This is a story with many moving parts. It ends with a complete and utter face palm, so stay tuned… […]
READ MORESome eight (!) years ago, I started to learn JavaScript from the viewpoint of a C# programmer. I wrote a series of blog posts here on the subject, and fairly early on I started using Firebug in Firefox for my experiments in coding and debugging this weird yet wonderful language. Yes, I could’ve moved on to Chrome and its developer tools, but I liked Firebug and I could get things done. The JavaScript on this blog site (and others I own) were completely debugged using Firebug. Firebug convinced me that global variables were a bad thing. And so on. […]
READ MOREThere’s a pretty good easy-listening guitar-based album from Dominic Miller called Shapes. He’s been working with Sting for a long time, and one of the tracks on the album is an extremely good re-recording of Sting’s Shape of my Heart song. All well and good as a recommendation, but what’s this got to do with anything? Bear with me… […]
READ MOREMy wife has a small blog for her hobby. I am, for my sins, her IT guy for it. She posts to it about once a week, maybe twice, and of course, after every post there’s a small uptick in views. All nice and normal. […]
READ MOREActually it’s more like a couple of little cautionary tales in one. […]
READ MOREOne of the widget plug-ins I use in this blog is one that gathers the URLs people use to access content here and that result in a 404 Not Found error. Those erroneous URLs get logged and, as admin, I can view them through the widget’s UI. The widget was written by an old mate, Scott Cate, for the GriffitiCMS blog engine (sorry, “CMS” engine), which is what I use here. He gave me the code a couple of years back and I’ve extended it a little to be able to clear the logs of the 404 errors. I do this perhaps once a week on average, because it just gets too depressing. […]
READ MOREDespite being, essentially, a Windows developer, I do own a Mac, specifically a mid-2013 MacBook Air. I use it … occasionally, let us say, mostly for iOS development. One day, there may be more to it, but that relaxed rationale is about it for now. Anyway, Apple just released macOS Sierra, the latest operating system for Macs (they’ve moved from the OS X name to macOS to match their taxonomy for iOS and watchOS). […]
READ MOREA while ago I wrote a book on algorithms and data structures, in my case for Delphi. It’s still on sale, but regrettably somewhat out of date, given the changes to the language in the last 15 years (I’m thinking of the new support for generics in particular). While on my vacation over the last couple of weeks I started thinking about writing a new series of blog posts on data structures, and what easier than updating the book into a new generics-capable one? There was one drawback: I haven’t done much Delphi at all over the last decade. Did I really want to go back? […]
READ MOREIn my blog post “Thoughts on open source” I ended cryptically with But be aware that just because they’re “free” doesn’t mean that the cost to use them is zero. Let me expand a little on this with especial regard to JavaScript libraries. […]
READ MOREBack in June 2015, I got my (replacement) CST-01, “the world’s thinnest watch”. I wrote about it at the time, mainly because of the stupendous crash-and-burn that the Kickstarter for it turned out to be. The watch is a lovely thing, to be sure. […]
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