Posts for December, 2004
Social networks
Interesting article by Dare Obasanjo about Social software. I think the lock-in he’s talking about creating is something that benefits companies rather than users. Is having your blog, photo-sharing, IM and email all through the same company actually a benefit if it means in a few years time you can’t try something new because you [...]Published in Web development on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004
VS.NET compiling slowed by my virus checker
I wasn’t really surprised to find that my virus checker slows my VS.NET compilations somewhat, but I was surprised by exactly how much. With Macafee’s real time scanning on, my P4 with 720mb of RAM compiles about the same speed as the P600 with 128MB of RAM I was using before. When I turn off [...]Published in .NET on Monday, December 13th, 2004
XMLHttpRequest and Google suggest
Wow! I didn’t even know about the XMLHttpRequest object that powers Google suggest. This is the first thing I’ve seen in *ages* that seriously changes how we can make webpages. :) I’m so glad that the web is still an exciting place to hang out.Published in Javascript on Monday, December 13th, 2004
Backup, backup, backup
I’m never too busy to back up my files. Never. Ever.Published in Programming on Friday, December 10th, 2004
Disabling animated gifs in firefox
Animated gifs drive me absolutely crazy. To turn them off in firefox: 1. Type “about:config” in the location bar 2. Find the “image.animation_mode” parameter and change it to “once” or “none” Have I mentioned how much I love firefox? Power to the people! The geeks shall inherit the earth. Reference: Post in the UserFriendly forumsPublished in Web development on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
Tools .NET developers can't live without
Roy Osherove’s put together a list of must-have tools for .NET developers. My favourite is definitely Resharper which is a VS.NET plugin that makes Visual Studio a lot nicer to use. If you’ve ever thought “I wish VS.NET did x”, chances are Resharper will do it. The refactoring tools alone made it worth the $100US [...]Published in .NET on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
Sending email in ASP.NET
Sending mail in ASP.NET is simple! You just create a message and then call the SmtpMail’s static send method: MailMessage message = new MailMessage();message.To = "me@email.com";message.From = "me@email.com";message.Subject = "An email from helen";message.Body = "Hello Helen. From Helen.";SmtpMail.Send(message); If you need to talk to a non-local server, that’s not really much more difficult. You just [...]Published in ASP.NET on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
The net's an amazing place :)
See two of my favourite technologies combined: Amazon.com and MSN messenger! I don’t know if it’s useful, but it sure is cool! Another interesting find for today was googleblog.Published in Web development on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
HTML doctypes
I can never remember these things. This is a list so I (or you) can just cut and paste into pages. HTML 4 transitional: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd"> HTML 4 strict: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> XHTML transitional: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> XHTML strict: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD [...]Published in Web development on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
Finding position of the parent node in XSLT
Here’s a really nifty solution to the problem of finding the position of a node’s parent node from the comp.text.xml newsgroup. The idea is you can find the position of the parent node by you counting all its preceding siblings. <xsl :value-of select="count(parent::bar/preceding-sibling::bar) + 1"/>Published in Web development on Friday, December 3rd, 2004
Creating tags with non-literal data in XSLT
If you’re forced to work with a schema where the tag names contain derived data (node position in this case) you can create your tag names in XSL using the element tag: <xsl:element name="{concat('mytagname', position( ))}"> <xsl:value-of select="mytag"/></xsl:element>Published in Web development on Friday, December 3rd, 2004
