Recently I tried to empty the trash on my Mac only to be continuously prompted with “cannot delete, file is locked”.

I found the guilty party was Windows Media Player (because the best place for that on a Mac is the trash - use VLC instead!).

It didn’t really matter what the file was, I couldn’t remove it. So here’s how I did get rid of it.

Continue reading ‘Can’t delete from the trash?’

You will see a lot of web sites with search boxes have text already populated inside of the field and when you select the input text box it disappears and reappears when it’s not selected.

This tutorial will show you how can add a small amount of jQuery to add this feature to any of your web sites.

Continue reading ‘jQuery tutorial: Text box hints’

I wrote a little tool to help me command line test URLs in my mod_perl dev environment. It lets me pass ful URLs + query strings via the command line, and see, or more importantly, debug the output.

Apache is running with mod_perl and we are using the PerlHandler to forward requests to.

There’s really nothing to the script, but I couldn’t find a simple example on the Internet when I first needed it.

Continue reading ‘How to fake an apache request’

I do a lot of work that requires me to log in and out of remote machines using SSH. As a result, I prefer to configure my laptop (working machine) to SSH without prompting for a password on those machines I know to be secure.

Here’s how to do it.

Continue reading ’ssh without a password’

While I was working on one of my client’s web site, I realised that I hadn’t taken any note of the (hex) colours during my mock up phase.

Initially thinking I should download a colour picker, I realised I could probably drag and drop.

Continue reading ‘Importing colour in to TextMate’

If you are familiar with using select boxes for categorisation and sub-categories, such as ebay does when selling an item, usually this can require a lot of JavaScript to maintain the select boxes, but jQuery can hugely simplify this task by adding a dash of AJAX.

Continue reading ‘Auto-populating Select Boxes using jQuery & AJAX’

Before I get flamed for claiming the impossible, this is how I achieved a goal that was entirely in AJAX, but I needed it to across different domains!

Some background: Some time ago I found, and implemented this awesome heatmap click tracking for the company I work for. However, since our test machines run everything from one machine (i.e. images and code), when it came to putting it live I never thought for a second it wouldn’t work…which was the result.

It was because the page was being served from one domain, while the click tracking data was being sent to our ’static’ (non-mod_perl) servers.

Continue reading ‘How I achieved cross site scripting’