Nifty Snippets

Adding language choice to FogBugz's code snippets

2012-03-06T15:56:00.003Z

Surprisingly, the "code snippet" widget used by the FogBugz wiki feature doesn't support telling the pretty-printer (they're using Google's google-code-prettify script) what language the text is in. Since the script can't always tell what language the code is in, this is a problem. And apparently, I'm the first one to ask about this. Wow.The answer is to write a BugMonkey script and install it in

Match everything...except!

2012-03-01T15:14:00.003Z

Micro-post:I was truly shocked to find today that in JavaScript regular expressions, . (the decimal point) doesn't do what I thought it did. I thought . meant "match any character." You too? Yeah. But it doesn't. Specifically, . doesn't match line terminators (so, \r, \n, \u2028, and \u2029). From Section 15.10.2.8:The production Atom :: . evaluates as follows:Let A be the set of all characters

Creating a function with a true name defined at runtime

2012-02-28T11:00:00.004Z

Okay, I'll admit it, this is an obscure one:I came up with a use case where I wanted to create a function that had a real name (e.g., shows in debuggers and such) that was determined at runtime. And as far as I can tell, the only way to do that is to use eval."eval!??!?!" I hear you gasp.Yes, eval. eval is evil when you can avoid it (which is almost always), but with strings you're in total

Google Code - Error retrieving directory contents

2012-02-26T15:44:00.003Z

I dropped by one of my Google Code projects, a trivial little jQuery placeholder functionality shim called place5, and was quite surprised to see, on the Source tab, the message "Error retrieving directory contents". Now, I have backups (and you do too, of anything you host externally, right?), so I wasn't panicked or anything, but I was still...jarred.Some searching around revealed that people

Getting rid of "What's Hot"

2012-02-14T17:11:00.002Z

Google have finally made it possible to get the "What's Hot" rubbish out of your main Google+ stream. Here's how:Go to Google+.Click "What's Hot" on the left-hand side.At the top of the page, there's a subtle little slider (basically an O on a line). Move it all the way to the left.(If you don't see a slider at the top of your What's Hot page, just wait a day or two for the rollout to come to a

`forEach` and runtime cost

2012-02-10T17:56:00.003Z

Just a tiny one today, mostly to write this down somewhere:As you all know, ECMAScript5 adds forEach to arrays, where you supply a function that gets called for each element in the array. There are lots of benefits to this, not least variable scoping on the index and value variables and a bit less typing, but don't all of those function calls add up to a significant runtime cost?No, they don't.I

The story on return false

2011-11-30T12:45:00.005Z

In JavaScript event handlers, you'll frequently see return false; at the end. Why? What does it do? The answer is: It depends. Before we get into the details, there are basically two things it could be doing:Preventing the default action of the event, such as when you click a link and the browser follows it.Stopping propagation of the event to ancestor elements.So which does return false do? Just

Finally!

2011-10-07T09:42:00.003+01:00

Google announces an honest-to-goodness relational DB for App Engine: Google Cloud SQL. And it's the nice, familiar MySQL engine with virtually full support and very few limitations. Notably missing from that FAQ is anything about limits on how long a statement can take to complete (I've asked the question), but other than that...

Potentially Good News on Software Patents

2011-08-26T14:04:00.003+01:00

There's some potentially good news on software patents. The Federal Circuit appeals court has rejected a patent claim on the basis that it's just an "abstract idea," a door that was very slightly opened in a recent very narrowly-drawn Supreme Court patent decision. Might reason ultimately prevail over avarice and bullying...? Paraphrasing something a good friend of mine said to me once, I'm

Nifty Snippets bite-sized morsels

2011-08-23T10:21:00.003+01:00

Sometimes the pressure for a proper "article" is too much and I end up not posting something here that I run across that I think is interesting. I thought "If only there were a service tailored to quick thoughts and links..." and of course, immediately thought of Tumblr (yes, and Twitter, but I was looking for something in between blogging and tweeting). So may I present: The Nifty Snippets

