It's been no real secret that the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) has been Microsoft's answer to Java. Garbage collection, bytecode compilation, large set of core libraries, it's all there. But there is a problem that I've encountered recently: distribution size and install base.
A fairly ...
Read more...I've had a Logitech MX1000 mouse for a few years now, and the two most important features for me have been the ergonomic build and the few extra buttons. Something I've always found with many-buttoned mice is that the side button closest to the thumb is a much ...
Read more...A recent Lifehacker story about a Greasemonkey script to remove quiz stuff from Facebook made me realise something: you know your site is too "web 2.0" when users are going out of their way to remove features. A quick search on Userscripts.org reveals that a substantial proportion of ...
Read more...When re-theming DokuWiki to fit in with the general look-and-feel of my blog, I thought it would look good to have buttons with images relevant to what they did. Having created the necessary, CSS, I subjected it to my multi-browser test bed (actually a Windows XP virtual machine with the ...
Read more...A dominating story in the news recently has been that of UK Members of Parliament "abusing" the expenses system. As part of this, expense claims data has been released to the public, but unsurprisingly not in a simple CSV format that just anybody can play with. All I could find ...
Read more...Browsing the visitor stats today, I found this little gem:
"Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95)"? Who uses such a browser? My bet is on it being a zombie machine that somebody has completely forgotten about, which would explain the several other hits I have from versions ...
Read more...While developing CodeScape Framework I came up with a simple template engine that instead of implementing it's own language just provided some structure-related hooks, and I've now got around to separating out and releasing Tpl, a simple, self-contained, hierarchical template engine for PHP.
Tpl's role is centred ...
Read more...I like to use tiny bitmap fonts like MonteCarlo for programming, but by default Ubuntu has bitmap font support turned off. From (at least) Gutsy through to Intrepid, this method worked for enabling bitmap font support, but after installing the Jaunty beta I found this no longer works.
Luckily, after ...
Read more...Recently I've been working on a program that will let me do a full-text search of my 1500-file digital video library. The result is something I've unimaginatively called "VDB", short for "Video Database".
This release doesn't do much; you can add your library of video files, and ...
Read more...Refactoring some code at work today, I came across a classic example of somebody attempting to use one language like another. The project in question is a port from MATLAB to C, and the purpose of the function is to see if a square matrix is symmetrical within a certain ...
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