Posted on: July 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil

I’m going to break this fairly short blog into 2 parts since I have 2 helpful tips that are fairly fast to implement.  I was going to make two blog posts on these, but they are closely related concepts, so here is a single post.

First, a helpful CSS Imagemap code creator:

For this site, if you ever have noticed, you might see that the top icons in the header (including the FamousPhil.com text) all link to certain pages on FamousPhil.  Usually, a HTML or CSS imagemap is used to make these links.  The site designer figures out where to place the selectable link area on the header by calculating pixels on the image.  Being the lazy designer that I am, I went to find a better solution to where I wouldn’t have to figure out exactly what pixel lengths I need to accomplish the clickable areas I wanted.  There is a really handy site that I found that allows you to upload or specify an image location on the web and easily specify areas for clickable links.  It then makes the html code.  This site is: http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap. I have used this site many times for creating CSS Imagemap code.  I just have one word of caution when using this site, that is, the code generated is really condensed and not really friendly to work with.  I recommend using a program like PHPDesigner 2008 in HTML mode and using HTML Tidy, make the code into the CSS2 standard to make the code look better and much easier to read.

Second, I would like to cover making a div in HTML with two images and have text span both images.

This problem plauged me for a good two hours the other night.  Basically, I am designing a site that has a body with an image gradient (fades out as the image goes down the page), and then at the bottom of that fading image, I have to continue a textured background repeating.

To accomplish this in CSS, you need to nest div tags in HTML and specify CSS.  Here is an example that I am using directly on this site:

"

	<div class="middle">

		<div class="middle2">	

		div>

	div>
"

"/*CSS CODE*/

div.middle{

	background: transparent url("img/backgroundrepeat.png") repeat;

	min-height:250px

}
div.middle2 {

	background:url("img/bodytopgradient.png") no-repeat;

	min-height:124px

}

"

In this example, middle is the bottom layer that will repeat down the entire page.  middle2 in this example is the top layer and has a single image that contains the top gradient. I add a min-height to make the top layer show up entirely before the background repeating pattern becomes the top image.  Text will expand the page downwards, but due to the lack of text, I made a minimum height on the repeating image also to verify that it works as expected.
Hopefully these tips will help you on your next design.  Thanks for reading my blog as always!
Tags: css, div, image, imagemap, map, span
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: March 24th, 2009 by Famous Phil

About 3 weeks ago when I was building a new server, I put 2 identical SATA drives in the server (500GB each), each capable of 60MB/s transfer when clocked.  I had a fair amount of data (250GB) to share on these 2 drives.  I normally would opt for a raid mirror (hardware based mirror), however I have this data backed up else where, so I decided that I would combine the disks using a span to make a 1TB partition.

I transferred the data to the partition in 2 days and really thought nothing of it because I was busy with other stuff.  However when I got back to college with this server, I found that most of my local file operations would take 10 times longer than they should take.

Therefore, I decided to ditch the span.  To copy all of the data off the span took 4 days to an external hard drive (capable of 20MB/s).  To copy from the external to a simple dynamic volume took a little under 2 hours.  This proves to me that spans just plain suck.  I’m now using just 1 disk and use the other as a weekly backup disk.

I did discover after a little research that Windows treats spanned and stripped volumes differently although they both combine physical disks to make bigger partitions.  Windows NTFS (NT File System) has a 2TB physical limit that it can handle, and NTFS starts becomming inefficient after 500GB to 1TB.  Since a span treats 2 physical disks as 1 physical disk, this explains the slow down.

However, I did learn that a stripped volume will treat each disk as a separate disk and combine the storage into 1 logical partition.  I have yet to try this with another disk and I may comment on this if I ever try using a stripped volume.

The bottom line is, you will have a major performance problem under server 2003 x64 bit if you opt for a spanned dynamic disk, not to mention 20 to 30 server crashes while getting your data off to undo it.

Tags: 2003, disk, dynamic, dynamic volume, server, span, x64
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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