Wednesday 18 July 2007

Madeleine case - New witnesses

Madeleine McCann aged 3 disappeared from her Hotel room in Portugal, where she was left alone while her parents dined in a nearby restaurant on May 3rd. So far police have only one suspect Robert Murat. Friends of the McCanns say they saw him at the search for Madeleine the night she went missing, but Murat claims he was not there until the next day when he went to see if he could help, Murat claims that on the night of 3rd May he was in his mothers house located a short distance from the Hotel.

But now, Portuguese locals have come forward and said they also saw a man meeting Murats description in the vicinity of the McCann hotel room. Police have refused to reveal who the Portuguese witnesses are or how many of them were interviewed.

The police also didn't reveal where on earth these locals have been for the past two and a half months! What was stopping them coming forward before, or what has made them come forward now, and after withholding information for two months can their testimonies be proved??


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Benoit Toxicology Reports Say What??

As you probably already know, last month Benoit murdered his wife and son and then committed suicide. Since then the rumours of "Roid-Rage" have been rife. Yesterday the toxicology reports were announced and I have spent the past 2 or 3 hours trying to find out what they actually said.

The majority of websites have a headline saying how Benoit was on steroid when he murdered his family and then about four or five websites said he wasn't on steroids but on a combination of prescription drugs including Hydrocodone a painkiller and Xanax an anti-anxiety drug.

So what is the actual truth? Well it seems that Benoits testosterone level was 10 times what it should be which states he was also injecting testosterone and www.wrestlemag.com eventually cleared it up for me.

"The doctor in charge of World Wrestling Entertainment’s Wellness Policy, Dr. Black, once went on the record as saying that testosterone is an anabolic steroid, going against WWE’s current stance, which is the subject of continued scrutiny after yesterday’s toxicology results in the Chris Benoit tragedy.

In 2005, Dr. Black appeared on 60 Minutes II to discuss a story about NFL players who were taking banned substances. When asked if he considered testosterone to be a steroid, Black was quoted as saying, “Yes. Testosterone is the, ah, original base chemical, or the starting chemical for all the anabolic steroids.“" (http://www.wrestlemag.com/news/index.php?p=6454)

So there we have it, Benoit was taking testosterone an ingredient in steroids and because one doctor has announced he considers testosterone to be a steroid that must mean he's right and therefore no matter what anyone else says the big bad steroids were to blame!


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Spend £95 Receive £44,000!

Believe it or not that is what happened to a 16 year old boy who thought he was getting a bargain when he bought a PS2 on E-bay for £95. When his PS2 arrived he opened the box to discover the PS2 minus the games that he was told would come with it but in their place was 65,400 euros (approx £44,000) His parents have passed the money on to police and so far no one has claimed it.

The police have been given until September by Magistrates to hold the money, and then the case will go to court where the family can legally claim the money back under the Police Property Act.

Ebay have commented on the incident "We know that eBay is a great place to pick up a bargain, although in this case, we agree that the contents of the parcel were somewhat unusual and we will assist with any inquiries the police may wish to make."

What a bargain, and how great would it be if nobody claims the money and the boy gets to keep it, I want to know who he bought the PS2 from and if the seller has any more for sale :)


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Monday 16 July 2007

Editing SharePoint Themes

As I mentioned a few days ago I've been working on CSS files to edit themes in SharePoint. I haven't seen much documentation on how to do this so after picking up pieces from different places and then figuring out what to do I thought I'd pass my knowledge on.

