Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Making your web pages fast (part one)

Recently, I had occasion to want to read an article on <a well-known development company>’s developer blog. It took, believe it or not, over 17 seconds to load and display on my wired connection, around 10 seconds longer than I would have waited if I hadn’t have wanted to read the content. Apparently on a phone it took over 60 seconds to load. I ran it under Firebug because I just didn’t believe it and wanted to see what would take so long. This is the tweet I sent: […]

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The HTML end tag means end of document, or does it?

As anyone who’s ever written an HTML document would surely know, everything apart from the initial DOCTYPE declaration appears in between <html> and </html>. Putting it in XML terms, an HTML document consists of one element, the HTML element. And, as it happens, it has two elements within it: the head and the body. End of story? Well, no; otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. […]

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That time when CSS’ position:fixed didn’t

There’s been an ongoing bug with my blog after I added the “hamburger” menu/options on the left side. In essence, adding it interfered with another “feature” of the individual blog post pages where the title of the post sticks to the top of the browser window as you scroll down through the text. And, yes, you guessed it, both features are provided by JavaScript libraries, different ones, by different people. It’s this week’s edition of JavaScript Libraries Gone Wild! […]

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Putting on the Blue Apron

In our house, we’ve divided up what might be called the food duties. I’m the savory cook and Donna the pastry chef. It’s not like we sat down early on in our relationship and threw the dice, I’m just not interested baking cakes, making cookies, rolling out pastry for a fruit pie, whereas Donna is. She on the other hand would way prefer someone else do the meats, the veg, the salads. […]

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The Auto Warranty sleaze

A month ago, we purchased my wife’s Acura off the lease. She’d done less than 30,000 miles in the three years she’d had it, there was nothing wrong with it, and there wasn’t anything available for the models she liked, in the colors and with the luxury level she was keen on. So rather than worry too much about that elusive new car, we just bought the current one off the lease. Maybe in a couple of years there’ll be something she likes and we’ll consider what to do then. […]

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Windows 10 upgrade: the Microsoft Money mess

OK, I get it: I’m behind the times. I still use Microsoft Money, the “sunset” edition. Yes, it’s been six years since it was retired, but I prefer it way, WAY more than Quicken. And, to be honest, thus far – I’ve now been using it for 20 years, believe it or not (first entry: July 3, 1995) – it’s been just fine. However, yesterday, I was suddenly brought up short with a jolt, or to be more accurate with an error message about Internet Explorer 6. […]

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WOFF files and Azure: the 404 conundrum

More than anything, this is going to be a discussion about testing, but the headline is all.  […]

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My new homepage

There’s a TV program on the BBC at the moment that we’re watching called Celebrity Masterchef. In it a bunch of celebrities (90% of which are completely unknown to me) tackle preparing and cooking dishes, competing against each other for the best one, well presented. There’s a couple of jokey judges (who I again have never heard of) to shake their heads in wonderment at the inability of the “celebrity in the street” to actually cook something appetizing. […]

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Open sourcing EZDSL on GitHub

Finally, and I mean FINALLY, I’ve uploaded my old Data Structures Library for Delphi (EZDSL) to GitHub. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, and now it’s there and you can download it, issue pull requests, the whole nine yards. I also updated it for the Delphi XE series (the last time I ‘officially’ updated it was for Delphi 2009). It includes linked lists (single and double), queues, deques, priority queues, binary trees, binary sort trees, a mildly-broken red-black tree, hash tables, skip lists, and a binary array. The type of data objects you can store are limited only by your imagination, but be warned, they’re just pointers in the interface and you’ll have to be adept at casting back and forth. […]

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CST-01: the world’s thinnest watch

OK, this is a weird one. Well over two years ago now, there was a Kickstarter for a watch. Not just any old watch, or even a smart watch, just the thinnest one in the world. It’s 0.8mm thin, or, for you non-metric types, 0.00315 inches. All it does is tell the time. So, I plonked down my $99 as one of the original backers and pretty much forgot about it, as I do with anything I back on Kickstarter. […]

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