Tips & Tricks

Rendering IE 8 in IE 7 compatibility mode

Unfortunately Microsoft over the years has left us disappointed year after year with their web browser Internet Explorer. Yes, I know we all have had frustration with the little quirks that all browsers have but Internet Explorer has been the bane of the web developer. IE 8 like previous incarnations appears at first to be

Testing if JavaScript method Exists

When developing within a large web application it may be needed to check if a JavaScript function/object exists prior to being calling. The benefits to checking if the method exists are: No JavaScript errors are Generated. if needed you can dynamically load and initialize your method or object In most cases you won’t need to

Creating a Custom Feed in WordPress

Ever find yourself wanting to create a custom feed of your WordPress managed website? Lucky for you they have the handy add_feed hook that allows you to define as many feeds as you want, Just be careful not to duplicate any existing feeds. I personally find myself using this feature to output xml of data

How to obtain the full absolute path of the exectuing shell script without readlink

One issue that I always come across when creating a shell script is referencing files dynamically based on the location of the shell script. A hack I often used was to pass the script’s path to the script on execution because the readlink command was not available to me. However recently I have revisited this

Dynamically generating the Java Classpath within a shell script

One of the main maintenance issues with running a Java application from a shell script is keeping your classpath up-to-date with the new and updated jars. To make things more difficult you can’t specify a folder as the classpath as it doesn’t include the jars in it only .class files. However through the use of

How to Save and Write To and From a File in Visual Basic

A common task when creating a form based windows application is to allow a user to save their information and to also load saved information. In this short tutorial I will show you the basic steps to save a form’s information to a file and then load up the contents of the saved file. Saving

Multiplying a Database Column’s Values

Like most individuals I find the built int SUM function of SQL very helpful when performing computations. Recently however I found myself wondering how to compute the product of a result set grouped by some factor, and I found myself slightly at a lost as no Product function exists. Fortunately for us we can use

Tips & Tricks: How to perform String Concatenation in Visual Basic

Visual Basic allows multiple methods for concatenating Strings. The simplest and most easily recognized method is using the + operator which will perform the concatenation of Strings. However if you want to concatenate two numbers together you will first have to convert them to Strings to use the + operator. To enable you to specify

Managing your files and folders through the command prompt

Remembering the correct command prompts across different platforms can be confusing. To make things easier on myself I have compiled a short list of the commands and their options that are commonly used to create and delete files and folder in DOS. Including how to delete a folder and all its contents. How to Delete

Creating User Friendly and Twitter Friendly links with TinyURL

Often we forget that although we want our URLs to be SEO friendly and contain information about the current page. Because of this URLs can become very long and cumbersome to the user and to other applications which allow a limited amount of text like Twitter. For example the URL to this article is http://resources.mdbitz.com/2010/03/creating-user-friendly-and-twitter-friendly-links-with-tinyurl,