Internet

My Heart Bleeds over OpenVPN security hole

Unless you’ve been under a rock you will have heard something about the Heartbleed security flaw in OpenSSL.

Heartbleed is arguably the most serious publicised security flaw in the history of the internet, because so many servers have been affected. Even if you have nothing to do with computer admin you could be affected if any of the sites you visit have been exploited. All internet users need to seriously consider changing all their passwords thanks to some negligent coding practices in an open source project… Read more…

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…

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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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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Impressed With WordPress

Frustrated by Joomla’s lack of out of the box capabilities, I’m doing the blog in WordPress now, and might move the whole shebang over if WordPress is up to the task.

Since I’m not looking for anything ambitious, I suspect that WordPress will be more than sufficient for my needs. In a matter of a few hours I’ve got it up and running with a minimum of fuss, and with no prior knowledge, I’ve found it to be relatively intuitive. The ability to browse themes, the functional text editor, a decent comments system, feed support and the ability to type straight html into fields is exactly what I would expect from any CMS without the need to resort to plugins for everything.

…So my first wordpress impressions are favourable, let’s hope it stays that way!