Random Thoughts of Mike Bunton

I have an earlier version of iTunes that has been on my laptop for a while and I haven’t kept it updated like I should.

So as I was preparing to go out of town, I wanted to upload some videos to my ipod for the plane ride and needed to upgrade the iTunes for my ipod to be attached to my laptop.

Of course iTunes warned me about upgrading before I could do anything.

So after multiple attempts to download and install iTunes, I finally found the answer to the problem and it actually lied with Quicktime (though from what I have read on the web, a similar problem exists with iTunes as well).

Here is what to try:

1. Download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
2. Install the program (MS Office not required!)
3. Run the program from Start->All Programs->Windows Install Cleanup Utility
4. Click on iTunes and QuickTime, and then click the “Remove” button
5. Run the iTunes installer!

I hope this helps you if you are having the same problem I was!

Good luck!

tags: General author: mike comments: No Comments

If you’re installing or using PHP on Windows/IIS server it is possible that you receive the following error: “Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library ‘…/php/extensions/php_domxml.dll’ - The specified module could not be found.”

To resolve this problem, please make sure you have following settings in php.ini file:

extension_dir = c:/php/extensions
extension = php_domxml.dll

Your extensions do not necessarily need to be located there, but the dll file should be in the folder specified in your php.ini file.

Your should also include php/dlls folder your PATH variable.

Note: php_domxml.dll uses iconv.dll file, therefore iconv.dll must be accesible thru the PATH variable. One way of doing is to copy iconv.dll in your /windows/system32 folder.

tags: PHP author: mike comments: No Comments

So I attended a lunch presentation last week on web site accessibility and wanted to know your thoughts on the subject.

Do you think about accessibility when you are designing and coding?

Most principles about accessibility are fairly easy to remember for the every day coder - things like always using ALT tags for images, allowing users to skip repetitive content (i.e. menus, headers) on every page - things like that.

Here were a couple of items that I am going to take a closer look at as I go forward in my coding and I think you might find them helpful as well.

1) ensure links make sense in context and out of context - this means that as you read a sentence that contains a link, does that link make sense to where it is pointing to? The more difficult link is taking a link out of context - for example, if you have a clickable link that says ‘click here’ - that is not good. Other times coders use ‘read more’ or something similar. In context, click here probably makes sense, but out of context it does not.

2) caption or provide transcripts for media content - this one is a little more difficult but I found out that there are a number of free products that will help with this process. Probably the best benefit of transcripts for your media content is that they become searchable within your web site and also become available for search engines like Google to index as well.

While these are only two principles about web site accessibility, try some research and keep all your sites designed in a totally accessible format for all your users!

tags: General author: mike comments: 1 Comment