So, the release candidate of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has been publicly available. I’ve been waiting for this since about April when I first installed Vista on my machine. There hasn’t been anything wrong with my machine, I was just giddy at the idea of an even faster, more reliable version of the Windows that I actually like using.

It’s been running SP1 for a few days now, and my computer doesn’t seem any different. At all. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I have installed service packs in the past that completely destroyed the computer. My installation of Windows Server 2003 is still shaky to this day. Having a machine just… work… after installing the service pack is always refreshing.

Maybe it is more stable. I can’t remember the last time I crashed. I can’t remember the last time a program froze up (except Firefox) and I had to manually close it. I certainly can’t remember the last time I had to CTRL-ALT-DELETE it.

Long story short… I have absolutly nothing positive or negative to say about SP1 RC1. As far as I’m concerned, my PC is running great… but it was before, too. But, according to Windows, its in there.

I’ve seen a lot of tutorials out there for how to have a fixed footer using CSS. Most of them require all kinds of nested div’s, wrappers, and so on. It’s really very simple, and this code can be copied and pasted into almost any website template without modifying the entire set up. See below.

CSS file:
.footer_spacer{
height:60px;} /* This height should be equal to or greater than the
footer. his ensures content is not cut off by your footer */
#footer{
position:fixed; /* keeps it from moving at all */
bottom:0;  /* keeps it at the bottom of the screen */
width:100%; /* stretches to fill the width of the body tag */
height:30px; /* sets the height. should be equal to or less than the
footer_spacer height */
}

HTML:
<div class = "footer_spacer"></div> <!--Nothing goes in here. This is
just a spacer. -->
<div id = "footer"> Enter Footer Content Here </div> <!--This is the
actual footer. Use CSS to style to your needs -->

And that is it. The footer_spacer div creates a “buffer” below the rest of your page for the footer to rest in, thus eliminating any content from being cut off. If your webpage uses floats, read on. If not, then you should be able to copy and paste this into your exisiting web page with no problems. Tested in IE7, FF2, FF3 and Safari. Should work in IE6 as well.

If you use floats, as some of my pages do, you only have to make one small modification. The footer_spacer div may need to be increased to accomodate the position of your floats. Also, be sure to add a <div style = “clear:both;”></div> before the footer_spacer div to make sure it is positioned correctly. Any issues getting this up and running, feel free to e-mail me at dcostalis@gmail.com.

Well, i found one. A bug that is. Turns out WordPress’ new widget code didn’t expect to be moved around. If you place the comments box below the code for the sidebar, it throws the comments function off. A simple one line fix, proposed at http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5439 by me should get everything up and running.

If you run into this problem yourself, here’s a quick fix:

If you don’t know what ftp is, skip below to the other, ugly fix.

Using your favorite ftp program, navigate to the wp-includes directory where your WordPress installation is located. Find and edit the widgets.php file. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and locate a line of code that says: do_action(’widgets_init’);

Below this code, insert the following line: unset($id);

Be sure to include the semi-colon;

Voila, your comments will now display correctly!

Ugly Fix:

I say this fix is ugly because code doesn’t really belong in your templates… but oh well.

You’ll have to make the change in all pages that display comments. in my case, it is only the single post page that I had to make this change in. Locate the <?php comments_template(); ?> line of code. Immediatly above this, insert <? unset($id); ?>. Save the page, and your comments should display properly.

Hope this helps. email me at dcostalis@whathuhstudios.com if you have any problems

I ran into this problem myself for no apparent reason…

Well now there’s a fix! Thanks to a regular Vista user on Microsoft’s TechNet forums, a fix has been found!
For Business and Ultimate version users:

>>Right click “Computer”
>>Click “Manage”
>>Under the “System Tools” section, Double click “Local Users and Groups”
>>Click “Groups”
>>Right click “Administrators”
>>Click “Add to group…”
>>Click “Add”
>>Click “Advanced”
>>Click “Find Now”
>>Double click “Local Service”
>>Click “Ok”
>>”NT Authority\Local Service” should show up in the list now
>>Click “Ok”
>>Close Computer Management and reboot.

For Home version users:

>>Run a command prompt as administrator (start -> run -> cmd.exe)
>>Enter the following in the command prompt window: net localgroup “Administrators” “NT Authority\Local Service” /add
>>Reboot

Thank you to “SugarD-x” from http://www.xoxideforums.com/ for posting this fix. Others in the thread requested to spread this across the internet, so I’m trying to do my part.

I’m impressed. I’m not sure if you could tell that from the post title, but it’s true. Microsoft Word 2007 allows you to make a blog post from right inside the word software. I don’t have to log in to my account at all. It detected my categories and everything right off the bat. Pretty neat, I think. It seems to work with most blogging software that I’ve seen, including Wordpress, Blogger, and so on. I really hate to say that I love a Microsoft product, but Office 2007 is really pretty amazing.

Posting from Word might seem like a complete waste of time, but the formatting is so much easier. I don’t have to use a tiny little javascript code thingy, and flip back and forth from “source view” in order to get it right. It just… works.