I’m evaluating CakePHP for possible use in a project, and I had a dickens of a time getting the scaffolding working at first. I already had some code written on this particular project1, as well as a rather complex relational database schema, etc. so I was trying to fill in all the models and controllers…
Development Archives
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I’m starting to get more and more friends asking me semantic XHTML questions – wanting to do styling with CSS and good things like that. This is a great shift and I’m happy to help – however these folks are still generally asking the wrong questions when they come to me. Semantic XHTML isn’t about…
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Writing documentation is not high up the “fun ways to spend my time” list. It is however, an important part of any software package – especially if you don’t have a support team. 🙂 Generally it is good practice to have someone who is not the developer write the docs; the developer is often too…
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Many thanks to Danny and Dan for making BarCampDenver such a success. I met a lot of smart and interesting folks and learned quite a bit. There was less of a “web development” focus than I believe is normal, but that isn’t too surprising for Denver. Maybe we’ll get some more web geeks out for…
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So in the current beta releases of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks (1.7b4 and 2.7b4 respectively) there is an IE only bug that makes the list of tags on the tags screen look like this: instead of like this: Being the CSS expert that I am, I looked at all the HTML and CSS rules and…
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I’ll be attending BarCampDenver on Friday-Saturday. My session idea will probably be “A Discussion of JavaScript Toolkits”. I’ve been looking at a number of them lately and would love to pick some brains on the topic.
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I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but as of Version 2.0.4 (419.3), my JS Quicktags (example page) seem to work in Safari. Yay!
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When I worked at a BigCo, we had what we called the engineering estimate multiplier . When asking an engineer how long something will take, you need to apply the following formula to the result. Multiple the integer value by 2. Increment the type of time used in the estimate. An example of the multiplier…
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I just sent in a dozen or so bug reports for software I’m using/testing. It can be easy to just work around issues and assume someone else has reported the problem, but if I want my customers to report issues they discover in my software I better do my part as well. Smart developers love…
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For accesskeys to work in IE, the element must be visible1, and containing elements must be visible. I’m not sure if this is a recent change in IE or if I changed my code somewhere along the way without realizing the effect it would have in IE. Here is a simple test case demonstrating this.…
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I’ve been trying to fix a problem my international customers have been experiencing with the “create tasks from e-mails” feature in the current versions of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks. I think I’ve got it working properly now, though tangental bugs from other encoding types wouldn’t exactly shock me. What does surprise me is that the…
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In our early alpha of FeedLounge we had implemented auto-complete for tags – similar to what you see in the Gmail “to” field and in Google Suggest. I now have the same functionality need for the tagging coming in the next release of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks. We ended up ripping it out because the…
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The consulting work I’m doing is reminding me (in larger software companies) how much “work” time is necessarily spent communicating and discussing – leaving little time for “actual work”. A co-worker of mine at a BigCo in a former life had this on a poster in her cube1: Meetings, the practical alternative to work. There…
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This weekend, I received an e-mail from someone who had signed up for a free trial of my Tasks software. This person’s e-mail said: Stop spamming me! I asked for some clarification, but did not receive it (though I did receive another request to “stop spamming me”). Now I certainly don’t like SPAM, and it…
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I’ve been doing some UI consulting up in the Seattle area this week and it feels very strange to be in an office all day. Lots of meetings, taking notes and capturing requirements, no walking the dog at lunch, waking up to be at the office at 8:30 (or 8:45…) regardless of how late I…