Disable double click for HTML links

I’ve got a bunch of users that constantly double click html links. Also, I’ve had a few users probing my apps trying to expose holes. Those probes have generally included either clicking links multiple times, or automatically submitting URLs via some automated process.

When I added messages to guide users that were re-submitting the same URLs, the double click users showed up as potential offenders. I needed a way to keep the double click users off of my intrusion detection report, but still be alerted to the more nefarious users. The solution to this problem is preventing browser based double clicks

I think my solution is elegant. I didn’t find this solution on the Internet, so I decided to post it here.

Simply make the onclick handler for the <a> tag reset it’s onclick handler to return false:

<a href="#" onclick="this.onclick=function () {return false;};return true;">Click Here</a>


I’ve tested this in Chrome/FF/IE8/IE6 and they all seem to work just fine. Comments and feedback welcomed.

Open Source Development Rocks

It’s been a month since I started working for Learning Earnings, and it’s been a pretty good month. Using the LAMP stack of tools feels really nice after spending a couple of years with Microsoft technologies. The technology I’m using isn’t the latest, but solid design and good coding practices can make most environments tolerable. Some of the technologies I’m using are:
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Outliers – the Story of Success

I’d heard of Outliers a few months back in some of my geek feed reading. I’m sure the portions of the book that were cited were the portions about Bill Gates and Bill Joy. At least that’s what I remembered when I saw the book last Sunday at Barnes and Nobel.
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Bike maintenance

I’ll have to admit that I’m not the most diligent at bike maintenance. I’ve been known to let a chain go for a couple of months without cleaning, have grime on my wheels and frames from a rain storm a month ago.

After attending the Bike Maintenance 101 class at Cahaba Cycles my son and I cleaned every bike in the house. It felt really good to walk away from a row of clean bikes, knowing that I can jump on and ride anytime without worry of weird failures.

Riding a dirty bike is fun, but riding a clean bike is even better.

Lenovo USB Keyboard

I spend a lot of time on my Thinkpad laptop. Coding, blogging, surfing, etc. I absolutely love the keyboard. The keys are just the right distance apart, well laid out, etc.

I have a couple of desktop machines that perform various services around the house. One is a Windows box, one is an old server that is used for experiments, etc. Using the random keyboards on those boxes was a PITA until I got my Lenovo USB Keyboard.

This keyboard has:

• UltraNav
• Keypad
• Great feel

If you’re going to use this keyboard on Windows XP, make sure you load the drivers from the Lenovo site. Linux seems to have everything built in.

I’m afraid this keyboard isn’t manufactured any more.

Free Tech Support again

Looks like I’m the free tech support guy again. I’m sure it’s not the quality, it’s the price. I’m going to have a hard time feeding my family on the $0 I get from fixing other peoples computers.

It seems that it’s always Windows XP that shows up at my door. Two weeks ago, this laptop was eaten up with viruses. A quick Internet search (from my Linux box that has never had a virus) yielded the solution. A quick download later and the machine was clean enough to put back on the Internet.

This week, the same computer was going to blue screen before the login page. WTF? How does it get that bad. The product key doesn’t work (It’s a Dell OEM product key), and I’m not sure what was done before I got it. I was able to repair windows, but now XP wants to be activated again.

I’m tired of fooling with this one. I’m going to offer to load Ubuntu (heck, if I’m going to support something, it might as well be something I like using) or just give it back. There’s not much data on it, and all it’s used for is surfing and watching DVDs. Sounds like a great job for Ubuntu.

There’s also the issue of the thank you. Anything will do, thank you note, case of diet coke, anything.

Tour de Cure Just Around the Corner

The Birmingham Alabama Tour de Cure is just 19 weeks away. I’ve started my training mostly by commuting to work (15 mile round trip), but I’ll be doing longer rides as the weather permits. It’s been cold in Alabama lately, and riding outside takes a special kind of resolve.

More importantly, I’ve started my fundraising for this year’s TDC. The training for the ride is important, and serves as a great lead in for asking for donations. Doing time on the bike trainers and home gyms is not the most important part of Tour. The most important part is doing my part to cure this disease, and I can do that best by raising as much money as possible. My goal is $5000.

