We apologize for our recent absence from the web. Our old server had a rather catastrophic failure and I had to setup a new one to replace it. Luckily our backups are up to date so everything should be here, but a heap of stuff won’t be working till I get the details sorted out. We have just moved from CENTOS 4.5 to 5.2 so it’s more than a restoration.

Bear with us, we’ll get there eventually.

UPDATE: Everything should now be as it was before the old server took a dive except that now everything is newer.
The W3c validator is up to version 8.2 and several other packages as well.

When you use Data Validation (Data/Validation/List, then =RangeName), I find it very helpful to be able to specify a dynamic range for the drop down because you may later add additional items to the list. It is fairly “easy” to do I guess.

I found this site most helpful on this topic. You simply need to specify a range using the explanation made there. Is it cryptic and hard to type? Yes.

Insert/name/define, type in a name, then use this:
=OFFSET(Data!$B$2,0,0,COUNTA(Data!$B:$B),1)

That would start in column B2 (very common place to start if column a contains labels and top row contains labels. There are basically three things you need to change as you go over a column at at time, the three $B’s.

Hope that is helpful to someone else because I find it confusing every time I use it for the first time in a while.

In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

In a move that has many people shaking their heads in wonder, Ebay are about to make offering Paypal payments on auctions compulsory in Australia. The ACCC has indicated they may well take action over it, but Ebay then issued a statement to their users that they are going to push ahead anyway and only delayed the action for a month because of the ACCC statement (Which said essentially that they think the action to potentially be anti-competitive.)

Ebay claims that the measure is for user security, but were that true and they really wanted to “help” users, they’d want to lower the price of Paypal transactions related to Ebay auctions so they are not double dipping on the fee charges, (ie getting paid for the auction listing, and then again to accept payment for it.)

They have not done this and as a result people are leaving Ebay in droves from the message boards we’ve read. Ebay perhaps consider Australia a good test market because in the grand scheme of things they haven’t really lost much if it falls apart because of this, or perhaps they think the extra payment money will make up for the drop in sellers and consumers. Who knows?

One thing that is for certain. The recent opening of the Tradingpost could not have been timed better. Telstra/Sensis must be absolutely delighted to discover Ebay driving business their way.

If Ebay had instead specified that payments could only be accepted by any method that can be easily reversed or by systems with similar security constraints to Paypal, it would probably have happened without ACCC interference. I find myself somewhat surprised that they did not expect the fuss that has resulted to be honest.

It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.

Microsoft’s recent release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 has resulted in several problems and incompatibilities, one of which was their own retail software. I bit the bullet and installed SP3 on a helpdesk machine (dumb, I should have known better than to put a new Microsoft service pack onto an important computer.) and all of a sudden I lost the ability to control my firewall settings and ports that were previously open where now locked shut. It required that I reset the registry in that area to get it working again.
The only difference I’ve really noticed so far in general usage once I got the firewall working again, was that it seemed to get to the login screen faster. Other then that, I’ve not noticed improved speed or stability, so I’m thinking it’s probably something of a non event for most people if you can get it installed correctly. (not everyone has as can be seen by several articles like this and this showing up on the net.)

I’ve heard a couple of people at work speculate that Microsoft would probably love for XP to get some of the bad press Vista has enjoyed up till now, in the hope it might convince people to “upgrade” to Vista. I have no idea of any truth to that, but I must admit that I thought SP3 would make XP slower so Vista didn’t seem so bad by comparison, and that has not turned out to be true, at least not in my experience so far.

It remains to be seen whether this is a good thing or not, but Google has added search boxes to search results that include certain sites. While this is no doubt good for searchers wanting to find stuff faster, it has already come under fire for displaying Ads for competing companies in the search results from that site specific search.

Read more here.