Category Archives: Programming
7 ways to be a better developer
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about ways to become a better software developer, specifically in terms of Firefox extension development. I’m listing the ways that I came up with here; most of it can be generalized to the development of any end-user facing program or application, but I wrote it with extension [...]
Firefox development productivity tip
Since I always use Firefox as a single window with many tabs (and have become quite adept at switching quickly between tabs, but not so fast at switching between windows), having the Error Console open in a separate window always slows me down. What I’ve done is created a bookmark on my toolbar (right-click, select [...]
Looking for some alpha testers
Is anyone interesting in helping alpha test and/or do some QA on a side project I’m working on? It’s a fairly simple Web application that should be relevant to pretty much everyone, but it will obviously be more useful to some people than to others. (How’s that for specifics?) If you want to take a [...]
At least it’s easy to remember…
My wife just used the “Forgot my password” form on the MNCPA’s website. The automated response was, how you say, not very helpful: This is definitely a candidate for WorseThanFailure.
Easy-peasy podcasting
Want an easy way to generate a podcast or RSS feed? At Eliot’s request, I wrote a PHP script that generates an RSS feed based on the contents of its parent directory, so whenever you add files to that directory (or its subdirectories), the feed is updated with links to those files. It also supports [...]
What’s old is new again
A few weeks ago, I started a little side project, and I decided to write it in Python with the Django framework based on all of the good things I’ve heard about it. I may never go back to PHP. It’s like this: imagine you’ve been driving the same 1987 Dodge Dynasty for the last [...]
Buggy Digg RSS Feeds: Resolved
Digg finally fixed the bug I reported and wrote about here 3 months ago. When you consider that my feed reader checks for new items every 15 minutes, 10 hours per day, I received an unreadable feed almost 4,000 times.
History Cloud
Something I’ve always been fascinated with is the way that certain words can define a time period. Over the last decade, for example, there were periods of weeks where you couldn’t turn on the television without hearing “anthrax” or “lewinsky” or “taliban” or “tsunami.” I’ve been working on a little project to help visualize what [...]