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Code Snippet: Highlight row in Table while hovering over any cell

Mar 252015

Where I work we display a large amount of data on our web pages and it can get hard to keep track of what data is on what row, so I found a simple way to make it possible to highlight the row the mouse is over. It seems like a small thing but when your rows get to be too big it does get hard to figure out what data goes with what. To see this in action you can navigate to jsfiddle.net/Lct0w66o or you can navigate to My Test Site at hometownnerd.com/CodeTest/RowHighlighter.htm or if it fails since my domain is being a little goofy hometownnerd.mine.nu/CodeTest/RowHighlighter.htm. Basically you will have the following code to make it work:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.highlighted td{
 background-color: lightsteelblue;
 }
table {
 border-collapse: collapse;
}
td {
 border-color:gray;
 border-style:solid;
 border-width:1px;
}
th {
 border-color:gray;
 border-style:solid;
 border-width:1px;
 background-color:lightgray;
}
</style>
<script src="js/jquery-1.11.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
 $("table").hover(function () {
 $(".highlighted").removeClass("highlighted");
 });
 $("td").not(".hirow").hover(function () {
 $(".highlighted").removeClass("highlighted");
 });
 $(".hirow").hover(function () {
 $(".highlighted").removeClass("highlighted");
 $(this).addClass("highlighted");
 });
});
</script></head>
<body>
<table>
 <thead>
 <th>Fruit</th><th>Ripe</th><th>Not Ripe</th><th>Rotten</th>
 </thead>
 <tr class="hirow">
 <td>Apples</td><td>500</td><td>250</td><td>100</td>
 </tr>
 <tr class="hirow">
 <td>Oranges</td><td>200</td><td>30</td><td>0</td>
 </tr>
 <tr class="hirow">
 <td>Pears</td><td>1500</td><td>450</td><td>300</td>
 </tr>
 <tr class="hirow">
 <td>Peaches</td><td>700</td><td>150</td><td>400</td>
 </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

You need to have jQuery loaded, which does most of the work, and any row that you want the highlight to be on should have a class of “hirow”.

The

.highlighted td{
 background-color: lightsteelblue;
 }

part is what sets how you want the highlighting to look by using css, I am just setting the background color to be lightsteelblue.

The

 $(document).ready(function () {

part tells the jquery code to wait to be able to run until the page has completely loaded into the browser.

The

$("table").hover(function () {
 $(".highlighted").removeClass("highlighted");
 });
part turns off the highlighting on the row if we are moving away from the table we are in by removing the class "highlighted".

The

 $("td").not(".hirow").hover(function () {
$(".highlighted").removeClass("highlighted");
});

part turns off the highlighting placed on the old row that was hover over by removing the class “highlighted”.

The

$(“.hirow”).hover(function () {
$(“.highlighted”).removeClass(“highlighted”);
$(this).addClass(“highlighted”);
});
part is the workhorse that actually highlights the row, by first removing any “highlight” classes and then applying the “highlight” class to the current row hovered over.

Hopefully this will help some people when they have this need, let me know if you have any questions.

In IT it may not be that good of an idea to specialize

Application Development, Personal, Software, Web Development No Responses »

Mar 092015

I have been around IT for quite a while now, I owned my first Internet connected PC in 1994 or so, although I did own a Commodore 128 that connected to BBSes before that. I remember connecting to those at 300 baud and trying to locate a 1200 baud modem. I even had a 3.5″ disc drive for the commodore, which was VERY rare at the time. Ever since the first time I heard that connection to the outside world, that horrid sound of the analog to digital connection, I knew it was something I should be getting in to. I remember hearing about Microsoft certifications and A+ certifications and Oracle and Cisco certifications and being jealous of those people that could afford to go take the test and get certified, even those that could afford to get the specific training that all but guaranteed they would be certified, even though they had no real clue what they were doing, sure they had learned some things but most of it had just been wasted on them. Now, I do realize that at the time that paid off for many many people, but many of those certification programs were year long or so hard to get that it just was not for everyone, even those that were in the field. It seemed to give you a good amount of income and also made it very hard for new IT people to break in to the field.

