Category Archives: Uncategorized
How Failtastic Can One Phone Be? Just Ask Palm About the Prē!
Why I’m Ditching Slackware
I went to find a package to install Git. The page at http://www.slackware.com/packages/ still says that the Slackware Package Browser has been moved to http://packages.slackware.it/ — it’s said this for years, and I keep wondering when they’re going to move the package browser back onto the main Slackware site.
But this time, when I followed that link, [...]
What Would an Ideal Portable-Computing UI Look Like?
Right now, the question of what you need in a mobile computing platform is most often phrased in terms of “Do you need a netbook or a full laptop? Or perhaps one of the new high-end smartphones will manage?” I think the question isn’t one of capabilities as much as it is a question about [...]
Silly Coding Tricks: “Inverted” String Match
First things first: Never actually do this. This is just a fun curiosity, for amusement value only.
Because of the way JavaScript’s search() method works, you can do:
var my_url = 'http://kai.mactane.org';
if (! my_url.search(/http:\/\/kai.mactane.org/)) {
alert("Your URL is http://kai.mactane.org");
} else {
alert("Nope, your URL isn't http://kai.mactane.org");
}
Try running this, and it will correctly claim that “Your URL is http://kai.mactane.org” — even [...]
How Many Ways Can You Exit an App?
Different people use applications in different ways. Sounds simple and obvious, but how often do you look at the real implications of it? Just to take a simple example, let’s suppose you’re using Windows (pretty much any recent version), and you want to perform a simple task: Exit the active application. How many different ways [...]
Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug
A “Blog” Is a Whole Bunch of Posts
This is rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves, right up there with misuse of the word “literally”:
This thing I’m writing right now? This single entry in my blog? This isn’t “a blog”. It’s “an entry” or “a post”.
Sort of like that piece of paper in a book is a page, not a book.
“Writing a [...]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread [...]
Does Wanting Privacy Make You Evil?
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is the same stupid excuse we always hear from people who want to invade everyone’s privacy, and I’m sick of it.
Incidentally, we need a good term for [...]