Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

April 24th, 2008

Firefox used to *not* suck.

The most recent version of Firefox crashes every freaking few minutes. I can't even browse to my own site with it. When I request ianring.com, Firefox crashes.

It used to not suck. What happened?

I've heard Flock is no better. And IE is ... IE. Where have all the good browsers gone? ...

April 17th, 2008

IP Numerology

Really smart, witty people often come up with identical thoughts.

Just moments ago, I was looking at an IP address for a site I host, and wondering whether it was a good one. I felt the undeniable urge to spin up a little numerology on it. So I did. Got ...

February 21st, 2008

returning a random row from MySQL

Something this useful: you'd suppose MySQL would do it efficiently. Return a random row from a table.

the conventional way to do it is:

select * from mytable order by rand() limit 1

that's fine on very small tables... but as you apply it to larger datasets, it gets quite expensive. I applied ...

January 22nd, 2008

Javascript: show and hide a table cell

Challenge: You want to show/hide some table cells.

Problem: To hide a table cell, you set its style display property to "display:none". Easily accomplished. To show it, you set the style display property to either "block" in IE, or "table-cell" in Firefox. There's the challenge - if you set the cell style to "display:block", ...

October 11th, 2007

MMP loses… was it fair?

MMP lost. What a disappointment. Yet another year that my vote has made no difference, and I once again get 0% representation in government.

I heard a mini-poll conducted by a dude on the radio, asking people as they went into the polls, if they knew what the referendum question was. ...

April 22nd, 2007

CSS nifty corners? = slow rendering time

Finally, it seemed like a perfect CSS solution to produce that 2.0-cliche rounded corner style had arrived, with nifty corners. This script goes where no others had previously dared: it draws rounded corners onto your rectangle by injecting hundreds of tiny elements, each with a background color to simulate ...

April 11th, 2007

Random Haiku goes to the next level

For many years, I've been offering random haiku poems via my Little Pagoda of Random Haiku, at http://www.randomhaiku.com/. It started as an experiment with using FSObjects to pass values between Flash and Javascript, then evolved as I built a random haiku generator, added some animation, and finally hooked up ...

February 5th, 2007

Today I used JSON.

Been reading about it for a while, always intended to try it out, but never had the time or excuse. Well today I finally employed JSON to accomplish something. Before today, I had this uppity attitude that "anything JSON can do, XML does better". Well that's a lie. Now I see ...

November 21st, 2006

Random Haiku

It's about time I introduced this old gem to the blogosphere...

Welcome to my little pagoda of random haiku, http://randomhaiku.com/

I created this many many years ago using the most awkward techniques - javascript and flash and thousands of little MP3 files. If I were to redo it (which I will someday - I ...

November 13th, 2006

not going to pubcon after all.

flight canceled, hotel canceled. I'm bummed out because these conferences don't come up very often, and it's a great networking opportunity, and a chance to be immersed in webmaster-chat for a few days with the world's brightest and best. But as the day approached, both members of my family started getting sick... when the princess ...