I’ve been in enough meetings where a vendor or technical architect has insisted that their product can interoperate with any other system because their data transfer uses XML, and this excellent piece on The Daily WTF shows exactly what a pointless claim that often is. The Daily WTF – [CodeSOD] XML vs CSV : The …
This article on the BBC site purports to be about how to create accessible websites, but reading between the lines I get the feeling there’s a press release from the company that built J K Rowling’s site behind it. It looks like quotes have been taken out of context to me: However, [CSS is] quite …
If a language is going to be loosely typed, then that’s fine as long as you know how to use it. If it’s going to be strongly typed that’s even better. So in JavaScript: var i=1; var j=”1″; if(i==j)alert(“Loose typing ahoy!”); Everything’s fine and you get an alert. And if you go: var thingArray = …
I kept on getting a problem whereby on trying to recompile a project in Visual Studio a dll assembly would be locked when I loaded the project up in a browser with a message such as: Cannot copy assembly […] to file [..].dll. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by …
Instead of those sites where you enter some garbled text to prove you’re not a spambot, you click on pictures of kittens instead. Kitten auth
This blog posting by Mike Davidson gives an interesting view of SEO and standards-compliant code. It’s not exactly an exhaustive scientific test, nor is it meant to be, but it’s an interesting and entertaining read. Mike Davidson: Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test
Talking to Tim on MSN about having to look up really basic syntax in some languages, this gem of a ‘joke’ came up in conversation: Tim says:I do that in flash still! Tim says:well, acutally no…but sometimes I forget what the _xmouse syntax is Karl says:that’s okay. _xmouse comes but once a year
This little desktop app allows you to write regular expressions and test them against a string to see if they’re working – it’s excellent. The Regex Coach – interactive regular expressions
I couldn’t find anything particularly useful about how to alter MySQL table structure in a situation where replication was being performed so I pretty much had to try something out to see if it worked. What I found was that MySQL was remarkably clever at replicating changes through from one database to another. I don’t …
For some reason, Zend have decided not to make PHP throw an exception when you try and load invalid XML into a DomDocument object. This includes XML with invalid characters e.g. &. This means wrapping a try/catch around anything does absolutely no good whatsoever, which is annoying. Is there a good way of trapping runtime …