Development

Dumber Developers?

Are sites like Stack Overflow and their ilk creating dumb developers?

When I was learning to code as a child in the 1980s, I would read something out of a Zx Spectrum magazine, laboriously enter the code, and then run the programme usually to find a typo stopped the entire programme from working as intended.

A few “L Break Into Program”‘s later, and plenty of source code reading, I’d gradually debug why things weren’t working and correct them until my hangman game or frogger clone ran as intended. When I write code now, I still often find that, for one reason or another, the code does not generate the desired output on the first run through. Read more…

Keyword highlighting in html Part Two

This is Part Two of a post about making a simple HTML input control that highlights key-words as you type them. It’s a follow-on from a post I made recently that walked through underlining text with wavy squiggles, which glossed over the trickiest part – actually updating the entered text as it is typed.

Now that Part One has covered why you might want to do this, and what some better alternatives are if you’re looking for something more sophisticated, I’m just gonna go ahead and present ALL the code and then walk through it with explanations: Read more…

Keyword highlighting in html Part One

Recently I posted about adding squiggly underlines to user-editable text in HTML.

By the end of the article we had nice squiggly lines appearing under text in a cross-browser way, falling back to a double underline if image borders weren’t supported. The “small” exercise left for the reader was to handle updating the text on the fly and restoring the caret position. I didn’t want to let on how much of a pain in the arse that can be! But since it is such a pain in the arse, I’m going to share the trials and tribulations with you, and by the end of this post we should have a nice working solution.

Read more…

Styled input controls in html

Well its been a very long time since I posted anything on this blog, to be quite honest I’ve simply been very busy both personally and professionally.

As always I’ve got *heaps* of projects on the go, so I’ll try and write ‘em up and link to some of the source soon, or better-still, actually finish some of them and host the working end product!

In the mean-time one of my personal projects is a little javascript app Read more…

The needs of the many? Fedora Consistent Network Device Naming

I’m writing this because of a change to Fedora networking that has caused me annoyance and wasted time. If you’re reading this perhaps you’ve been affected too?

I’m talking about ethernet interface naming… many people who’ve upgraded their Fedora installs will have asked the question “what happened to eth0?” Why are my ports now named “p135p1″ (and other odd and confusing names)? The ethernet interfaces have been renamed because somebody decided that logical port names based on the type of device should be changed to names based on the location of the device(?!). If this seems like an illogical case of the cart driving the horse to you, then you are not alone! Worse still, the new default location based naming scheme doesn’t even work properly in many cases (like my atom machine).

If you are simply looking for a way to return to logical names like eth0 and eth1 then skip to the fix at the bottom of this article by clicking CNDN fix. If you want to know more, you can read this wee rant about the linux network device naming… Read more…

Microsoft HTML help gotcha

I stumbled upon a “gotcha” today that could really perplex the average PC user.

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ActionScript 3.0 TextField Style and Event gotchas

Yesterday I ported some experimental syntax tree code I’d written in C# over to Flash and ActionScript. It’s a tribute of the richness of ActionScript 3.0 that such code could be ported so easily.

To test the code out I needed to be able to input text. No worries. Add a TextField.

It’d been a while since I’d done this in ActionScript, and I hit a couple of “noob” gotchas that can even get an old dog like this one. So in case you’ve hit the same problems, and are being misled by the documentation, here are a couple of pointers…
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Rounding Numbers In C++

Ever wanted some handy functions to round those pesky floating point values to whole integers?

In C# you can use the Math.Round() method which has more than half a dozen overloads supporting different data types and parameters to specify the rounding technique used.

In C++ there isn’t a std::round() equivalent, so let’s take a look at the options…
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Chasing Your Tail

This Dyslexic Dog spends more time chasing his tail than he'd like. I imagine other software developers share my frustrations. For me it's usually around trying to get dependencies to cooperate. You know - the situation for native code generation known in the Windows world as ".dll hell".

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Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2010 is a dog

I’ve been using various incarnations of Microsoft Visual Studio for years now. MSVC 2003 was a vast improvement over VC6, when Microsoft standardised their C++ compiler compliance, and its debugger has always been second to none. In fact, it has always been a pleasure to work with such a wonderful piece of software. That is, until now.
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