formulas in CSV (comma separated values) files? It works perfectly. You just hardcode the parts of the formula which can be hardcoded, and use your programming code to add in, say, row numbers. Open the file inside Excel and you get working Excel formulas.

Getting an Epson LX-810 printer to work on Windows XP

2008-06-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

We've all been there...a beloved old peripheral no longer works on Windows XP.I had the occasion to try to install one of these impact printers, which had worked fine all along on a Windows 98 machine, in an XP machine. Epson's newest driver is the Windows 98 one, so you are supposed to use the Windows XP driver for Epson LX-810. Fine, but it doesn't really work. It'll print letter size, but no

Javascript code to jump cursor to next box in an HTML form

2008-06-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

Looking for a quick way to advance the user's cursor to the next input element in your HTML form? Say, after they have typed three characters, as in a phone number?function check(theElement,nextElement) {if(theElement.value.length >= theElement.maxLength) {document.authenticate.elements[nextElement].focus();}else {document.authenticate.theElement.focus(); }return true;}...

Old versions of software

2008-01-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

OldVersion.com

Internet Explorer 7 keeps redrawing screen on Windows XP SP2

2008-01-10T22:19:00.000-08:00

I have IE 7 running on several WinXP Service Pack 2 computers. It works fine on some, but on one, you could hardly use it, particularly for viewing pages with a lot of components. Every time you tried to scroll, it redrew the screen, giving you an annoying flashing screen experience.Perhaps you are thinking, "Who gives a toss? I use Firefox," but the problem is, some programs work only in

Blogger: stack overflow at line 54 part 2

2007-11-13T22:28:00.000-08:00

See part 1.I encountered this again recently on someone else's blog. I googled the error, but all I could seem to find were versions of my crappy half-assed solution that I slapped up almost two years ago, on the assumption that Blogger would take care of it.It's not caused by turning the backlinks feature on or off. It's caused by old Blogger templates. If you choose a new template for your blog

Rules automatically created for the program: Symantec LiveUpdate part 3

2007-09-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

Okay...here's what seems to work. You do the Google Answers thing...open NIS 2005, personal firewall, configure, programs. Select all the programs in the box, remove, run the program scan.Once that's done, follow the prompts and Finish. Look for the entries in the box that say Symantec LiveUpdate. Change them all to Permit All (rather than Automatic). Restart your computer.Because you've just

Rules automatically created for the program: Symantec LiveUpdate part 2

2007-09-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

I can see this is going to turn into a saga.I tried this last night: Rules automatically created for the program: Symantec LiveUpdate. It worked last night.After I booted up again this morning, the popup reappeared. Tried this:(Okay, it was in Google Answers, now I can't find it. It involved running the same program scan, then manually configuring the LiveUpdate entries to "permit all," then

Rules automatically created for the program: Symantec LiveUpdate

2007-09-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

I kept getting this, in annoying popup form (Norton Internet Security 2005 AntiSpyware Edition).I went to the Symantec site...their database was useless, but their tech support wasn't.You are to go to your Norton personal firewall, configure, programs. Click inside the list, select all (control+A), remove. Basically you're going to delete all of the programs in there and have Norton re-detect

But does it get you off the junk fax lists?

2007-06-07T15:51:00.001-07:00

junkfax.orgI'm game to try it.

Problems publishing on blogger.com #4

2007-06-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

Scratch the cookie theory. Doesn't work.Now I'm trying something else out...if (if) you can publish on an older browser, the problem would appear to be browser-specific. It's just a bugger to test. Until you've blogged enough to really test it out.I will leave you with a really nice episode of Doctor Who. Mind you I'm not the biggest Doctor Who fan, but some of the stuff is beyond excellent.

Blogger.com: Your publish is taking longer than expected...

