Software As She’s Developed

I’m listening to this excellent BBC podcast on Unintended Consequences of Mathematics. In his book The Mathematician’s Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it [...]

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usual live blogging caveats – spelling errors, messy, etc etc @premasagar is visiting the Osmoplex today (thanks @jayfresh for arranging it) and is taking us through his work on iframes, widgets, and sandboxing. I’ve realised we could perhaps be collaborating as my jquery-iframe plugin is so close to his. Different emphases, but much overlap. GitHub is where [...]

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Last week saw a confluence of excellent events. In the same week as a house move, it proved to be a week of much learning and little sleep. I’d hoped to do a better write-up, it never happened, a combination of being too busy and new MAC BATTERIES SUCK, meaning the lappy couldn’t last [...]

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On Demand Javascript – Scalecamp 2009View more presentations from mahemoff. These are the slides from my ScaleCamp presentation, covering various techniques for various styles of On-Demand Javascript, including Script Islands, “async” and “defer” attributes, and library support. One of the interesting things at ScaleCamp is that many of the folks there are dealing with third-party advertisers and [...]

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"Script Island" is what I'm calling a design pattern I alluded to here. The pattern is to embed Javascript in your HTML like so: PLAIN TEXTHTML: <script id="greeting" type="x-deferred-script">   alert("this is my script - it's eval'd on demand"); </script> When the page loads, the browser should say "I don't know what 'x-deferred-script' is, and therefore ignore the concents [...]

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I only came across the MHTML image hack over the weekend, while listening to @jeresig on the new jQuery podcast (incidentally not the only

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I just heard on the new jQuery podcast that jQuery docs will be getting comments. jQuery just got a whole - even more - useful. This is direct from the horse's mouth, an interview with jQuery head honcho John Resig. I've felt for a long time jQuery has been ahead of the pack [...]

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Around the time Ajax got coined, one of the already-known patterns was 37Signals' Yellow Fade Effect. As techniques were shared and visual effects libraries emerged, we began to see visual effects become commonplace on the web. I documented four of them in Ajax Design Patterns: One-Second Spotlight, One-Second Mutation, One-Second Motion, Highlight. (I wish I [...]

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G'Day, here's a new tiddlywiki plugin I've been working on: InfoBoxPlugin. It's based on the equally-monikered infoBox in MediaWiki/Wikipedia, which you'll see in any article that is marked "current event" or "controversial", for example, on the big W. I find infoBoxes elegant, as they are unobtrusive enough to let you get on reading the article, [...]

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To simplify TiddlyGuv message rendering, I made "SimpleMessagePlugin". It removes the message box 1 second after a message was shown (using displayMessage). In the event another message appears in that time, it appends the message (as it normally does) and extends the message box's lifetime by a second. In other words, it always closes a [...]

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