Category: Support

Here at Skynet, we use a lovely little date picker script written by monkeyphysics (no real name on his site that I could find). You can find the original script including a donate link for the author and licensing here: MONKEYPHYSICS MOOTOOLS DATEPICKER

All of the sudden, the modern browsers decided to create an issue that caused picking dates in the past to be very glitchy. DJ described it by saying It really is like one of those whack-a-mole games.

Honestly, I think the so-called glitch should have been a problem from day one. The script renders two different divs at the same time, and it simply just hides the inactive one. I added a z-index so that the visible one would be on top. Without this, it was hit or miss how the click event would bubble.

It was a very easy fix. I added the following lines of code on line 299, pushing what was on line 299 below the added code.

this.oldContents.setStyle('z-index',59);

this.newContents.setStyle('z-index',60); 

You can just add them yourself or download an updated copy here:

MODIFIED DATEPICKER

Source: Skynet Solutions

By: Jed Parmenter

Adobe has released its newest versions of its industry standard software, CS6. To everyone’s disappointment, or at least mine, Adobe Edge is still not a finalized product included in their Creative Suite. Although they have released a great solution called Creative Cloud, a subscription service offering access to all CS6 applications as well as other cloud services. This facilitates the integration of desktop Adobe software with the company’s growing staple of tablet and smartphone applications.Creative Cloud is priced at $49.99 per month for an annual membership, or $74.99 per month on a month-to-month basis. The service is also being offered at a special introductory rate of $29.99 per month for current users of Adobe’s CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 software. This service can save you a lot of money and time if you use these programs on a daily basis. An annual membership over the span of three years will have paid for an entire Adobe Creative Suite, and we all know it stinks to buy a $3500 program that is upgraded within a year. Having access to all Adobe programs across multiple platforms, and getting automatic updates for all of your Adobe programs as they come out is a win-win situation for me.
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite.html
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201204/042312AdobeCreativeCloud.html

By:Clint Smith

Source: Skynet Solutions

Being an IT Technician, I run into all sorts of technical issues. One of my client’s Terminal Servers needed to be rebooted about once a month, and I wanted to find out why. After doing some research, I found an article on the Microsoft site that gives a description of the problem and a resolution.

There is a known issue with Terminal Server that causes it to keep RDP connections open even after the user disconnects. This creates extra load on the server over time and dramatically slows it down. Here is a link to the article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/03/06/performance-issues-due-to-inactive-terminal-server-ports.aspx

By: Tony Purkey

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

I can remember, when I was a kid, going to my local library and bookstore to get the latest printed BBS listings for my area. In my opinion, Bulletin Board Systems were the beginning of the internet for the general public. I had a 386 or 486 running at a blazing speed of 33MHz with a connection speed of 2400 baud. Excalibur, AOL, and other similar sharing sites came up soon before the dot-com era boomed.

Everything has been fairly steady in the internet world until people and companies started trying to beat everyone to the punch with new browsers and languages. But what has really started a tear in the interweb’s fabric is the premature use and implementation of HTML5.

As it stands now, HTML5 is not a standard, and it is not supported, however you still find big names boasting about their compatibility with this non-standardized language. Every big name in the tech field has their own internet browser, and they are using this to their disguised advantage to make the user feel as if they are ahead of the curve. It ends up being a finger pointing contest to what company or browser fails to be the best at something, but all we really want is across the board functionality for all devices.

Who originally proposed the start and development of HTML5? I bet you wouldn’t guess it started with one of the least used browsers, Opera from Opera Software. Since then every big boy on the playground has stripped it from their grips and is claiming it as their own, but there is a catch: you have to use their browser because the language is developed in a proprietary way that only allows viewing with their software. So where is this going? Advertising? Control? Web content monitoring? You can decide for yourself.

Currently there is no date on the final standardized release of HTML5 according to World Wide Web Consortium. There are plenty of supported APIs between browsers, but in the end, this early adoption HTML5 is causing big confusion for people everywhere around the world.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Clint Smith

I’ve been consulting and supporting corporate IT infrastructure for several years now. Lately, much of my work has been in remote desktop and network support, from walking remote users through program operation to installing software and devices. Remote support tools are necessary for almost any IT pro.

I’m sure many of you have used Microsoft’s RDP client to connect to systems. RDP is great for management of servers and systems where there is very little direct user access to the desktop. In my experience though, having access to the user’s desktop and sharing what the user sees is instrumental in solving problems. RDP is hindered in this due to the fact that when you RDP into a machine, the user cannot see the session on their monitor. RDP is also limited to professional versions of Windows and Windows specifically. In a lot of cases, I do not have complete control over the provisioning of systems, and supporting home versions of Windows and also OSX is a must.

This is where joinme.com comes in. It creates a connection to the active console session of the user’s computer, be it any flavor of Windows or OSX. Simply type in joinme.com into your browser of choice, and then have your user do the same. The user will need to click the share option on the joinme.com website. Depending on the browser and browser settings, it will prompt to download or run the joinme program. At this point, have your user run and then click allow to any UAC prompts. When it’s done installing, the joinme toolbar will be displayed at the top of the screen. Simply request from the user the 9-digit number displayed in this toolbar. Type this number into the join field on joinme.com on your computer and click join. Your remote user’s desktop will be displayed inside the browser. If you want control of the user’s desktop? You now have the ability to manipulate their system.

One small caveat to note is UAC enabled systems will freeze the joinme connection anytime a UAC prompt is displayed on the remote user’s computer. If you expect to encounter UAC prompts during your remote session, you can do one of two things. Direct the user to respond to the UAC prompt, and the joinme connection will reestablish. You may also disable UAC which will avoid the freezes completely. Joinme is a free to use service for non-commercial purposes. They do have a pay for service option that among other things offers a more robust application to connect to users’ desktops instead of running inside the browser. Hopefully this helps those of you that are looking for an easy solution to remote support.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Dustin Fry

Everybody has heard the phrase ‘Garbage In , Garbage Out’. The developer is the first line of defense against the garbage going in. Although a developer cannot safeguard against items like a misspelled name or inverting two numbers within a telephone number, there are many things he or she can do.

The general rule should always be ‘f you can perform a validation to ensure accuracy and not allow bad data into your application, then do so.’

Dates are much easier now than in the old days when you had to validate that a date was really a date and in the proper format, but there are still date validations you can do. If your application requires a birth date, you should always make certain the date entered is not a future date. There won’t be anybody born in 2062 that needs to be entered into your system today. If you also have an employment start date and end date, you should ensure that the start date is not greater than the end date (if the end date exists), and that the start date entered is not earlier than the employee’s birth date.

Phone numbers can be checked to ensure they are the proper number of digits and all numeric. Email addresses can be validated to ensure they are formatted properly. If it is extremely important to your application, you can make them enter it twice or email them a verification to be completely certain it’s been entered correctly.

If you have a field like state code or country code always use a drop down or validate the keyed entry against your master table.

If it is important to the organization using your application to use titles for their customers like Dr., Mr., Mrs., etc, and you are also capturing the gender, it might be wise to ensure gender for Mr. is always male. This could save you, your company, or your client from sending an invoice to Mr. Tiffany Tidwell.

You should keep in mind that depending on who is keying information into your system they may not even be looking at the screen while typing. If they are typing from a list or stack of forms, their eyes will be on that list or a stack of forms, not the screen. If you write the code to validate your data properly once you can stop erroneous data from entering your system hundreds or thousands of times.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By: DJ Burrup