Drop-down menu without javascript

<!--tags javascript css menu -->Some time ago I was looking for a CSS-only (no javascript) cross-browser technique to make a drop-down expanding navigation menu. I found the GRC Menu that did this, but it had a lot of site-specific stuff in there. It was not something I could easily use as a starting point for my own sites.

So I hacked around with Steve's CSS and HTML and developed a minimal version. Here's the minimal version of GRC's script-free pure-css menu.

Syndicated 2008-05-19 19:17:57 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

That doesn't happen very often

On Saturday morning I woke up to people talking about string concatenation, and how many parameters some function needed.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 01:57:52 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

MS SQL matrix query

<!--tags sql microsoft mssql -->If you use Microsoft SQL and you want to do a query to turn some rows into columns, it can be tricky. I don't know what that type of query is called, I think some call it a matrix query or a cross-tab query or a pivot query. Here's how I've been able to write a pivot cross-tab matrix queries for Microsoft SQL Server including an extra variation for SQL Server 2005.

Syndicated 2008-02-07 04:09:24 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

MediaWiki software and rel=nofollow

In case any of my readers run a MediaWiki site, you should know: By default, MediaWiki is configured to use rel=nofollow on links. This means anyone who sets up a MediaWiki site, not just wikipedia and its siblings. Here's more info and how to reconfigure it. That makes me mad. They should have better defaults.

Syndicated 2008-01-09 04:10:16 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

Event notifications in linux

<!--tags knotify growl notifications bash-->Envious of slick Mac notifications via Growl, I looked around for similar systems for linux. There doesn't seem to be anything quite as nice, but KDE has a knotify subsystem that is used by KDE apps and easily scriptable. And Galago has libnotify (or is it libgalago?) a gtk-based system for notifications.

I wanted to have an easy way to get notifications when a build or test suite is done running, so I wrote a few simple scripts to use knotify to do so. See Putting KNotify to work for some docs and screenshots of what it looks like. Here's the docs and code: <h3>knotify-send</h3> <h5>docs:</h5>

Usage:
  knotify-send [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup

Example:
  knotify-send heya! "look at me"

<h5>code:</h5>

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by galago-project.org's notify-send

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $base heya! \"look at me\""
    exit
fi


dcop knotify default notify eventname "$1" "$2" '' '' 16 0

<h3>knotify-done</h3> <h5>docs:</h5>

Usage:
  knotify-done [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done

Examples:
  knotify-done svn up
  knotify-done ./configure && make && knotify-done make install
     (only notifies for 'make install')

<h5>code:</h5>

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by http://sami.picobot.org/?p=19 and comments

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done"
    echo
    echo "Examples:"
    echo "  $base svn up"
    echo "  $base ./configure && make && $base make install"
    echo "     (only notifies for 'make install')"
    exit
fi


$@
title="Completed with exit code $?"
body=$@
dcop knotify default notify eventname "$title" "$body" '' '' 16 0

Syndicated 2007-09-14 02:17:03 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming