Michael Barrett Congratulations
You shouldn’t have. I’m putting the finishing touches on a new WordPress theme. It’s still a little rough in places, comments need formatting, lists need sweetening, various twiddles need to be twaddled. But it’s mostly there, so why not take it for a test run? This theme is fully ‘widgetized’ (to use the WordPress nomenclature) [...]
Setting up PHP in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
I updated my Mac with OS X 10.6 last night and the process went very smoothly without any problems. Apple does a good job with OS upgrades and installs, and they almost always go very smoothly. Most users can just pop in the disk, click the button, restart and go. In my case, I use [...]
Don’t call it a bubble (the twitterconomy is a fickle mistress)
The URL shortening service tr.im is closing up shop, promising to maintain redirected URLs until December 2009. There is a lot of noise on Twitter and tr.im’s blog about the shut down. Apparently many users were using a feature of tr.im to generate ad hoc web site statistics – which was foolish even before tr.im [...]
Backblaze Review
I have constant backups made at home using Apple’s Time Machine (and it has in fact saved my butt more than once), I wanted to have the additional protection of having my files stored safely someplace other than my desk. I know some folks do off site backup the old fashioned way; by duplicating their [...]
Snarky responses to the Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto
The original principles can be found here: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html (if you’re into handwavium and naked emperors) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customerthrough early and continuous deliveryof valuable software. Because there’s nothing customers like more than half baked software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. [...]
Lexical Closures are Handy
I wrote previously that I would write about a handy trick in JavaScript known as a “lexical closure”. This article has a great definition of a lexical closure: http://www.brockman.se/writing/method-references.html.utf8. I quote… Essentially, a closure, or lexical closure, is a function f coupled with a snapshot of its lexical environment (i.e., the non-local variable bindings used [...]
JavaScript Scope Blues
I’ve been working out some methods of making uniquely namespaced JavaScript objects. I’m trying to handle a situation where there could be multiple instances of the same object or functions on the same page with the same name. The idea is to prevent one function, variable, or object accidentally writing over another because they have [...]
Weekend Round-up
Just when I thought “A List Apart” had become a useless dried up husk of RoR wankers, they turn around and publish this gem of an article: Getting Out of Binding Situations in JavaScript I’ve read various descriptions of ‘binding’ in JavaScript before, but this is probably the most clear explanation I’ve seen. As a [...]
These are headlines
Recent news followed by my pithy remarks. MacBook Air Announced Without Pony. Bloggers Demand Pony. The (ever) Daring Fireball and Paul Boutin at Slate are lamenting the fact that the newly announced Mac sub-notebook doesn’t have some manner of cellular EVDO type of use-anywhere-networking-just-like-the-iPhone support. A quote: Like me, Boutin was hoping for ubiquitous wireless [...]
Speaking of layout updates
I’ve created my own WordPress Theme (coinciding nicely with the 2.3.2 upgrade). When I kissed RapidWeaver goodbye, and re-familiarized myself with WordPress, I didn’t want to spend time customizing a web site design…I just wanted to fix the problem of me not posting very often. I discovered the Ideal Website theme – which is pretty [...]