Lt – ROBERT OWEN — Technology Leader & Musician

Win_root System32 Hal.dll missing or corrupt

July 11, 2009 by Robert Owen

Had a dandy today. A client called saying that their computer would no longer boot. When I asked them if there was any kind of error message, they read me the following: Win_root\System32\Hal.dll missing or corrupt: Please re-install a copy of the above file. Sounds serious, huh? It is. When I arrived at the office there was an ominous “clicking” … Read more

CSS – Long URL

June 24, 2009June 10, 2009 by Robert Owen

This is an older post that did not make it through to the new site when I converted to WordPress. Hopefully this will still be relevant to someone out there.

CSS and the Long URL:

I was working on a webmail client a while back and had been having a few design problems. Sometimes when you subscribe to a blog, forum or usergroup the e-mails from those respective subscriptions will include an “unsubscribe url”. This Blog does. Now this URL can be really long and, in a normal email client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) this is a non issue. But, writing a webmail client this became an issue.

In Firefox, if the url is longer than the width of the div area it would break my layout. In IE the long url would wrap to the next line as expected. The only Fix I could find for this was

Upload Files with Coldfusion.. It’s Simple!!

June 10, 2009February 7, 2007 by Robert Owen

This is simple… simple I say!!! Uploading files to your website using Coldfusion is actually a Simple process… There is nothing really secret or sinister about this so.. here we go:

Computer Locked up?

June 10, 2009January 18, 2007 by Robert Owen

Everyone’s seen it… You are surfing the web or working on a project for work when…. Everything Freezes up! AAAAARRRRGGGG… (no, this isnt an ad for Geek Squad!).

What caused it? Spyware? Virus? Cheese? It’s really hard to tell. Lots of things can cause the dreaded “Freeze”. After cursing furiously, you reboot and continue your work..(if you were a good boy/girl and actually saved it!?) But what caused it????

When this starts happening, think about what may have changed lately.. Did you:

Install a new program?
Remove and old program?
Click a mysterious Pop-Up?
Add a new piece of hardware?
Upgrade your memory?

Simple Pop-up Window

June 24, 2009December 28, 2006 by Robert Owen

I tend to use this little bit of javascript quite a bit so I thought I would share. You can use this little javascript to add a “Pop-up” window effect to links in your website.

For example, if you have a page of product images and Item numbers you can make them link to a “Pop-up” window with the item details.

Making a DIV Clickable

June 10, 2009November 17, 2006 by Robert Owen

Ever had a need to make a div clickable? I have. I was searching for a way to do this very thing and came across a couple of different methods to acomplish it.
We can use javascript or apply the a – /a tags.

Simple Contact Form

June 10, 2009November 9, 2006 by Robert Owen

If you have access to a coldfusion server then you you have the ability to handle form processing in a couple lines of code.

With other methods you would make the “action” of your form post to a script held in a cgi directory. You would have to find that script and edit it to allow content from your form and to process the mail to an allowed address.