Author Archives: Ian

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IE 6 Death Watch gets a Funeral Service and at least a few more Nails in it’s coffin

By Ian | February 23, 2010

Part 2.
Six Months ago I declared One Year to Go on the IE 6 Deathwatch
In the beginning of this year it was disclosed that Google (as well as and 20+ other companies) had been the victim of Chinese cyber attack, attackers called the operation “Aurora” . Microsoft had admitted that Explorer was used [...]

Posted in Code, Web | Leave a comment

different behavior for Prototype JavaScript childElements() in FF and IE

By Ian | February 19, 2010

Or now to lose the rest of one’s limited hair …. I’ve come across a “doesn’t work as expect” issue while working in Prototype 1.6.0.2 JavaScript framework (”Easy Ajax and DOM manipulation for dynamic web applications” for sure!)
1$(’someIdName’).parentNode.childElements()
works fine in FireFox (v3) but not in Internet Explorer ( v6), in particular it seems [...]

Posted in Ajax, Code, JavaScript, Web | 1 Comment

Agile Web Development with Rails, erratum

By Ian | February 16, 2010

from the Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition. (fourth printing), in Chapter 8.3 iteration C2: Creating a Smarter Cart (page 104), when creating the initial CartItem model class, the price function is defined thusly :
123 def price
@product.price = @quantity
end
Unfortunately that sets the price to the number of items [...]

Posted in Ruby and Rails | Leave a comment

$400 fine and 3 demerit points for the life of 79 year old Siu Mui Lam

By Ian | February 10, 2010

Siu Mui Lam (also known as Mrs. Wong, born 1930) was killed by a dump truck driver on June 23, 2009 (the second day of City strike) when she crossed an intersection at St. Helen’s street/ Bloor before a STOP sign.
The impact was so huge, that head and body was severely disfigured, and she pronounced [...]

Posted in Canada, Life, Toronto | Leave a comment

2010 Will be The Year of the Tablet!

By Ian | January 3, 2010

In all likelihood 2010 will be the year that tablet computers (and activities that belong on such a device) will become mainstream.
A large part of this is due the the (expected) announcement of Apple to release a large(er) factor iPhone or iPod Touch device, which has a chance of doing what the [...]

Posted in Hardware | Leave a comment

Using GreaseMonkey’s persistent data functions as a aged Cache, revised.

By Ian | December 15, 2009

In eating my own dog food I have revised, corrected, improved and fixed the code I posted last week. The biggest changes are related to ensuring that all that cached data does not just accumulate and never gets cleared away.
Values set using the “GM_setValue” function are saved in the Firefox preferences back end and [...]

Posted in Ajax, Code, GreaseMonkey, JavaScript, Web | Leave a comment

Use GreaseMonkey’s persistent data functions as a aged Cache.

By Ian | December 9, 2009

GreaseMonkey (Don’t know that GreaseMonkey is the greatest thing since slice bread? See Greasemonkey) has two persistent data function’s, GM_setValue and GM_getValue, which let you set and get values. See Mark Pilgrams excellent Dive Into Greasemonkey : Storing and retrieving persistent data for more details. (even better, go to GreaseSpot and it’s api [...]

Posted in Code, GreaseMonkey, JavaScript | Leave a comment

Using an iPod as a travel device and the what could be (aka the tripPad™)

By Ian | December 6, 2009

This fall I was lucky to travel to Berlin and Paris on vacation, but as I geek I of course brought along a computer or 2.
On last years trip to Los Angles I had a NetBook (Aspire One) and using our friends WiFi was able to keep up on email and access the locations I [...]

Posted in Brain Farts, Hardware, travel | 1 Comment

JavaScript Function to get the Intersect of 2 Arrays

By Ian | December 1, 2009

In mathematics, the intersection (denoted as ∩) of two sets A and B is the set that contains all elements of A that also belong to B.
I needed the javascript array equivalent, so that given an array A = ["a","b","c", "d"] and B = ["b", "d", "e"], getIntersect(A, B) = ["b", "d"]
123456789101112function getIntersect(arr1, arr2) [...]

Posted in Code, JavaScript, Web | 1 Comment