I recently had a developer on my team who had some trouble with jQuery’s $(…).data() syntax. In case anyone else has trouble, maybe I can clarify things a bit. I’m anonymizing all the code involved, of course. We wanted to make certain items have certain behaviors under certain circumstances. And so we set up a “whatToDo” […]
Tag Archives: oops
Why Did My Layout Just Go All Wonky?
Friday, November 20th, 2015 – 9:51 am
If you add Boostrap’s CSS to a layout that’s already working just fine, you may find that things shift in strange, subtle ways. And even not-so-subtle ones, like basically your entire layout breaking. Generally, this seems to manifest as block-level elements becoming too small, and clipping out content inside their bounding boxes. A div that used […]
Year-End Self-Grading
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014 – 8:44 pm
The past couple of years, I’ve posted a couple of year-end retrospective posts, analyzing how much I’d posted, and how much of it had to do with gender issues. Time for this year’s round-up! (A few days late.) This year (well, last year), I managed only 12 posts total. Which sucks. Of those, two were tagged […]
Smart Apostrophes: They’re a Problem (in URLs)
Sunday, November 10th, 2013 – 7:40 pm
Recently, The American Prospect published an article excoriating the “men’s rights” movement. It was a pretty good article, and well-received. Lots of people tweeted links to it… or, they tried to. Curiously, those tweets all broke in the exact same way, pointing at a truncated version of the correct URL. That’s because the next character after […]
The Problem With “Objectify A Man In Tech Day”
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 – 8:46 am
Update: While putting the finishing touches on this post, I found out that its creator is cancelling Objectify Day, for a host of very good reasons. I think much of what I wrote here can still be useful, so I’m posting this piece anyway. I’m glad to see that the purpose I had in mind […]
A Follow-Up on Pronounceability
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 – 2:11 pm
Late last year, I wrote about making sure your domain name is both spellable and pronounceable. Well, I just encountered a site that technically gets it right, in that its domain name is exchangebitcoins.com. But as soon as you look at their logo, which presumably tells you what they actually want to be called? At that […]
I’ve Chosen Convenience Over Privacy
Sunday, April 24th, 2011 – 2:13 pm
Back when I got my Palm Prē, I noticed that it wanted to store various of my information on Google’s servers. I thought I’d kept it from doing so; I sure wasn’t using Gmail on a regular basis. I configured the Prē’s email client to check my own account on mactane.org, and I thought everything […]
How Many “Years Of Experience” Do You Have?
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 – 2:41 pm
In my ongoing job search, I’m sometimes asked by recruiters: “How many years of experience do you have with [name of some technology or skill]?” It’s a somewhat reasonable question when the item involved is a programming language or technique that I use every day, or at least every week. But there are far too […]
Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 – 9:17 pm
If you haven’t been getting as much email as usual this past week, the culprit may be SpamAssassin. It turns out that SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (the current version, released in June of 2008) has a Year 2010 Bug. The problem lies in the core configuration file 72_active.cf, which contains a wide variety of “currently active” rules. On line […]
Hummingbird Updated to Version 0.60
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 – 7:49 pm
I’ve always questioned the wisdom of building a startup company based around someone else’s platform, like Facebook games or Gmail inbox add-ons. You’re totally at the mercy of the other company. (Many people have found out how silly it was to go up against Microsoft or Apple in just the same way.) And yet, here […]