posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

I read some articles, which I won’t cite for lack of wanting to start a small war, that refer to HTML5 as a collection of technologies that describe how the new web works, in much the same way that the term Web 2.0 was used for years to describe a collection of technologies including AJAX to provide higher interactivity to web pages. In these specific articles, HTML5 was referred to as including HTML, CSS, and [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Useful Items That I Forget

Attempting to build a simple JavaScript application using Visual Studio 11 on the Windows 8 Developer Preview today and received the fun error “Unable to activate Windows Tailored application”.  I’m running the software using Virtualbox (4.1.8).  Turns out that my screen resolution wasn’t high enough in the virtual machine.  It needs to be at least 1024×768 and I had left it at the Virtualbox default of 800×600.  Changing the screen resolution and then attempting to [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Linux & Open Source

I was working on a patched Debian system recently using PHP functions feof and fread.  I went to run my test script and managed to auger Apache in while at the same time dumping over 1GB worth of errors into the Apache error log in a matter of minutes.  Over and over (over 5,000,000 entries, actually), with these errors: [Wed Dec 07 11:17:00 2011] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] PHP Warning: feof() expects parameter 1 to be [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

One of the best features that I’ve found so far (and I have many more yet to find) are promises.  When building Metro-style apps using JavaScript, the framework utilizes asynchronous requests through xhr.   Within that paradigm, there’s a promise object which essentially says that there will be data there sometime in the future (thus the async request).  The promise object has a method called then, which accepts three arguments, a success function, error function, [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

As amazon.com and several other independent sellers can tell you, I must be beginning another book because I placed a significant order for music to accompany the writing efforts.  In truth, I’m beginning two books, a new book and a revision to another.  This should be an adventurous few months. I’m about to place the first words into the first chapter and, as you might be able to tell, I’m attempting to delay by any [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Useful Sites That Everyone Already Knows

Just started http://www.sitereportr.com for checking site status.  You can check to see if a site is up or down or unknown.  Get the IOS app for your iphone or ipod touch too!

posted by steve | Category: Useful Items That I Forget

To disable the power button completely in Ubuntu, at least in the version I’m running, go into gconf-editor as the user for which you’d like to disable the button, go to Apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/power and set it to blank.

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

I’m amazed by the amount of spam that I receive that just doesn’t make sense.  Okay, I shouldn’t be amazed by that, but here’s a good example:  I have a couple web sites, one for myself and one for one of my books, JavaScript Step by Step.  On the JavaScript Step by Step web site there’s a contact form for readers to let me know about errata and other such niceties. It seems as though [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants | 1 Comment »

I’m struck by the number of times that people make the wrong decisions when it comes to application development as it relates to the ultimate goal.  The ultimate goal of application development is to support the business, so that the business can leverage that application to streamline processes, beat a competitor, or whatever the business need.  To that end, it seems worthwhile to deliver the best application possible. A competing approach says that the application [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

I’m writing a review for a book and while rereading some of the paragraphs I noticed that I’m having one of those wordy writing days; one of those days where I write several words to express one thought when one or two words would do.  A symptom of such a malady is the use of semi-colons (oops, already used one in this post).   I wonder as to the source of this wordiness.  It may [...Read more...]