In the previous episode of this series I discussed why you might want to speed up your web pages and how it is more about perceived performance, rather than absolute performance. However, this optimization, as with anything, comes with a cost. If you have a site that receives occasional use, then maybe you don't want to overdo the time and effort that these performance optimizations might entail. Or maybe what I'll be describing may not go far enough: in which case, I hope the analysis side of things helps you more. […]
READ MORERecently, 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: […]
READ MOREAs 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. […]
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! […]
READ MOREIn 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. […]
READ MOREA 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. […]
READ MOREOK, 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. […]
READ MOREMore than anything, this is going to be a discussion about testing, but the headline is all. […]
READ MOREThere’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. […]
READ MOREFinally, 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. […]
READ MORE