That all changed a few years later, all of the sudden the IT field figured out these certs were not worth the paper they were printed on, and all of the people that legitimately earned them and had a leg up had nothing anymore. It seemed like IT had become a place for those that “knew” stuff, which is finally when I got my chance at working in the field. I made it into the field through a backdoor that meant I had to show people how important it was to be a part of it. I started to program for a decent size scale company Mettler Toledo. My boss showed an interest in someone starting to pick up an ancient language they had, and all that was in the shop at the time were older people that had no interest in learning something new, so I started to learn how to program it, which was a breeze to learn. I started to repair and modify code for a few of the older systems that were floating around and also to write a few new ones as well, this meant my shop could do something in house other shops had to get filled by other way busier shops, which could take a month or so. This gave me the ability to start asking for some new stuff to play with, I knew Basic from high school and could write that pretty good and had heard about a newish language which gave me the ability to write for Windows.

I wrote a few apps for my shop which they sold to some clients, allowing them to print tickets and interface their computers to the scales, locally. I was getting really good at it. I even started to write for a new scale product which had Basic built in, and realized I had finally found what I wanted to do. I was making $15 per hour at the time, which was ok money for a scale tech, but nothing like the $40+ per hour for an IT person. A few of the guys from my shop applied to Verizon and got in and they were going to be making $50 an hour, so I did the same. When my boss found out he tried to keep me with the company by finding a place for me in systems and it was a pretty good deal, $45k but I had to move my new wife and son to New Hampshire….crap, my wife wanted to stay close to her family, which we did, so I went to Verizon as a Tech for DSL. It didn’t take me long to start to make an impact on things there as well, creating fancy Excel spreadsheets for people and making some very influential friends.

I moved up within 6 months to Management because of one of those friends. I started to immediately make an impact on the team by creating a intranet server for them on a PC under my desk and started to learn ASP and MySQL. I created this all on my own and made it very helpful to people in my group and started to get other groups to use it as well. I never like to toot my own horn, which has always been one of my weaknesses, but it works out better to have other people toot your horn for you, which I always have had happen. This was no exception, the people using the system told their bosses and my team told our boss and I became a very important person in the building as well as some other locations, all over the US. This server even helped me to get a beefier server given to me, which gave me the ability to start learning PHP as well as Javascript and HTML. I was riding the IT wave pretty well and was able to keep my job for a long time through a lot of 30% staff cuts every 3 months, maybe I was getting to secure where I was. I had even attended college on Verizon’s dime and received my AA. I was also able to help people with their PCs, doing admin tasks on them since IT would take days and days to help them. This admin ability was my downfall at Verizon, which on that day was the WORST day of my life, but not everything is bad when you get told to pack up your stuff. I had made some more influential friends and within a week had an interview with a web development company that my boss’ boss’ husband worked at.

Enter my current company that I work for, Aurora Healthcare, they write ASP.Net code that interfaces with a MSSQL database that houses some 8-9 TB of data. This was my first job as a fulltime developer and it has been a god send, I love developing. I have been developing their product with them now for 6 years and have learned quite a bit since my Verizon days, I am now officially in the IT field and still spend a lot of time learning what the IT world looks for. I now know at least 6 development languages, and have learned how to use google to get better and figure out those things my company needs to have, like a self learning database manipulator that can copy databases and tables and make a lot of difficult tasks possible for people on my team. I have to say I am glad I did not jump on the certification bandwagon, I may never have been able to stay in IT or I may have hated it, who knows, but what I do know is learning many different things in IT is WAY better than getting pigeon holed into a specialty, which could be here today and gone tomorrow with no warning. It is so much better to keep yourself relevant than it is to become a specialist, maybe that is just to get your foot in the door, maybe once you are in being a specialist can command a lot more money than I get, but just make sure you have a backup plan, just in case something happens and that specialty dissolves like so many of them do.

