Ryan Chapin's Website

I recently was re-installing WinXP on my folks computer and instead of blowing away their existing disk used an extra one that I had lying around.

When I went to run the WinXP set up disk I chose to boot from the CD and then got the "Setup is inspecting your computer’s configuration" message.  And then just a black screen.  The CD drive spun down and then nothing.

Turns out that since I was trying to use a disk that → Continue reading “How to Fix Getting a Black Screen When Attempting to Install Windows XP”

When you create an input button that has a long string set as it’s value attribute IE 6 and IE 7 render additional, spurious whitespace or padding to the left and the right of the text in the button.  This is solved by adding the following conditional CSS style for the input button in question (assuming we have an input button with the class "submit_button"):

input.submit_button
        {
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0;
        width: auto;
        max-width: auto;→ Continue reading “Removing Extra Space In a Submit Button Under IE 6 and IE 7”

FontLab has recently announced a product that allows you to use any photofont, OpenType, or TrueType font on your website.  And it even works in IE 6.0!

I was looking around for some free emoticons for use in forums, blogs, and e-mails and found this site.

I’m working on a project that requires the use of some javascript for a simple survey.  The rub is that the pages all need to be accessible.  I’ve not yet done any work with any AJAX and accessibility but found a few links to articles to get me started.

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?
Accessibility of AJAX Applications
AJAX and Accessibility→ Continue reading “AJAX and Accessibility”

First off, I didn’t want to simply forward port 22 on my firewall to my local machine as I didn’t want to completely expose it to the net.  I have a number of hardened Internet servers that are completely exposed (for ssh connections, that is) and sufficiently locked down that I felt comfortable configuring my network to only allow ssh connections from a specific server.  What I did there was specify firewall rules to only allow connections on port 22 → Continue reading “Accessing A Subversion Repository Via an SSH Tunnel from Windows XP with Interactive Password Login”

There are times when you might want to change your default browser; especially if you are a developer and want to make sure that something works as it should with both IE and Firefox.

To change your default browser:

• Go to: Start/Control Panels/Add or Remove Programs
• Click on "Set Program Access and Defaults", the last button in the left-hand nav
• Click on the "Custom" set of options
• You will see an expanded list of items, Web Browser, E-mail Program, etc.

If you have ever tried to do a simple getURL() command in Flash from an .exe projector you’ll notice that it fails when Firefox is your default browser.

Following is the solution to the problem in both AS 2.0 and AS 3.0

Here’s the code for the fix in AS 2.0:

// code on a keyframe on the main timeline

var swfUrl:String = _root._url;
var lastSlashIndex:Number = swfUrl.lastIndexOf("/");
var pipeIndex:Number = swfUrl.indexOf("|");
var baseUrl:String;
if (pipeIndex >= 0)
{
    baseUrl 

Here’s a quick how to on running Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time under Windows

1. Right click the shortcut of the Firefox 2, click "Properties". Add "-profilemanager" at the end of the shortcut path. Click OK. Then run this shortcut to launch Firefox Profile Manager.
2. Create a new profile, name it "firefox3". And uncheck the "Don’t ask at startup"
3. Go to Properties of the Firefox 2 shortcut again, remove the "-profilemanager" and add "-p default" at the end