I’m the rider recruitment chair for the Birmingham Tour de Cure. Don’t be surprised if you get a note or call from me asking you to join the Tour. I’ll ask you first to be a rider. If you don’t feel comfortable being a rider, I’ll gladly accept a donation. If you want to track my progress, just head on over to http://main.diabetes.org/goto/david.wilkins

Looking for a new cell phone

I’m currently in the market for a cell phone for my son. Being a geek, I naturally tend toward the new devices with lots of features. The last two phones he’s had were fairly new devices: Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Pearl Flip. The problem with these devices is that, while snazzy, they weren’t designed for ruggedness. The Pearl Flip only lasted about a month until it got crushed underfoot, and the Pearl lost it’s mind after about 3 months.

I’ve decided to move away from brittle phones to rugged phones. The one I’ve got my eye on is the sonim xp3 quest. Some of the features are:

• IP-67 rating/ MIL-810F certified
• 3-Year Unconditional Guarantee
• Equipped with a turn-by-turn navigation application
• micro sd Card slot (up to 2 GB)
• 2MP Camera with Flash
• Submersible to 1M for 30 minutes in water
• Withstands 2m drops on concrete

It’s doesn’t have 3G, or a touch screen, but it might last for more than a few months. If he just won’t lose it, I’ll be able to collect on the warranty at least.

Mobile Internet Devices

It seems that more and more mobile internet devices (MIDs) are showing up. A friend of mine turned me on to these over at allpmp.com. At just $155, they’re nearly cheap enough to put in every room of the house. I’d like to replace my 70′s era intercom system with some MIDs that could display Jetson’s style information while I get dressed. And the intercom functionality would be great to have too.

These units are a bit small. The 4.3″ screen is about the size to build into a piece of modern furniture. I don’t think that screen would be something that I could read from across a medium sized room.

Amazingly, this device sports WIFI, USB, and 3G. I wonder why the Nexus One costs $530, and this one costs $155? Sure, there are some processor differences, but not $400 worth!

Fedora 12 in the house

I’ve got a fair amount of hardware around the house. The upgrade bug bit me over the holidays, and I decided it was high time to upgrade to Fedora 12 on some of that hardware, since it’s F12 has been out a couple of months, and it looks pretty stable.

First up on the upgrade list was my son’s laptop. He’s got a pretty run-of-the-mill laptop, AMD single core processor, ATI x1000 series graphics, wireless, etc. His notebook has been used heavily (he frequently leaves it on all night playing music), and Fedora 10 reached it’s End Of Life just a few days ago.

I used preupgrade (a great utility) to do the upgrade. Everything downloaded and prepped fine until I rebooted to start the install proper. It turns out that his boot partition was a little small. I thought I could fix that without reading the instructions, and that was a mistake. When I went out and deleted all of the kernels, initrd, System.maps etc from the /boot directory, the installation continued just fine. The post-installation failed to properly put the grub.conf file in order, and therefore his laptop wouldn’t boot. I turned my attention away from the laptop and went on with upgrading my Compaq DL360. I figured I cold just copy the appropriate files from the DL360 once I got it installed.

The Compaq DL360 has had it’s RAID controller removed and an eSATA card installed. This allows me to boot off of a 1TB WD MyBook. I proceeded to use preupgrade to upgrade this box. This installation went fine until the reboot, at which time I got a message “/dev/sda1 not cleanly unmounted“. It seems that others have had this problem, but didn’t post the answer. I fought with this problem for HOURS, until I randomly tried changing the filesystem type from EXT2 to EXT3. The installation proceeded without a hitch. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the fsck in the installation, but someone should have a look at it. BTW, I posted my answer on linuxquestions.org, so maybe someone else can save a little time. I need to go looking for other instances of this question and post my answer there too….

Once I got the DL360 installed, I simply copied the boot files over to the laptop, and I had two Fedora 12 installs up and running in a few minutes. I got brazen and upgraded my main laptop after that (Lenovo Z60t). The only problem with that install was that my system partition was a bit small, so I had to aggressively delete files until the installation was happy with the free space. Hint: you can delete *all* of the locale files (most of which aren’t used) if you’re not planning on booting the box again until the installation is over.

Thank God for rescue disks!