Website of the Month!

There's so much usefulness to the World Wide Web, that I'm bursting to yell out my favourite website for this month:



With an extensive search facility and categorisation of all those free fonts, you're bound to find the right font for your needs as there are well over 13,000.

There are still references to commercial fonts, if you manage to not find anything.

Image links in IE8

While mocking up a design page for a colleague's website I came across a new browser behaviour in IE8.

This was the first time I used IE8 as my main development browser, due to the fact that the PC was re-installed and high-priority updates were applied. Surprisingly Microsoft branded IE8 as a priority update.

Anyway, back to what I was talking about, here's a sample:
<a href="index.htm"><img src="logo2.jpg" alt="Logo" title="Logo" /></a>


As you can tell, this is using an image for a link, where it behaves well in Chrome, Firefox and in the previous versions of IE (7 and older). But in IE8, this is not the case as the DOM does not treat the image as innerText, only as a child node. As a result, everytime I hover the mouse over this image, an extra gap would come from nowhere shifting any relatively positioned elements.

To fix this I explicitly added a space (&nbsp;), so the line would look like:
<a href="index.htm"><img src="logo2.jpg" alt="Logo" title="Logo" />&nbsp;</a>

SQL Replace

A colleague recently asked me if it was possible to replace a string in SQL. After a bit of questioning, this is because entities like & in HTML would be encoded to &amp; in his database.

Since it was the case of outputting information from a SQL statement, this can be simply done by using the REPLACE function in the SELECT. For example:

SELECT REPLACE(CompanyName, '&amp;', '&') FROM Company

The same concept applies in Crystal Reports.

Remote Desktop Copy & Paste

Here's a little tidbit. When I used to Remote Desktop onto client machines, they would disable file transfers as part of their security procedures.

One way of transferring files in Remote Desktop is to allow the remote session use your local drives, so you can still navigate your computer from within the session, which is quite slow.

Then you would have the ability of using the clipboard to copy & paste content from one file into another.

But if you want to copy and paste files themselves, this is possible by enabling both of the above. It is a bit slow but it is more convenient and quicker then trawling your local drives slowly to find the file only to face a slow drag and drop procedure.

Free Nero

It's official. The creators of the popular CD/DVD burning software, Nero, has released a free version of it's flagship product for Microsoft Windows.

Not to be confused with the 15 day trial, the free version of its software is limited to only the simple task of burning CDs and DVDs. Their website states:

"This version of Nero 9 contains simply data burning and disc copying features for CDs and DVDs. Additional features and functionality are available with an upgrade to Nero 9 full version."

Of course, many would have turned to the likes of other freeware and open source software such as CD Burner XP Pro (my favourite piece of kit by the way) or ImgBurn. However, Nero's offering maintains their trademark interface and the use of SmartStart for novice users, which many would prefer.

You can download it from here.