Yesterday evening as I was putting to bed a few changes to this blog’s JavaScript (that would provide fodder for my continuing series on functional JavaScript), I decided to update the version of JSLint I was using in Sublime Text. When I had done so, suddenly my JavaScript file produce a huge slew of warnings that had not been there before. Whaaaat? […]
READ MOREOver the Christmas break, when traditionally things are a little quieter at work, I do a bit of research into topics that interest me and that might have some bearing on our future products. This year was no exception and I decided to investigate React, Facebook’s library (framework?) for building user interfaces for the web. It’s a fascinating library to be sure (and I’ll talk more on it in another post), but there was one paradigm it uses which I haven’t really talked about before: immutability. Don’t get me wrong: sure, React components have properties and state, but the way they change (or rather are allowed to change) is very circumscribed. […]
READ MOREOK, so this afternoon I got bitten by an issue that has bitten a gazillion web developers (and will probably continue to bite more in the future). I’m talking about the syntax for the callback function that’s used for jQuery.each() versus that for JavaScript’s Array.prototype.forEach(). They are, dear reader, not the same. […]
OK, call me dense. I had a problem: the new theme I have for this blog has cute little buttons for the social networks I belong to and use; they’re at the bottom of every page. Internally they use Font Awesome to deliver the individual icons. On my desktop browsers: no issue, they look great. On my iPhone? What. The. Heck. […]
READ MOREAs I’ve reported on the blog for my Volvo 1800S (aka 64SAINT), it’s being featured in episode 5 of season 20 of My Classic Car with Dennis Gage. The preview has just gone up on YouTube […]
READ MOREOver the New Year break, I decided it was time for a change here on the Algorithms for the Masses blog. Not necessarily a full-blown New Year Resolution, more a general feeling that the current theme was old in the tooth, had accumulated a whole bunch of cruft (and how!), and it was time to chuck it in the bin of history. Time for something clean, and, horror, responsive. […]
READ MOREBack in March last year I presented an implementation of Heap’s Algorithm – an algorithm devised to generate all permutations of a set of items – in JavaScript. The article was interesting to write because in doing so I had found a bug in the pseudo-code on the Wikipedia page for the algorithm, which led to a discussion with the main editor for the page on how to make it better. […]
READ MOREThe one issue that’s weird about JavaScript that I’ve found is that it has no compiler: the first time you find a bug is when you run your code, not when you compile it. So, since I’m adamant about writing “good” JavaScript code as I write it, I’ve installed a couple of JSLint plug-ins, one for Visual Studio and one for Sublime Text. JSLint is Douglas Crockford’s linter for JavaScript and, although utterly (perhaps barmily?) strict in certain areas, is the one I’ve settled on for checking/validating my code before I run it. […]
READ MOREJust a very small post, this, to announce that I’m now using Open Live Writer (OLW) as my blogging tool. Maybe not all the time, at least for the next couple of weeks. You could say that I’m still experimenting with the plug-ins I have for Windows Live Writer (WLW), so no code snippet blocks yet or “Now Playing”. Those are to be tested and played around with some more before I really jump in with both feet and uninstall WLW. […]
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