Later

Just bought a Raspberry PI 2

Computers, Hardware, Personal, Weather, Windows 10 No Responses »

Feb 242015

I finally sprung for a Raspberry, thought the form factor was pretty neat and with what it seemed possible to do with it, just thought it was time to check it out. I bought mine from mcmelectronics.com and with it being so new I was put on the waitlist for 12 days and then it was shipped. Well, that time has come and gone and I have since received it. I have been amazed that something that small could do as much as I have seen it do. I have used berryboot to allow my PI to have 3 operating systems at its disposal on boot, which is awesome! I have one Linux for tinkering, one RetroPie for gaming, and one XBMC Media Center for making it an entertainment center later. I cannot wait to try Windows 10 on it, when it comes out. It plays many different Roms out of the box in RetroPie, although n64 seems to not work very well, but it does play MAME, NES and SNES very well. I just need to spend some more time on the PI so I can get used to it and see what can be done. I have plans on making my old weather station start to work again by reading straight from the devices instead of through the console which has been failing.

The specs as posted on a site are as follows:

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the second generation Raspberry Pi. It replaced the original Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ in February 2015. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 1 it has:

A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
1GB RAM

Like the (Pi 1) Model B+, it also has:

4 USB ports
40 GPIO pins
Full HDMI port
Ethernet port
Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
Camera interface (CSI)
Display interface (DSI)
Micro SD card slot
VideoCore IV 3D graphics core

This device seems like it is just about perfect for just dabbling around with Linux and maybe messing around with home/weather automation eventually and can even become a central entertainment hub in your living room able to play games and stream video and music fairly well and considering it has built in HDMI plugs straight into your TV. This thing is awesome!

As a developer you should not paint yourself into too small of a list of languages

Application Development, Computers, Software, Web Development No Responses »

Feb 182015

I have been developing for a very long time, I started writing code in Visual Basic 5 before .Net was a thing. I knew one language basically VB, I had learned Basic about 10 years before in High School and thought how great it was to start writing programs for Windows. It was awesome, I could make utilities to do a lot of different things. I had no idea that I was in a very small club of developers, those that were using VB, everyone else was writing C++ or Visual C++ and they were able to write some awesome stuff, compared to my little cheesy stuff, you could only write games and the like in one of those C variants, which I only knew existed.

Fast forward 10 years or so, I was starting to write VB.Net apps and ASP.Net stuff, and thought I was a great developer and that I was marketable. Started looking for a new job and found there was little to no call for VB still everyone wanted a variant of C although it had become C# so I realized I needed to do something that I had put off for a very long time, learning new languages. I started by trying to expand my web languages into PHP and javascript, I realized I had all but shot myself in the foot by learning VB/Basic, I was having a very hard time getting the language mechanics of both of them, but kept on trying to learn them. PHP was awesome and powerful like a C language seemed it could be and Javascript allowed me to start doing some of the more funky things in ASP.Net that the company I work for had not yet started to do. Then I started to hear about jQuery, I noticed it had a much simpler way of doing things and you really did not need to know as many of the little nuances of each browser engine and you could really start to do some really amazing things, like manipulating the DOM and doing some AJAX stuff which is amazing and really took my ASP.Net stuff to a new level. During this learning I guess the languages I was writing started to make it easier for me to learn new languages. The company I work for decided to use Dundas for dashboards, which made it possible to really customize the dashboards, the only real hurdle was it used C# and I had yet to learn it, but it seemed kind of easy to pick up, I am guessing it was the PHP, javascript, and jQuery programming that made it easy to start to pick it up. Now I have been writing C# code within Dundas for over a year and have actually created a couple of apps using C# in Visual Studio and now it feels so much easier to learn the new languages, not like it was 10 years ago when looking at C code made me think it was a foreign language.

Using these languages when I could have just as easily stayed a VB/ASP.Net developer has allowed me to become a much more valuable member on the development team and to become very important to the team, which is never a bad thing. I believe it also will have made me more marketable although I am still a little scared to try to get a C# job and I am also a little scared to try a PHP job as well. The only other thing I wish I would have learned as a young developer is graphic design, not to become a designer but just so I could make my apps or webpages look better and more marketable. I highly recommend young developers to learn as much as they can and to maybe start with a C language, which will make it easier to pick up other languages. Those devs should probably also try to learn some design stuff as well, that is almost a requirement now. Broaden your language horizons so that you may be much more marketable and this will definitely help you in the long run.

Later for now.

