Software As She’s Developed

Setting up a new Windows PC today and not loving the browser warnings. The messages, as I recall them: “You are about to submit the form. It’s dangerous.”, “You’re going to leave the page. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is not encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This is H20. It’s dangerous.” So my question […]

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Favicons should ideally be easy to manipulate, as easy as manipulating the web page's UI. (Favicons are the little website icons you see in the address bar, browser tabs, etc.) For example, a chat app like Meebo could signal that your buddy's trying to contact you, a mail app like GMail could indicate You [...]

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I was wrong, the third character is apparently a nine. There ought to be a Captcha gallery/blog for all these. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way. Oh well, blame the spammers. But more to the point, what's up with this Captcha brought to you by the letters "A...F"???? Hex captcha? Hey, why bother [...]

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Here's a podcast about Comet - exploring the two-way web with Ajax. From my Ajaxian post earlier today: Alex Russell has coined a term for a flavour of Ajax that’s been getting more attention of late. Comet describes applications where the server keeps pushing - or streaming - data to the client, instead of having the browser [...]

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Ajax Basics 3 of 3 This is the final of three podcasts on the basic Ajax patterns. Podcast 1: Display Patterns and the DOM. Podcast 2: Web Remoting - XMLHttpRequest, IFrame Call, HTTP Streaming. Podcast 3: Dynamic Behaviour - User Actions (Events), Timing, Ajax App, Web Service, On-Demand Javascript, Richer Plugin Podcast 3: User Actions (Events), Timing, Ajax App, [...]

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Imagine a tool that does lots of things, and another that does one thing really well. And imagine both of them are free. Long Tail theory suggests the specialised tool wins, right? No, maybe not. If the general-purpose thing does an okay job, many will prefer it instead. Why? Because there's a premium [...]

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Harry Fuecks suggests there are two types of Ajax apps: HTML++ and Client/SOA. This is something I've noticed too, and it cuts right across the Ajax architecture, impacting on the user-interface, the physical architecture (browser-server separation) and the abilities of the developers involved. The "Ajax App" pattern addresses this as a decision. It's the root pattern [...]

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Surgery by Ajax is imminent. We just need to solve that NP-hard URL problem ... CEO of Ajax The Slasher, David Hassaminor Hickup, said "We knew from the outset that AJAX would cure cancer. This is just the first step. Tomorrow's children will be concieved via AJAX technology. We are working on an AJAX-enabled satellite with [...]

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How long until wikipedia becomes a honeypot? "Who wants to be a millionaire" contestant is struggling to answer the question, "What year did the Fonz jump the shark?", and calls out to Lifeline Buddy. Back in 2005, Lifeline Buddy would have googled for the answer. But this is 2007, and "wiki" is now a household name [...]

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Abe Fettig's done some important experimenting to arrive at a direct remoting technique, one which bypasses the need for a Cross-Domain Proxy and doesn't rely on cross-domain On-Demand Javascript. Compared to the latter technique, Abe's idea is more functional, because you get the power, expressivity, and bidirectional capability of XMLHttpRequest, as opposed to the On-Demand [...]

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