simon.schönbeck.dk

  • Find a Windows Vista MAC Address

    Yesterday eve I had to add a laptop to my network which is using MAC address filtering. The laptop ran Windows Vista and I tried to locate its MAC address by using the good old ipconfig within a command prompt. This gave no results as apparently the network details only get listed once an actual network connection is made. As you probably have realised this is a catch-22 situation as without the MAC address registered on the router I was never going to make a network connection in the first place…!

    Actually the weird thing is that the MAC address is normally on a sticker on the bottom of laptops, but in this case there was no such sticker.

    Google as in most other cases provided a quick fix by pointing me in the right direction. There is a command specifically for this task named funnily enough: getmac.

  • <code> vs. <pre> in WordPress editor

    Writing my earlier post about the textarea issue I initially ended up with a funny looking post. It was due to the examples of HTML code included in the post not being parsed properly. Apparently I had been writing my post in HMTL mode instead of Visual mode and all the HTML code was parsed as “real” code.

    The code was wrapped in <code> tags, instead of the usual <pre> tags which keeps the code looking as expected.

    If you are neither certain of the exact uses of each of these two tags I suggest you read this documentation page for a quick overview of the differences along with other usage hints.

  • HTML textarea default value line breaks

    This one I struggled to find the right formula to get it working. The solution was so simple and basic that I wonder why I did not just try it before all the complicated approaches.

    I basically needed to have line breaks occurring in the default value of a textarea field inside a HTML form. That is between the <textarea>…</textarea> tags.

    My first approach was to simply add \n where I wanted a line break. I also tried all possible combinations of \r, \n, CR, LF, separate, together, quoted, escaped… you name it. Nothing worked.

    Googling around proved no good. Most people kept referring to the nl2br function in PHP, but this is not what I was trying to achieve. Besides this is all client code, pure HTML, no server side processing involved.

    I ended up at the W3 HTML specification and saw the light! A simple example copied from their site included the solution to all my struggles:

    <FORM action="http://somesite.com/prog/text-read" method="post">
   <P>
   <TEXTAREA name="thetext" rows="20" cols="80">
   First line of initial text.
   Second line of initial text.
   </TEXTAREA>
   <INPUT type="submit" value="Send"><INPUT type="reset">
   </P>
</FORM>

    Notice how they simply added a line break in the actual HTML source. This is so simple that you may even not notice the subtle difference. Let me show you how I had my initial code:

    <form>
<p>Some random paragraph</p>
<textarea>First line \n Second line</textarea>
<p>Some more randomness</p>
</form>

    As normally white space in HTML is simply ignored I did not give a thought about the fact that a line break can be created in the default textarea value by simply…, yes, adding a line break when writing the source code.