Entenmann's is just not that good anymore….such a shame

Food, Personal, Reviews, Uncategorized No Responses »

Feb 172015

I used to love getting Entenmann’s danishes, they were reasonably priced and pretty good, I was always partial to the Cheese and the Raspberry danish. I have been getting them for quite a while and they were of decent consistent quality. Well this seems to have changed, it seems they have made some changes to their recipes and quality. I bought a Cheese and a Raspberry danish yesterday and has a small piece from the middle, of course, where the “good” danish should be hiding with the cheese or raspberry. The raspberry was ok, although I though the danish was a bit dry, the filling was pretty tasty. The cheese on the other hand, just felt like it was just making the danish wet and was not very good tasting, I have always really liked the cheese flavor, but this time it had very little flavor. I am not sure if they are changing the recipe or if it was just a bad batch, although seeing how everyone is trying to cut costs and trying to make more money I would think they have found a way to make a larger profit, not really caring about the consequences. It always amazes me how companies will cut the amount or lower the quality and raise the prices, doesn’t anyone care about the consumer anymore. Everyone does it so I guess they think it is ok to just do it themselves, no it is not just Entenmann’s, it is everyone…Tropicana makes the jug smaller and raises the price, glad lowers bag count and raises price, and really they just keep it all secret. The bottle size is now in tiny little letters that I cannot see even with my glasses….ARGHHH!
Enough of my rant for now!
Later

Entenmann’s is just not that good anymore….such a shame

Food, Personal, Reviews, Uncategorized No Responses »

Feb 172015

Enough of my rant for now!

Later

Trying out Windows 10 Tech Preview on my Dell Venue 8 Pro

Computers, Personal, Smartphones, Windows 10 No Responses »

Feb 162015

I have been running Windows 10 on my tablet now for about 2 months or so, and must say, I absolutely love it. Am I saying this because I am a Microsoft or Windows Lover, no! Even though I do love Windows I have not been a fan of everything that Microsoft has done, yes I own a number of Windows machines and use quite a few Microsoft apps on those machines, I even have used Windows phones consistently since Windows Mobile 3 or so including Windows Phone 7 and 8, but I am not a blind Windows follower, I have tested Linux and Iphones and Android, which have not made me as happy as windows has, I do not like Iphones at all, they do have their merits, but they are just so….dumbed down. I guess enough of that tangent, I have been very happy with Windows 10, I love the new Start screen and how it does not go completely full screen and I love the more desktop feel of it. I have noticed quite a few issues, but it seems MS is fixing a lot of them as time goes on, the new style of releasing builds constantly is awesome and makes you feel you have a say in what is being done. Of course you have to believe they are reading the insider posts and addressing the things users are posting. I cannot wait for my phone to be able to get a build, and hopefully they fill some of the missing features that other devices have in the future versions.

Windows 10 is NOT perfect, hopefully yet, it has a fair amount of issues, like touch keyboard is not consistently popping up on first click of toolbar button and there are many screens that are not easily readable due to some rendering issues, there are also some metro apps that when they go full screen they are not able to be closed via the close button or controlled in any way without pressing just about everywhere on the screen to find something that works. That being said, with Windows 10 being this early in the release window, it is still quite usable as a main O/S and I am looking forward to using it for many years….hopefully. And on top of that they will make it free to Windows 7/8 users for the first year? Yes please!

Later everyone.

Very good email course on how to write and get traffic to your blog

Application Development, Computers, Personal, Web Development No Responses »

Feb 162015

I am not really a blogger by any sense of the imagination, sure I will write the occasional post about something that catches my eye or aggravates me, but I really never set out to become a full fledged blogger. Now, I am not sure the current email course I am reading will change any of that, although it would be nice to start earning some income, if that is at all possible via the knowledge I do have after being a developer for around 25 years. The course in question is one put out by John Sonmez or the Simple Programmer. The email course about blogging can be signed up for by going to the following link, devcareerboost.com/blog-course. No I am not being paid to send you to the link except maybe through the knowledge he is giving me. He is also a writer that has written a good book on development “Soft Skills: The Softwares Developer’s Life Manual”, which sadly I have not yet read, but will just as soon as I finish the final Game Of Thrones book, soon very soon. Anyway, he writes and shares a lot of very good information that he has gathered over his years as a developer and most of it is very beneficial to other devs.

