html form tag without the top/bottom padding

This seems like such a simple thing, but I'm really happy to be able to add it to my collection of useful code snippets:

The important part (HTML code snippet):
<form style="display: inline; margin: 0px;">

Explanation/history/context:
For years, now, I've just accepted (but been annoyed by) the fact that the HTML FORM tag causes some whitespace to display above and below the form contents:

html	screenshot
Form outside table: Text above table <form> <table border="1">   <tr>     <td>table cell</td>   </tr> </table> </form> Text below table

One common way of avoiding that whitespace padding is to stick the FORM tag inside a TABLE tag, floating freely without being inside any particular row/cell, like this:

html	screenshot
Form inside table: Text above table <table border="1"> <form>   <tr>     <td>table cell</td>   </tr> </form> </table> Text below table

I've never bothered to find a better way, until recently, when I decided that I didn't like HTML validators complaining about that. So I searched and found a method of avoiding that whitespace that's simple, seems to work fine in multiple browsers, and passes HTML validation:

html
Form outside table with style: Text above table <form style="display: inline; margin: 0px;"> <table border="1">   <tr>     <td>table cell</td>   </tr> </table> </form> Text below table
screenshot

Removing empty macros from Excel, to avoid popup security dialog

Anyone that's ever dealt with Excel has probably seen this security warning dialog about macros:


It's one thing if the spreadsheet actually has macros in it, especially if it actually *uses* the macros in it. But even if you create a macro, and subsequently delete it, you still get this warning.

I found an Excel FAQ today that included instructions for fixing this. Worked for me!

Finding and un-removing files that I did a 'cvs remove' on yesterday

Last July, I posted a bash shell script called 'cvsrecent.bsh', the purpose of which was "to get a list of CVS revisions and log messages for all checkins within the past (some number) of days."

I've continued to use this script, to this day, but I found a shortcoming this morning that I hadn't noticed before. It doesn't find files that have been removed from your working directory or the repository. I removed some files from my working directory and did 'cvs remove' on them yesterday, and today I decided I need to undo that.

So, I wrote a set of commands to find and check out the last version of all files that were deleted some number of days ago. Here are the components I used:

First, a bash function to get previous revision of a file:
function cvsprev()
{
  cvs -q log $@ |     grep "^revision " |     head -2 |     tail -1 |     cut -f2 -d" "
}

Next, a bash function to get the date for some number of days ago, and format it the way cvs likes it:
function getdaysagodate()
{
  date --date="$1 days ago" +"%Y-%m-%d"
}

Finally, here's the set of commands I used to:

1. find all the files that CVS put in the "Attic" some number of days ago (in my case, I used 1 (one) since I removed the files yesterday).
2. for each file:
   1. get the full working-directory path
   2. find the last revision number, before it was removed
   3. do a 'cvs update -r' to check out the last version of the file

for f in  `cvs -Q log -SNd ">=$(getdaysagodate 1)" |  grep -A1 Attic |  sed -e "s/^.*Attic.*$//"    -e "s/^\-\-$//"    -e "s/Working file: //"`; 
do cvs update -r `cvsprev $f` $f; 
done

Another command could be added to check those files back into CVS automatically, but I wasn't 100% certain that I wanted to check all of them back in. I mainly just wanted to find them, and look at them. Maybe sometime I'll update the cvsrecent.bsh script, so it can handle files that have been removed. At least I'm half-way there after having written these commands today.