Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Technical category.
Why Don’t Developers Like to Estimate Time Accurately?
Filed in General,Technical, 9th April, 2011, 18:50 CETI was reading this just now – Why Can’t Developers Estimate Time? – and realized the discussion leaves out some fairly important psychological factors that influence time estimates significantly. As the developer, you focus on the risky bits — the parts that are technically difficult & complex, that use new APIs or new libraries you [...]
Creative procrastination
Filed in General,Mrs. Bella Bang,Technical, 10th July, 2010, 2:22 CETI was taking Mrs. Bang for a walk last night, at 2am or so, and mulling over my ideas for a dauntingly large new feature I want to add to my music theory site. One idea spun from another, and I started thinking about mad libs — you know, the game where you fill in [...]
An Approach to Exception Handling
Filed in Technical, 5th October, 2008, 18:42 CET[In response to this post, also posted here, asking about guidelines different developers have come up with.... I actually started a response on the site, then realized I was typing an entire essay into a little comment box.] Guideline #1: Never discard exception information. You might either wrap the exception and throw the wrapper, or [...]
Support Firefox, through Internet Explorer
Filed in Technical, 2nd October, 2008, 1:35 CETIf you’re a web developer (or if you have to use websites that are still IE-only) you might spend time browsing in both Firefox and IE. You may also have noticed that when you use the toolbar search box in either one, the browser tacks a few extra parameters onto the Google search URL… so [...]
Avoiding getting flashed by Dilbert
Filed in Technical, 25th April, 2008, 0:34 CETI’ve been reading the Dilbert comics online for years, always from the archive page – the home page was just overwhelmingly cluttered by ads, and it required extra clicks to see previous comics when I’d missed a few days. So when the central Dilbert site switched to a super Flash-heavy format for their homepage (including [...]
Disconnected ShareThis plugin for WordPress
Filed in Technical, 17th February, 2008, 1:41 CETI see the ShareThis plugin on tons of WordPress blogs — and with reason, because the presentation is quite nice. You don’t have to take up a chunk of the screen listing all of the different social networks (and they keep multiplying…) or offering the option to email this post to a friend; instead you [...]
404 pages on 1&1 webhosting: complaint and solution
Filed in Technical, 16th February, 2008, 1:03 CETI had an unpleasant surprise today when I was testing a new site I’m setting up using 1&1 web hosting… I mistyped the URL, and lo and behold, instead of showing any kind of useful error page for the 404, the server neatly redirected my browser to a completely different URL, “domparking.php” at the “sedoparking.com” [...]