John Stanfield dot com

One of the most common complaints from my boss is “how come links to external sites don’t open in a new window” and my response is usually a shrug. There are many reasons why a link may appear on a web page… A developer could forget to add the target attribute when inserting it. A content writer could be using a WYSIWYG editor that doesn’t support it. The content might be bulk loaded without proofreading for the target attribute. It’s tough to control these things (i.e. ensure that the target=”_blank” attribute is set).

I’ll ignore the religious argument over allowing users to decide how they want to open links. The person who signs my paycheck asked for this.

I wrote a Javascript function to parse out all hyperlinks on a page and set the target attribute to _blank when the href appears to be different that the current page’s host/domain. It ignores hrefs that contain or begin with “javascript:” so that a new window doesn’t open just to call a Javascript function.

This function uses Prototype, so you’ll have to download that in order to use this (or you’ll have to tweak this to not use prototype).

function externalLinksInNewWindow(){
    if (!document.getElementsByTagName)
        return;
    var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
    for (var i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
        var anchor = anchors[i];
        var thisHost = location.host;
        // anchorHost is http://www.someothersite.com/somepath
        var anchorHost = anchor.href;

        // if anchorHost starts with http, parse it
        // if it doesn't start with http (e.g. ftp://) then don't bother parsing
        if (anchorHost.indexOf('http') == 0) {
            // this makes anchorhost like www.someothersite.com/somepath
            anchorHost = anchorHost.substring(anchorHost.indexOf('//') + 2, anchorHost.length);
            // this makes anchorhost like www.someothersite.com
            if (anchorHost.indexOf('/') > 0)
                anchorHost = anchorHost.substring(0, anchorHost.indexOf('/'));
        }

        // allow for using href="javascript:myFunction()" instead of onclick="myFunction()"
        if (anchorHost.indexOf('javascript:') == -1 && anchorHost != thisHost){
            anchor.target = "_blank";
        }
    }
}

Event.observe( window, 'load', function() {
    externalLinksInNewWindow();
} );

My new laptop arrived today from Newegg. It is a MSI VR-705 notebook in their value series. Talk about specs: 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 17″ widescreen, HDMI out, webcam, SD card reader, and full keyboard with a real numeric keypad (never seen an actual numeric keypad in a laptop, just the silly one where the 789UIOPJKLM keys double as a keypad [does anyone actually type numbers that way?]). With all that built-in, I don’t even know what I could plug into the USB ports!!!

Anyway, since I am not a fan of Vista (whatever that is — I’ve never even seen it), and I still do .Net development (maintenance only! anything new is Ruby on Rails!), and I’m not interested in dual boot with Fedora or Ubuntu, I went with Windows XP Professional. It took a while to find a manufacturer who has a a notebook with good specs and XP drivers on their website. The price and specs of this notebook combined with the fact that it supports XP Pro was unbelievable. There are a few not-so obvious things when it comes to installing XP Pro:

• First, go into the BIOS and disable S.M.A.R.T on the hard drive (this is on the main screen, and it is an option for the hard drive)
• Next, while in the BIOS, disable AHCI (I don’t remember which menu, but the BIOS is very limited)
• Most importantly, you must have an XP SP2 disc. The original XP disc from 8 or 9 years ago won’t work because it clashes with the PCI express video card, and I don’t know of an easy way to tell the video card to revert to a compatibility mode. If you are stuck with an original XP Pro disc, you will have to slipstream XP SP2 into it. It is easy — probably easier than trying to tinker with the video card. Just Google “slipstream XPSP2″ and you will have a plethora of tutorials

I frequently make a quick copy of a table before tinkering with the data within it. Since I use both SQL Server and MySQL, I always have to look up the syntax of how to do this because I never remember.

In T-SQL, this is the syntax:

select *
into MyTableBackup_20090414
from MyTable

In MySQL, this is the syntax:

create table MyTableBackup_20090414 as
  select *
  from MyTable