dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

User Name: 500kr
Product Purchased: EzClip Ez Clip Toll Pass Holder for EzPass, M-Tag

Product As Advertised: Yes
Shipped Quickly: Yes
Customer Service: Good

This plastic device is basically a small box, into which you can place an electronic toll pass (in my case, an EZ Pass), and which mounts to your windshield via suction cups. Very handy if you have multiple vehicles but only one pass, or if you want to use your pass in a rental car.

The EZ Pass normally mounts to a windshield via Velcro; this pass holder makes it easy to slip an EZ Pass in and out, and the suction cups are surprisingly strong; they really don’t want to let go of a windshield, period.

Getting the holder off can be a bit tricky, as a result; but thankfully, the suction cups are attached via slots on the hard plastic holder, so if you tug too hard, the cups will slip off the holder. If the suction cups come loose, they can easily be slid back into the slots.

The holder has no impact on the ability of a toll booth to read the pass (at least, not in Maine, New Hampshire or Massachusetts). All in all, a great product.

This was a fine buy. I placed my order on a Friday and I had the holder the following Wednesday. That’s a bit longer than I think it should take First Class / Priority Mail to arrive but it’s not inordinate. The price was great, the product is excellent, I would definitely recommend this vendor.

This blog probably appears different because it is different. How so?

It’s been upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Although it’s taken a minor revision number, WordPress 2.3 is nearly a new release with lots of new features, including:

• Native (built-in) tagging, which is long overdue
• Automatic program update notices through the Dashboard
• Significant and extensive URL improvements, including a system that will prevent old permalinks from going bad if you later change how your permalinks are structured
• A moderation system for multiple-user blogs
• Improved performance of the TinyMCE rich text editor

Special note to those of you considering the upgrade: This one requires a fairly significant database upgrade (due mostly to the new tagging feature), and will render visible error messages in your blog if you don’t run the DB upgrade script. Be forewarned.

The theme has been updated. Pretty much since August, this blog was skinned in TypoXP 1.0.3. And while TypoXP 1.0.3 worked just fine with WordPress 2.3, I decided, what the heck — I’m making a big leap, might as well update the theme, too.

So you’re now seeing the TypoXP 2.0.1`theme, which looks and acts slightly different from the previous version.

I’ve changed syntax highlighting plug-ins. Previously, I had been using iG:Syntax Hiliter, which I liked quite a bit and had hacked up some to look the way I wanted it to look.

While iG:Syntax Hiliter version 3.5 works with this WordPress release, that plug-in has been out of development for over a year and a half. It’s just a matter of time until it doesn’t work any more. Since I was acting now on a number of upgrades, it made sense to act now on this item, too.

Continue reading ‘Yes, Things Look Different, Because They Are Different’ »

Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

Java Question?

I was wondering, is it possible to see the source code from an applet that is on a website? Or is it once it is on the internet so well protected nobody can get it? It goes about this applet:
http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/bltempconvert.htm
I am trying to make such a converter myself but am a bit stuck so would want to see if the code from that applet can help me a bit further.. if someone could give a raw version of the code for such an applet it would be even better

Actually, the script this questioner referenced is not a Java applet, it’s a simple JavaScript converter program, like hundreds of others out there. But copying it would be somewhat difficult to do, and his request, sent in a follow-up e-mail to me, was pretty specific:

I really hope you can help me. I need an applet that looks like something as in the link I put in my Question. Is there any way to see the source code from that applet? If not if it’s not too much work could you show me what the code for an applet with 3 text fields with 3 buttons and behind them is? Then the text fields must represent Celcius Fahrenheit and Kelvin and when you click the button it gives you the temperature in the other 2 measurements and clear your input to 0.

Again, it’s not an applet. And it would be infinitely problematic, not to mention counterproductive, to set as 0 the input the person entered, while trying to compute the new values.

So, I modified this request: Our JavaScript will compute the other two temperatures from any temperature we enter. But we’re not going to use a button to submit the request; we’re going to use the onchange event for the textboxes to trigger our function. And we’re going to set the background color for the computed values to be pink, so we know what we entered and what was computed by the script.

Continue reading ‘A JavaScript Temperature Conversion Program’ »

Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

How do I make a link that takes the user to a random page?

I’ve seen a lot of sites that takes the user to a random page, like Wikipedia, or any site that does it, but I look at the link in the taskbar and it says something like www.example.com/example.html#, does the # have significance in something? Then how do I make a link that takes the user to a list of certain sites I have?

This is easily done in any Web programming language:

1. Create an array of URLs you want to use as “random” elements.
2. Generate a random number between 0 and one less than the length of the array.
3. Select that array cell and echo it out as the href attribute of a link element.

For this demo, I will use JavaScript, since it doesn’t involve a server technology.

Continue reading ‘A Simple Random Link JavaScript’ »