Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Silence

There’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… […]

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Scam HTTP_REFERER problem

My 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. […]

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Beware standards: a JSON story

Actually it’s more like a couple of little cautionary tales in one. […]

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404 reporting

One 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. […]

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Updating to Macbook Air to macOS Sierra

Despite 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). […]

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Making a stack persistent or immutable

A 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 It’s still on sale, but regrettably somewhat out of date, given the changes to the language in the last 15 years (I’m thinking of the new support for generics in particular).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? […]

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Free open source comes with a cost

In 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. […]

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It lasted just over a year

Back 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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Thoughts on open source

Waaaay back when (yes, it was eight years ago, an eternity in software development), I wrote a post on my old blog about using “Code from the Internet”. In those days, for me and my readers that meant finding some C# code from some blog post somewhere out there written by some Joe Blow and using it in your own app. These days however, if you’re doing any kind of web development, you’re going to be pretty well using a whole bunch of code from the internet, and in general from that internet outpost called GitHub. […]

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New theme for old blog

A while back, well after I’d purchased the current theme for this blog, I ran across another great responsive theme on someone else’s blog (unfortunately I never made a note of whose it was, so can’t credit them). The theme is called Selfy and I’d have to say it’s pretty clean and simple. […]

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