It appears that I've become rather busy at work, so I might not get so much time to write articles for the next short while. I'll still hope to put stuff up every couple of months, so keep an eye out.
- Shooting Yourself in the Foot Part Two
- 4th Jun 2009
- At some point, most developers have come across 'Shooting yourself in the foot', the comparison of how different programming languages would implement the process of firing a gun at your foot. This article assumes success, and the lack of a significant portion of your leg; Part Two looks at how to rebuild your leg, in various languages.
- JavaScript Slideshows
- 3rd Jun 2009
- Many developers state that modern JavaScript effects, such as slide-shows and news tickers, can only be viably achieved using frameworks such as jQuery and Dojo. This article sets out to demonstrate that it is in fact a simple affair to construct a slideshow using JavaScript and DOM manipulation, without the need for such frameworks.
- Highrise
- 9th Apr 2009
- A man is sealed into an apartment for four days. Short story, science-fiction.
- Go Northeast
- 5th Apr 2009
- A man finds himself standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. (There is a small mailbox here.) First published by 365tomorrows.com; flash sci-fi.
- JavaScript Tab Controls
- 8th Mar 2009
- Tabs have always been one of the most useful elements of a user interface, allowing an interface designer to pack a lot of information into a small space by only showing a section at a time. This article explores the implementation of a tabbing interface using HTML and JavaScript, and goes on to look at pages where more than one set of tabs is used at the same time.
- NotPDO: Wrapping MySQL to look like PDO
- 14th Feb 2009
- It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen: you're deploying a PDO-based PHP application to a shared host, and they don't run PDO. If you can't reconfigure the server, you can always wrap MySQL to look like PDO; that's what NotPDO does.
- Modified Preorder Tree Traversal
- 9th Feb 2009
- Exploring the MPTT algorithm, and how it can be used for hierarchical data storage. Includes algorithms for addition to and removal from the tree.
- CRC32 Calculation in 256 Bytes
- 9th Feb 2009
- A quick look at a 256-byte program capable of calculating the CRC32 checksum of a file.
- List of Countries and Dependent Territories
- 31st Dec 2008
- If you've ever needed to know which country is at UTC+3.5 (it's Iran), or who is responsible for administrating the Western Sahara (that's Morocco), it's all in here. List is also available in SQL, for such situations as a 'select your country' dropdown on an e-commerce Website.
- Asynchronous JavaScript and JSON
- 30th Dec 2008
- The most common problem that people encounter when using AJAX is that they can't update more than one region of a Web page at the same time, since the request only comes back to fill one region. Using JSON, it's possible to update multiple regions at once, and it's even possible to run inline JavaScript in the AJAX response, automatically. The magic behind it is explained here.