http://www.aquarionics.com/category/programming en-gb Aquarion (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Site Admin (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:44:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2008/03/18/Uh-oh http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2008/01/08/It%27s_not_for_you Chris Selland: But as a biz dev guy (who doesn’t have time – or a reason – to be online much) – and despite the fact that my job is all about relationships – I find twitter to be pretty pointless. LinkedIn, on the other hand, I use every single day. Oh. Good. I’ve been watching the Social Networking backlash with something of a professional... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2008/01/07/Pandora_closes_the_box I just got an email from pandora It says: As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/12/17/Web_Development_Three_Point_Question_Mark Half of the Web Development community appears to have managed to go screaming round the twist. First (In order of “Things Aquarion saw”) was Opera’s decision to file proceedings with the European Union for Microsoft’s failure to adhere to web standards. I’ve got more to say on this, but I’ll do so later. Second, we have Malarkey’s call to disband the... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/12/13/Opera_files_a_complaint_against_Microsoft Håkon Wium Lie: Today we have taken a stand. Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. We believe that Microsoft has harmed Web standards by refusing to support them; Microsoft often participates in creating Web standards, promoting them, and even promising to implement them.... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/11/20/IANAG 61 http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/09/01/Vizzinibugs%2C_Heisenbugs_and_the_vanishing_birthday Heisenbugs are bugs that vanish when you turn debugging on. Schrodinbugs are bugs that don’t manifest until you read the code and realize they could never possibly have worked, whereupon they don’t. These are impossible, yet happen despite this. Vizzinibugs are the single most common type of user interface bug. They are when the user follows an action path inconceivable to the... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/09/01/Vizzinibugs%2C_Heisenbugs_and_the_vanishing_birthday Heisenbugs are bugs that vanish when you turn debugging on. Schrodinbugs are bugs that don’t manifest until you read the code and realize they could never possibly have worked, whereupon they don’t. These are impossible, yet happen despite this. Vizzinibugs are the single most common type of user interface bug. They are when the user follows an action path inconceivable to the... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/08/22/Re-evolution Our season of redesigns continues here on Aquarionics dot com with this blatant thef… I mean, homage to iStyle. Coming up later: Making the entry and menu boxes (centre and right) not stand out quite as much. For the reflections, I’m using a custom solution for two reasons. One, it’s been ages since I mucked around with GD, and two, the Jacascript Reflection Library... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/08/22/easy Given that I work for a company called hotxt (Yes, yes, I’ll explain at some point, but right now? Right now if I tell you what I’m doing, I will be murdered in my sleep. Not even kidding. Well, I might be murdered at my desk) I shouldn’t find the graveyard of exorcised Es to be so funny. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/08/16/Twitterpated To all people who scan the public timeline on Twitter and subscribe to everyone who flies past: STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/07/03/Softly_softly Yesterday, one of my pet bugs in the Mozilla codebase was finally fixed. Almost exactly one year ago today I mentioned the birthday of Mozilla/Fx’s inability to support Soft Hyphens. After eight years, that’s no longer true Sometimes Open Source does work. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/07/03/Softly_softly Yesterday, one of my pet bugs in the Mozilla codebase was finally fixed. Almost exactly one year ago today I mentioned the birthday of Mozilla/Fx’s inability to support Soft Hyphens. After eight years, that’s no longer true Sometimes Open Source does work. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/06/21/Toast_and_hacks “Toast” “Hmm?” “Toast.” “As in, unraw bread?” “If you like.” “Okay. Why are you talking about toast?” “Because in the entire history of everything, I couldn’t think of anything to start off this article with apart from the word ‘Toast’. It’s my new unseeded random... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/05/14/Meaning Translation into Gamer of Matthew Paul Thomas’s Translation from cranky-speak into English of a selected portion of Mark Pilgrim’s ‘Silly season’ : Adobe Apollo and Microsoft Silverlight are the HyperCard of the 21st century. Translation: Platf0rm 1ndepen-c is roxxor teh boxxor, L0cked plat4m suxx0r & is 4 newbs w/out l33t. lfg 4 x-s-able & useable w3b warez. http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/Debugging_Ajax One of the problems with Ajax is that the server side of it becomes invisible. You send a request to the server with an ajax request object, and you can get output from the JS by firebug, or alert boxes, or whatever, but for the script running on the other side, there's no visible place for the output. There are many ways around it, but my current favourite is Growl. Growl is a... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/02/06/Two_Point_What I don't care what the marketing people mean when they say "Web 2.0". I don't even care when you tell me it's about slight gradients, rounded corners, whatever. Because what I mean when I tell *you* about "Web 2.0" is this: http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/10/29/Djingle_Django_Scarecrow One of the concepts you may run into if you read into Python and its fans in great depth (and here I mean Python of the programming type rather than the Monty type) is that of “Guido’s Time Machine”, the number of times when you are thinking “Would it be nice if Python did this…” and you suddenly find that yes, that’s exactly how Python does it, to the... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/10/22/Textile For the last couple of hours, Aquarionics has been using Jim and Lissa’s TexilePHP system, which is a conversion to PHP of Brad Choate’s conversion to Movable Type of Dean Allen’s textile system (Once relased on its own, now part of Textpattern). It’s the same system as AqWiki uses for text formating, and I used the Jim and Lissa version because it supports multiple... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/10/10/The_Iceweasels_Come The Mozilla Corperation don’t want people to change the source code of Firefox, recompile it with extra bonus bugs and possible API incompatibilities, and release it – as Firefox – to people who might use it and blame them for bugs that aren’t their fault. Linux distros – such as Debian and Ubuntu – routinely maintain their own forks of open source...