I have access to SharePoint, SharePoint Designer and IE Developer Toolbar. I find SharePoint Designer better for viewing CSS or HTML files, but another good programme is Notebook++ which is an open source, source code editor for use on Windows. It supports many different languages:

ASP, Ada, ASCII art, Assembly, AutoIt, BAT, C, C#, C++, Caml, CSS, doxygen, FORTRAN, HTML, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, KiXtart, Lisp, Lua, makefile, Matlab, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PostScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Unix Shell Script, Smalltalk, SQL, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, VHDL, VB/VBScript, XML

You can download Notebook++ free here

Anyway getting back to the subject editing themes. To edit the theme you need to open the theme file. This is located in /_themes/THEME_NAME/THEME_1011-65001.CSS replacing THEME_NAME and THEME with the name of the theme you wish to edit. Open it from the SharePoint site. Doing that should open the CSS file in your default code editor, unless you have SharePoint Designer then you can locate it that way.

So now I have the CSS file open, I have my Web browser open with the site and theme I want to edit and IE Developer Toolbar. First thing to do is on the IE Developer Toolbar click on "Find" and then on "Select Element By Click" this means that you can click anywhere on the web page and you will not be taken to another page and it will show you the attributes for that part of the page that you have clicked on. So for example, I want to change the page border colour. So I clicked on the page border and in the current style list navigate to the background-color attribute, then right click on this and click "trace style" this brings up a new window, showing me the following

.ms-main {
BORDER-RIGHT: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-RIGHT: 5px;
BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-LEFT: 5px;
PADDING-BOTTOM: 5px;
BORDER-LEFT: #ffffff 15px solid;
PADDING-TOP: 5px;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #055baa 15px solid;
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e3efff

Then a quick CTRL+F in SharePoint Designer and search for .ms-main will take me to the part of the .CSS file I wish to edit (a good idea is to either write in a comment detailing your changes or to create a copy in case you need to go back to the original.)

So I then changed all the #ffffff to blue wrote in a comment to say it was originally white and the I saved the file. After doing this the theme was just how we needed it so I had a look at another theme to see if any others could be edited slightly to become useful. On going back to my edited theme I noticed that everything I had changed had gone back to how it was. I still had SharePoint Designer open so I re saved the file and refreshed the browser, it changed again to the edits that I had made, so I realised that there must be another file that needs editing too in order to keep the theme the same. I discovered this file in the 12 folder on the server. This folder can usually be located in \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12 then navigate to "Template" and "Themes" there you will get a list of all the available themes, navigate to the one that requires editing. In my case my theme is called "Blue" so I opened the "Blue" folder, in this folder you will see 5 .CSS files, these should be called:

  1. COLOR0.CSS

  2. COLOR1.CSS

  3. GRAPH0.CSS

  4. GRAPH1.CSS

  5. THEME.CSS


The THEME.CSS is the flie that needs to be edited in order to save the changes, this file begins with the body tag and looks something like this:

body {
font-family:Arial;
background-color:#FFF
text-align:center;
margin:5px;
}

This is the first line in the THEME.CSS however it is not the first line in 1011-65001.css, you will find this at approximately line 150. So now it is just a simple case of copying everything from body downwards, emptying the THEME.CSS file and pasting what you have copied into it. Once this is saved you can change your theme and go back to it and your changes will still be there. I did not require an IIS RESET to do this but there is a chance your changes won't save without one.

If you have any questions on this subject post me a comment and I'll do what I can to help :)



I have a confession to make - contrary to what I previously said the 1011-65001.css file is only acessible with Frontpage or SharePoint Designer, sorry about the mix up!


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Sunday 15 July 2007

Funny 404's - Error Page Not Found

I was playing around on the Internet yesterday when I came across a really funny 404 error, and it made me think what other types of 404's there are. So I have a look round and found quite a few, they made me giggle I hope you enjoy :D

These are a few of my favourites:
Frog
Mario
Button
Photo
Question Mark
Kansas
Lightening
Monkey
Dead End
Oh The Humanity
How To Survive A 404
Psychiatric
404 Translator
Operation Failure
Sonic

And my personal favourite an oldie but I still think its great the Depressed Web Server

I thought some of the best one's were the Sonic one and the Operation Failure one, not just for the humour factor but for the thought, it's much better to get one of these than to get a normal 404 page. I hope you liked :)


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