Announcing Lineage
Just a brief post to announce my latest mini-project, Lineage. It's a small, simple toolkit for creating JavaScript constructor functions and their prototypes ("classes," if you will) in a...
View ArticleJohn Cleese on Creativity
My good friend Jock Murphy blogged about this video, where John Cleese spends 36 minutes talking about creativity and telling "how many (blank)s does it take to change a light bulb" jokes. I can only...
View ArticleFinally, the normative ECMAScript Spec - in HTML
Finally a normative ECMAScript specification in HTML. Very worthy private efforts notwithstanding (here, here), having a normative deeply-linkable, HTML edition is huge — and long overdue.
View ArticleCleaning up old Ubuntu kernels from /boot
My Ubuntu system told me today that it was running quite low on room in /boot. I searched around for what to do about that, and found this answer on Ask Ubuntu. It turns out that when kernel updates...
View ArticleToo Funny - An IE7 Tax
An Australian online retailer has started charging users of IE7 a tax to use the browser on their website. This was inspired, they say, by the amount of time it took their developers to make the site...
View Article9pt grey text on a dark grey background
Is it just me? Am I getting old? (Well, yes, but...) Surely 9pt grey text (#646464) on a dark-grey background (#1C1C1C) qualifies as a Bad IdeaTM? How's this for readable: Form Factormini-PC CPU...
View ArticleWell, I'm floored
How do you floor (or truncate) a floating-point number in JavaScript? (E.g., take a value like 5.7 and get just the 5?). The answer is simple: Use Math.floor. That's the right answer at least 99.99% of...
View ArticleSteve Sanderson's Round-Up of Eight Rich JS Libs/Frameworks
Steve Sanderson's done an interesting round up of the eight libraries and frameworks represented at the Throne of JS conference recently. The conference was about JavaScript applications, not web...
View ArticlejQuery - Cleaning up when elements go away
(Updated 08/08/2012.) Have you ever wanted to get a notification when an element is removed from the DOM so you could clean up? For instance, maybe you have events hooked on a different object (like...
View ArticlejQuery - Element cleanup update
For those who saw my jQuery - Cleaning up when elements go away post yesterday, I've updated it showing how we can do this right now, today, without waiting for the enhancement (or if the enhancement...
View ArticleMeasuring Scrollbar Size
Normally we want to avoid doing this sort of thing, but sometimes you just end up having no other option: Recently I couldn't avoid doing some sizing logic in JavaScript rather than CSS and markup, and...
View ArticleA reminder how Microsoft used to drive web innovation
As IE6 finally rides into the sunset,* Nicholas C. Zakas offers us a reminder of how, in a series of browser releases culminating in IE6, Microsoft introduced many of the key web innovations we use...
View ArticleS3 Adds CORS Support
Some interesting news today: Amazon's S3 now supports CORS, the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing standard. This means that in addition to storing your images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files in S3 as...
View ArticleIncredible. Extraordinary. Inspiring. Beautiful.
Ten years of Hubble photographs of a tiny portion of the night sky, well away from the glare of the Milky Way, deep into the infrared and then corrected back to visible, the eXtreme Deep Field is...
View ArticleQuick note on RegExp#lastIndex
Just a quick note on RegExp#lastIndex: It's misnamed. It's not the "last" index of anything, it's the index of the next character in the string that will be looked at by the regex instance's exec...
View ArticleYou can contribute to caniuse.com
I'm sure most of us have referred to (and probably cited) caniuse.com at some point. It's probably the most comprehensive collection of browser feature support around. Want to know the status of CORS...
View ArticleI Don't Want To Create An Account
Note to online vendors:I don't want to have to create an account to give you business.Got it? By all means offer me the option of doing so, if that makes you happy, but if I'm buying 10 quid of...
View ArticleAsynchronicity
I see questions like this one a fair bit: The author has written this code (and is apparently using jQuery):function Obj() { this.id = 0; this.name = ''; } Obj.prototype.setName = function(name) {...
View ArticleBlitz.io Updates Pricing Model
Early this month I was checking out blitz.io and although it looked like a cool tool (and fun), the pricing model stopped me looking at it too closely, for reasons I explained to them:Hi folks, Was...
View ArticleFont Size Units
I've always used points (pt values) for sizing fonts on web pages, e.g.:body { font-size: 12pt; }Those of you who know me know that I'm a developer, not a designer (in the web designer sense; I design...
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