2007-06-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

Okay! I've discovered a few things.One is that my blog publishes fine in an earlier version of IE, when it won't publish in my (reasonably upgraded) versions of Firefox and IE. You might try using an older browser if you have one around.Two is that when I turned on this setting in Firefox:...to "ask me every time," I got a boatload of requests from Blogger to modify cookies. I clicked "allow"

Helpful MS images

2007-05-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

Java spider function

2007-05-28T11:09:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 21, 2004Here is some source code for a Java spider function. I'll guess it could have been written as a recursive function but I couldn't remember the name "recursive," so I slapped together two functions. Quick and dirty, but it works.public void spider(String directory) { File dir; Vector directories; String child; String mydir; // got this snippet off the Net dir = new

Ipswitch not uploading your files when you're uploading directories?

2007-05-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, February 02, 2005I just found out that the default setting on the Ipswitch FTP program, does not transfer "older or same" versions of files on the server, when you're uploading directories. It doesn't pause and ask you. It just goes through every motion of uploading them, and doesn't upload them at all.Oh gee, how did I find out about that? rotfl...

Warning: copy(yourfile): failed to open stream: Permission denied in yourPHPfile on line x

2007-05-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

Friday, February 04, 2005 A possible solution to PHP Warning: copy(yourfile): failed to open stream: Permission denied in yourPHPfile on line xI got this error and cracked my head over it for a while. The usual, googling around and getting hundreds of examples of people asking this same question and not getting much, if any, answer to it.Someone finally came up with the idea that it had to do

Dumping old computer blog posts here

2007-05-28T09:29:00.001-07:00

I've decided to dump the posts from the old computer blog here. The blog itself got deleted a long time ago, back when I was a moron and deleted it (the tech stuff usually gets experimented with first). Hence, the posts have been sitting on static HTML pages all this time. It's not worth doing anything with the pages (they're in the old site format) and some date back to 2002 and are basically

Problems publishing on Blogger.com?

2007-05-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

I've had these on and off. I'll try publishing a post, and the thing keeps running and running, and doesn't publish anything. It will occasionally show a message saying to the effect: This is taking longer to publish than we thought, click here to continue publishing. So I click, and it starts running and running again, then I get the "publishing is taking longer than we expected" message again,

What is PR2, PR3, PR4, etc.?

2007-05-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

I went ahead and downloaded the Google Toolbar. I'm not big on toolbars, but the idea of being able to see the Google PageRank of every single Web page you visit...it's...handy.Yes, you can download this from the orange link at the top of this blog (a small commission will go to thebroadroom.net):Even if you already have Firefox, you can choose to download only the Google Toolbar.What you'll get

Site update

2007-05-16T22:51:00.000-07:00

So...I'm sitting here, working on updating the blogger templates. The problem is not the blogs of course. The problem is that half the site is still on HTML pages, before I moved everything to blogs...and the HTML pages are out of date. They were produced before I got Dreamweaver, so they don't even have the "new" site template on them.I can admit it's been a long time since I've done anything

Various useful images

2007-03-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

And so the site transfer goes on...

2006-10-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

...and on, and on...I've already decided that this version of TheBroadroom.Net...the one that appears on this server...is going to be better than the last. There's no point in transferring a four-year-old site that's still getting new content dumped into it, unless you make the new version better.For historical purposes, I've worked on this site on three computers: a Windows 95 custom built one,

Anyone else having problems with MTV Overdrive buffering?

2006-08-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

Just wondering. I've tried everything--I've upgraded everything from the browser to the Media Player to the Flash, I tried MTV's optimizer (which didn't seem to do anything), I've done Windows Updates...the thing is weird. If you play a music video (with the sound off) and then try to play it again, it's better (as if it really is caching it rather than streaming it).Still...should it really be

Site overhaul

2006-07-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

As you can see, we're redoing the entire site. Again. This is probably the fourth incarnation of TheBroadroom.Net. It started out four years ago as a frameset, then went to a handmade Javascript menu, then a vertical CodeThat.com menu, now it is...a horizontal CodeThat.com menu. The wallpaper may be changed to something else later on, I just saw it on a CRT and it looks, well, atrocious, but I

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