Copying table structure in SQL Server

2011-06-16T04:37:00.003+01:00

Why didn't I know this? For so many years I've bemoaned the fact that SQL Server doesn't have MySQL's CREATE TABLE LIKE statement:CREATE TABLE NewTable LIKE ExistingTableUm, er, except it does:SELECT TOP 0 INTO NewTable FROM ExistingTableThe INTO clause of SELECT..."...creates a new table in the default filegroup and inserts the resulting rows from the query into it." (MSDN link)And of course, if

Google Apps migration and multiple accounts

2011-06-12T10:38:00.006+01:00

Non-coding post today. If you use Google Apps for your Domain, you've either been transitioned to the new "full" infrastructure or you soon will be. If like a lot of people you have this crazy idea that your personal and professional lives should be separate, and so you have separate accounts for personal and private stuff, you'll run into the problem that your Google Apps stuff and your Google

Release: place5 placeholder emulator plugin (alpha)

2011-06-08T11:33:00.006+01:00

Just briefly, folks, I'm writing to announcing the alpha release of my place5 jQuery plugin. It's just a dead-simple plugin that emulates HTML5 placeholder attribute behavior on browsers that don't support it natively. On browsers that do, it stays out of the way (unless you tell it to take over), but it quietly does the job for you on browsers that don't do it themselves. Check it out! This is

Appending to an array

2011-05-22T13:28:00.007+01:00

JavaScript's Array#concat function is handy and cool, but it creates a copy of both arrays. That is, given array a and array b, a.concat(b) will create a third array c with the contents of both of them, leaving a and b intact. Now, sometimes that's what you want, but other times you just want to append b to a without creating a copy of a.While JavaScript doesn't have a dedicated append function,

jQuery 1.6.1 softens `attr` woes

2011-05-11T03:29:00.005+01:00

jQuery 1.6's change to the attr function, and introduction of the prop function, raised quite a bit of confusion (and awareness) about properties and attributes. It was quite a breaking change, affecting a fair bit of code, and so jQuery 1.6.1 changes attr again to make it more backward-compatible. See the jQuery 1.6.1 blog post for details. According to the jQuery team, as of 1.6.1, most older

Big compatibility break in jQuery 1.6

2011-05-04T06:24:00.008+01:00

jQuery 1.6 is out, and unusually for jQuery, there's a pretty big API compatibility break with regard to the attr function. Details in the release notes, but basically, attr really is just for attributes now, whereas before it sort of conflated attributes and properties. There's a new prop function for interacting with properties.Update 2011/05/11: jQuery 1.6.1 changes attr again to make it more

A brief, incomplete definition of 'an engineer'

2011-04-26T01:11:00.004+01:00

Most of us, much of the time, react to "You're wrong" with "No I'm not! And you can't tell me otherwise!" An engineer's response is "How? Show me."

Thinking outside the box with the ASP.Net Development Server

2011-04-23T11:45:00.018+01:00

A well-known limitation of the ASP.Net Development Server is that it will only bind to the local interface of the development machine, never the LAN interface, and so you can't bring up pages served from the development server from anywhere but on the box itself via the localhost name or 127.0.0.1 address. And fair enough, it's meant to be a debugger aid, not a web server. But there are

Gorgeous

2011-03-29T12:57:00.003+01:00

Completely off-topic, but gorgeous.

No Excuse

2011-03-18T13:58:00.009Z

I'm active in a couple of places where people go for help with, amongst other things, JavaScript code running in web browsers. Routinely, you'll get questions like this one where the person asking the question is having trouble visualizing what's happening on the client side, and is stabbing in the dark with alert or console.log to try to figure out what's going on. It's like the old days of

Skipping the protocol

2011-01-30T16:44:00.006Z

I just found out about this incredibly useful trick for loading absolute resources with either http: or https: depending on the protocol with which your page was loaded (to avoid those "mixed content" complaints from browsers).Amazingly, you can just leave the scheme (protocol) part off the URL entirely. So for instance, if you're loading jQuery from the Google CDN with this path: