Software As She’s Developed

I’ve recently begun working on a project with Osmosoft, which I’ll announce Real Soon Now, and have got my hands dirty with TiddlyWiki to the point where I’m now able to make at least some useful functionality. You effectively get an MVC framework for free with TiddlyWiki, so as a power developer, I can see […]

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There’s some tweets and such like about Ecmascript Harmony today. I also saw a nice demo of Ecmascript 1.7 goods today. Really, I can’t get excited about future versions of Ecmascript and can’t get emotionally all in a tangle about the trials and tribulations of Ecmascript. I mean, Javascript is arguably the most popular language in […]

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I used 280slides.com for a quick presentation today at the London Javascript meetup. (The usual Jobsesque slides - usually one phrase plus an optional image.) The tool is very cool, as initial reviews suggested, but most of those folks had not used it in a real world situation. The tool has it’s complications when you use […]

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I find Vim easiest for browsing source and as I explore TiddlyWiki, I decided to use some fairly recent Vim features - vertical splitting and the explorer window. Combined, these give you the feeling you’re an 1988 edition of Eclipse. Just like a modern IDE, but navigation is ten times faster. Here’s the macro - which […]

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Okay, it's remarkably lame, but here's my first TiddlyWiki plugin. It defines a new shout macro - you include <<shout some-message>> in a tiddler and it includes A SHOUTING VERSION OF THE MESSAGE. I adapted it from the sparklines plugin. The important code is at the end - you create a macro by defining a value [...]

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Walking through Tiddlywiki source (write-up to follow), I noticed some interesting code in TiddlyWiki.js, importTiddlyWiki function. The code takes a string and injects into an IFrame. I had talked to Jon a little while ago about a similar problem and was wondering about it ever since. The technique here looks like this: It wraps the text with [...]

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I'm listening to Steve Yegge's talk on branding from last years OSCON. He talks about how languages are branded, e.g. "Java" is enterprise. One of his main points is that brands are "const identifiers", i.e. it takes an entire generation to change brand perception, so it's often more effective to simply re-brand. e.g. GTE had a [...]

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A problem with the current opensocial gadget spec is that there's no relative path support. This means you end up hard-coding any references to Javascripts, CSS stylesheets, images, and services which are distributed along with your gadget. This is not good. For example, you may have a "prod" setup and a "dev" setup. While developing, you [...]

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Writing a multi-timezone clock gadget, I found myself needing to convert timezones in Javascript. This is one uncharted area in Ajax/Javascript - unfortunately, there is no timezone library to my knowledge. Unfortunately, there's no public JSON service to tell you what time it is right now in Tokyo either. I could create one without too [...]

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Google App Engine launched this week and one controversial aspect was that it only works for Python. It wasn't a big deal to me. Firstly, it's a good way for Google to limit the initial market. Secondly, Google specialises in Python and not Ruby - quoth Yegge: "One of the fences in this big playground [...]

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