About a week ago, Microsoft released Zune 2.5, the latest update for the Zune media management software.  Apparently this software update adds in some functionality that was previously removed (smart playlists) and adds quite a bit of new functions.

Other than the addition of smart playlists, Zune 2.5 didn’t really add any functionality that I envision myself using very often.  I found a very good, accurate review of the new software and firmware on Paul Thurrott’s Web site.

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First of all, to dispel any misinformation that is apparently still going around on the Internet (and, I, too, once believed this when I was first introduced to CSS), CSS is not capable of inserting content into your pages. CSS cannot be used to create headers and/or footers to be used on every page of your site.

For those of you looking for ways to use the same menu on every page of your site, and keep that menu in a single location so that it’s easy to update, CSS won’t do that for you. That’s what server side includes are for, actually. Server side includes can be used with pure HTML (provided that includes are enabled on your server), with PHP, Perl, ASP or basically any other server-side language.

In fact, CSS does almost the opposite. CSS is intended to separate the content from the design within a Web site. CSS is strictly intended to facilitate the “look” of the pages on your Web site. No content is interpreted from CSS.

Now, for the quick lesson on how CSS works.

First of all, we should examine the name. CSS is an abbreviation of the phrase “cascading style sheets”. Let’s pick that apart for a moment.

Cascading

items that overlap, with each new item taking precedence over the previous

Style

refers to the particular look or appearance of a specific item

Sheet

figuratively, this is intended to refer to a collection of items gathered together in a single location, like a sheet of music

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I just wanted to make a good, quick post about two good resources I find myself using quite a bit.  The first is an md5 encrypter.  It’s a very nice, simple tool that simply converts any string into an md5-encrypted string.

At work, I find myself making a lot of very simple scripts that require me to set up administration areas, but don’t really warrant taking the time to set up online registration, etc.  Instead, I simply use the md5 encrypter to encrypt the passwords I want to use, and then I enter those encrypted passwords directly into the database.

You can find that tool, along with quite a few others, at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools.  The link directly to the md5 encryption tool is http://www.iwebtool.com/md5.

The other tool I’ve found myself using quite a bit, for basically the same reasons listed above, is a random password generator.  The one I’ve been using the most is presented by PCTools.com.  It offers a lot of options, and does a very nice job of generating random, secure passwords.  You can find that tool at http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/.

I am basically posting this here as a reference for myself, but I’m sure the information will be helpful to other people out there, as well.

Occasionally, when working on my Web server, I need to create a new user on the server and grant one or more other users permission to view and edit files within the new user’s home directory. This task, in itself, does not seem all that difficult on the surface. However, because most Unix servers are set up (and rightfully so, for security purposes) not to allow most users to navigate outside of their own home directories, it becomes a problem.

Let’s say, for example, that you have two users on your Web server that you want to allow permissions to view and edit each other’s home directories, but you don’t want them to have access to any other files and folders on the Web server.

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Apparently, Microsoft released the public version of the first service pack for Windows Vista about two weeks ago (it seems a beta was initially released in August or September of last year). Although I have my computer set to automatically check for and install updates every night, my box, for some reason, did not pick this one up on its own.

Instead, when I came home from work the other day, I found that my computer had “recovered from an unexpected shutdown”. When I clicked on the link to check for solutions, I was informed that the problem should be fixed with Vista Service Pack 1.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently went through the trouble of restoring our family computer to its original factory settings in order to try to get a little better performance out of it. However, even after all of that work, the computer is still performing fairly poorly.

Therefore, I went to the Web to look for some fairly inexpensive options to upgrade the computer. I happened upon crucial.com. Now, I’ve heard the name of that Web site thrown around on a lot of forums, but I have never bothered to visit. In the past, it was fairly easy to purchase memory upgrades, because there were only a handful of different kinds, and every memory stick worked on every motherboard.

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You may have heard a lot of horror stories about trying to network a new Vista machine with your old XP machines, and you may have even tried it on occasion with no joy.  I know I had.

However, this time around, I was determined to get it working properly.  I, once again, Googled for articles explaining how to network the two machines.  This time, however, I was able to find a somewhat recent article on the subject (in the past, the majority of the articles I came up with were written when Vista was still in its beta stages).  I followed the steps in the article and was 95% of the way to having my two computers networked together successfully.

The last two pieces of the puzzle for me, however, were: 1) setting the correct permissions on my Vista files and folders and 2) configuring my Norton 360 firewall to allow the networking to happen.

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About a week ago, my parents provided me with the recovery discs that originally came with the eMachines computer they gave my family last year.  The computer has been running dreadfully slowly since they gave it to us, and it’s been getting worse by the week.

Of course, the kids are the main users of the computer, so I’m sure it’s become chock full of all kinds of tracking cookies, spyware, adware and everything else from the various things they try to download.  Therefore, I decided to completely reconfigure the computer, starting with the recovery disc.

I backed up the handful of files that were on the computer that I needed, and then restarted with the recovery disc in the drive.

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I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m a bit peeved with Google and their Analytics utilities.

For the past year or so, I have been using Google Analytics and have been extremely impressed with the reports it provides on all of my Web sites. However, there has always been one aspect of the Analytics utility that’s driven me crazy: the tracking code always causes javascript warnings.

I was hopeful, however, when I logged into my Analytics account today and noticed that Google is providing new tracking code for Analytics users. I copied the code and promptly pasted it into the template for one of my sites. Much to my chagrin, when I loaded the page in Firefox and checked my code debugger, I found that the new code produces just as many, if not more, errors as the old.

Why is it so difficult for these large organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so many more, to produce usable, clean, efficient, error-free code? Why do we have to continue putting up with these types of issues from organizations that probably employ more full-time coders than anyone else in the world?

UPDATE - I’ve added some screen shots of my error console after the jump.

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The other day, our IT security guy contacted me to let me know that my computer had accessed a Web site that potentially installed some adware/spyware on my computer. He asked me to run some standard scans (virus, adware, spyware, etc.) to make sure that my computer was clean.

I went ahead and ran the scans and found that my computer appears to be clean. However, while doing research to figure out what had caused the problem in the first place, I came across a very interesting Web site.

YouGetSignal.com is a Web site that offers advanced IP related searches. You can search for the physical location of an IP address, complete with a Google map to display the results. You can use a visual traceroute tool, which is also accompanied by a Google map.

The most interesting utility I found, though, was an IP lookup that allows you to list all of the domain names associated with a particular IP address. I got some very interesting results when I searched for some of my own domains.

For instance, the IP address associated with one of my hobby sites hosted at Netfirms (dcevolution.net) came up with 164 other Web sites using the same IP address.

However, when I searched for Web sites using the same IP address as the hobby sites I have hosted at site5 (dchelp.net), the only results that came up were my other sites.

Searching for centernetworks.com brings up 760 domains using the same IP address, while htmlcenter.com brought up 48 domain names, which all appear to be offshoots of htmlcenter.com (although some of them are rather questionable, so I’m not sure if they are actually associated with htmlcenter or if it is just a weird coincidence that they came up with the same IP - or if the owners of those Web sites are using some sort of proxy to hijack htmlcenter’s IP).

Still, it’s kind of fun to search for that sort of information, and extremely interesting.