The one browser that has always insisted on doing things its own way rather than following the standards is Internet Explorer (this is perhaps because for a number of years IE6 was so popular that it effectively was the standard). Now that IE only has 50% of the market you need your web pages to [...]

When you are defining the fields for your database tables you will have a lot of fields that contain text. In this article we look at the difference between defining those fields as char or varchar and the situations where one may be better than the other. Of course you may be using a database [...]

A discussion of what buffers and blocks are and how they can make a difference as to how efficiently a mainframe computer can read and write datasets. Buffering and Blocks

Just about all browsers have a find on page option in the menu and so adding an equivalent option using JavaScript may not appear all that useful. It doesn’t work completely the same way as the built in ones do though since it uses a separate browser window rather than a dialog box and therefore [...]

Object Oriented Programming languages make developing programs to run on multiple operating systems much easier. All you need is a class library of common functions that has a separate version you can link in for each of the operating systems you want to support where the public interface to the multiple copies of those classes [...]

For anyone still using a dialup connection to connect to the internet, it may not always be convenient to read all your emails during the one session online and it may not be worth dialing back in just to see the rest of your emails. Fortunately most email clients download all your emails while you [...]

In this article on dial up internet connections we look at how we can use internet connection sharing to provide access to the internet from multiple computers on a network while only requiring one of them to have a modem attached. Sharing an Internet Connection

When is text not text? When it is a part of an image. As far as most computer programs are concerned text and images are two completely different things and any text that you have placed inside an image is just a part of that image and can’t be read by the program. There are [...]

Hidden files are much easier to reference in Linux than in other operating systems. It all comes down to a single character on the front of the name. Hidden Files

This example of my cookie toolbox in action allows you to set up a web page on my site that links to your fifty favourite web pages. Your Favourites

Cookies are the main way of retaining information between one web page and the next and the only way to retain information between different browser sessions. Cookies are supported by both JavaScript and server side processing. Cookies are however limited in the amount of data they can store. Each domain can store up to 20 [...]

Windows XP was shipped with two web browsers from Microsoft. Internet Explorer 6 is the one everyone knows about while almost no one even realises that MSN Explorer is there. This “hidden” web browser can be removed from your computer to free up resources and increase the security of your computer. Removing MSN Explorer from [...]