Out of the corner of my eye

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Entries from December 2007

The source of inspiration

December 24th, 2007 · No Comments

Inspiration
Inspiration is when a spontaneous connection between two disparate facts or thoughts occurs.
After starting to read Koji Suzuki’s thought-provoking “The Loop” last night, then talking to J. about her dreams, I came up with a theory concerning inspiration.
Our minds, probably due to the n-connected nature of neural networks, are immensely capable of metaphorical, lexical and […]

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Tags: AI and Psychology

IE 8 and Firefox 3 now both pass Acid2 test

December 20th, 2007 · No Comments

A post yesterday on the IEBlogĀ  reveals the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This is great news for web developers everywhere, as it means the next iteration of the most common browser should just work with most site’s html/css, without the need for annoying tweaks and hacks.
Firefox 2 doesn’t quite […]

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Tags: Web dev

Code without music is like a fajita with no salsa

December 20th, 2007 · No Comments

I have been feeding my brain with music from my new iPod Touch. Sounds like God’s Kitchen Global Gathering 2006, Pure Pacha (Pete Tong/Sarah Main), Second Toughest in the Infants by Underworld, liberal splashes of Radiohead and a little Pink Floyd in the blender. I’ve missed having music to accompany my coding while at work.

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Tags: Personal

Email obfuscation does not work, and is easily broken

December 11th, 2007 · No Comments

I’ve read plenty of articles about email obfuscation over the years. Until I got an email address with decent spam protection, I occasionally made a half arsed effort at it too - the old davedx at gmail dot com. That was before I knew much about how powerful web scripting had become.
Email obfuscation is […]

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Tags: Web dev

Gat Decor - Passion - old school house

December 7th, 2007 · No Comments

This brings back memories… tracks like this were what got me into house music and the club scene.

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Tags: Culture

Get current form data from TinyMCE

December 6th, 2007 · No Comments

If you’re using TinyMCE for some kind of web GUI and want to access the current data contained in the textarea using JavaScript, you may have noticed that just getting it will only give you what was loaded into the textarea’s inner content in the HTML. To get the content the user has inputted into […]

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Tags: Web dev

Audio CAPTCHAs

December 6th, 2007 · No Comments

I spent quite some time implementing an audio version of our CAPTCHA. It took longer than the visual version, and I ended up modifying Nick Swardh’s code to get it done in the end. It isn’t too hard once you figure out how to join mp3s together so let’s look at what’s out there already, […]

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Tags: Web dev

The Destruction of Sennacherib

December 6th, 2007 · No Comments

by Lord Byron
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were […]

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Tags: Culture

Response to “signs you’re a crappy programmer”

December 2nd, 2007 · No Comments

Damien Katz blogged some “signs you’re a crappy programmer (and don’t know it)”, and the article ended up on the front page of Digg. Many of the comments criticised some of what he said, but I didn’t anywhere find what I felt should be the strongest criticism of “You think no function/method should have multiple […]

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Tags: C++ dev

Lazy programmers - why is ‘protected’ the default?

December 1st, 2007 · No Comments

Lots of programmers seem to use protected as the default access level, and I think it’s lazy.
I can kind of see the reasoning: you don’t want to expose your variables and private methods because the user of your class probably won’t know what they should be changing and what should be left alone, but you […]

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Tags: C++ dev