The email course lesson I received today talked about how to create traffic, which is one thing I have been having a very hard time generating being a very private developer and not having the networking, meeting people and using them for the people they may know, ability that many people in the IT field. I have always struggled in this aspect of getting myself out there. This course seems to have a lot of good ideas on how to generate traffic, and it all seems like it is very helpful in getting me traffic so I thought I would share it with you and maybe get some traffic coming from his blog, and hopefully someone will get something from my blog when they do in fact find it. I do have a couple of posts that have received a couple thousand views over the past few years they have been posted, like how to use a domain name with a dynamic IP, which is by far my most popular post. I hopefully will get some more traffic due to this posting and small review. Hopefully you will find his email course useful to you as I have and hopefully you will get the blog that you have always wanted with the traffic to show you are doing it right.

The email course so far have covered what makes blogs fail and the theme of the blog, how to get started and how and where to host, what to write about and how to get ideas, how best to get your blogging feet on the ground and what you should do to make it successful, and then today’s which was how to generate traffic. I had previously created my blog and luckily had done the first 2 lessons correctly, or at least close enough, that I really could start with the 3rd lesson.

For my part I think I will start to post some stuff that I have learned during my development time, maybe some code and maybe some other things steeped in development. Hopefully, I will start to find some loyal followers and I will be able to help out a few people in my blog.

Again, if you are looking to learn quite a bit of good information about being a dev or about what it takes to be one, check out The Simple Programmer or read his book “Soft Skills: The Softwares Developer’s Life Manual”, if you want to learn about blogging and how to establish yourself and your blog then sign up for his email course devcareerboost.com/blog-course.

Later all!

Give the ability to auto hibernate to a Windows 8 Tablet like the Dell Venue 8 Pro

Hardware, Software, Windows 8 Tablet No Responses »

Dec 232014

I have been using a Dell Venue 8 Pro for almost 4 months now and really love it. It runs Windows 8.1 which has made the tablet very usable. The only real complaint I have is that the battery, since Windows uses an “always on” sleep mode to keep the tiles up to date, is the battery life on it is not very good. It lasts about 24-36 hours while sleeping, so if you happen to forget to plug it in over the weekend, it is dead Monday morning and you have to wait for 10-15 minutes of charging for it to be able to start up. Well, I have finally fixed that on mine and wanted to make it available to others as well. It is an executable that you set to fire using a scheduled task, I set my task to run when my tablet has been idle for 10 minutes and it works great, I have even disabled sleep altogether. I have included the zip of the folder that houses the exe and the ini file and also a text file of the source code, just in case you want to make your own or do not want to trust someone else’s code. The ini file stores the filenames or partial names of files that you want to not go to hibernate while they run. If you put radio as one of the entries it will not hibernate if Radio or Tuberadio or Radiotube is running. I also have it hibernate no matter what is running if the battery hits 5%, just to be safe. I believe you need to enable hibernation on your tablet, which can vary based on the tablet I think, so you may need to search it out.

Edit (2/26/2015): I have been running Windows 10 Tech Preview and I can gladly say, first this does work on Windows 10, and second it seems not to be necessary, Windows 10 allows my tablet to keep a charge for MUCH longer now.

Well, enjoy and hopefully it will help you enjoy your tablet a little more,

Larry

Download Zip File

Biking again

Biking No Responses »

Sep 162014

Well finally stopped being lazy and decided to start trying to bike again, hopefully so I can commute to work on my bike, since I live 4 miles from work should be a cake walk. Rode 5 miles last night and felt ok afterwards. Still kept my average that I had back in July, so I am guessing I could make it to work in about 10 – 15 minutes which is way easier than what I used to do years ago, plus the road is flatish, so that will help too (google says 82′ incline and 260′ decline to work) so that will be easy. Just need to stop being lazy. Anyway, enough about that let me put down the particulars of the ride last night for posterity.

4.48 miles in 15 minutes so about 18 mph

Weighed 205.8 this morning.

start: 90

1 min: 111

2 min: 123

3 min: 133

4 min: 144

5 min: 146

6 min: 157

7 min: 159

8 min: 164

10 min: 164

12 min: 161

14 min: 164

15 min: 144 (cooling down)

Later

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