Category: Programming

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 Choice is Obvious

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 a new technology, it’s only been around a couple of years, and a lot of designers are still very wary of using it.

Flash is a very interesting topic in terms of web accessibility. It’s actually capable of being very accessible indeed.

This makes the article come across as ‘use Flash to make accessible websites because it’s better for it than CSS’ which is quite far from the truth. Initially I thought it was just a case of poor expert quotes, but it seems that it’s just poor journalism that’s behind it.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Designing a more accessible web

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 = new Array();
thingArray[i]="Loose typing still ahoy!"
alert(thingArray[j]);

You get the same thing.

Try something similar in C#, and you’ll get a compile error:

int i = 1;
string j="1";
if(i==j)Response.Write("Oooooh badness");

So it will never work.

In VB.Net, though, we’re in a funny middle-ground where things are sometimes the same, and sometimes different:

Dim i as Intger = 1
Dim j as String = "1"
If i = j Then
Response.Write("They're the same here.")
End If

So far, so ropey, and not that dissimilar to JavaScript. But then:

Dim thingArray as new ArrayList
thingArray.Add(i)
If thingArray.Contains(j) Then
Response.Write("They're still the same...")
End If

will never write anything out. Because despite the fact that 1 = “1”, an ArrayList that contains 1 doesn’t also contain “1” because they’re different…

It’s a cop-out of a language, I say.

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 another process.

With a note that the error was something around:

Which wasn’t very helpful. Googling for the error message didn’t help much as there were all kinds of reasons for files being locked, but Googling for asp.net compile file locking did and I was lead to
this page which explains it.

I tried various ‘fixes’ of my own, such as rebuilding the entire solution, starting and stopping IIS through services, and sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t. It was very bizarre and very annoying, but the file lock was starting to cause me real problems.

The solution

It was quite easy: disable the Indexing Service from the Services list. Apparently the indexing service was locking the file and it would be released after ‘a bit of time’, which was why my random attempts at fixes sometimes seemed to work, and sometimes didn’t.

Microsoft: sometimes, I really hate you.

Preventing compiled dll’s from being locked in Visual Studio.

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