My lessons from life and software development

Clicktale’s free plan only allows you to see 2 page views per recording session. And that’s simply not enough to see if Clicktale is worth paying for. How are you supposed to decide whether to upgrade to a paid plan if you haven’t been able to gauge the power of the tool? So, while you’re…

Today I was modifying someone else’s file when I noticed that when I uploaded it to the server it displayed horribly. All whitespace was gone, and in the place of newlines was ^M characters. Here’s a snapshot of how the file looked when I uploaded. If I viewed it with ‘more filename.php’ I didn’t see…

Part of the new geolocation api provides a method to get a user’s current position. In theory that’s awesome, but in practice it was returning inconsistent results. Sometimes it was accurate, other times it was off by miles. If I tried it multiple times in a row it would get more accurate, but only some…

Every once in a while I get a submission to Song Key Finder that contains some weird characters (they showed up as boxes). I use the MusicBrainz database api to verify song and artist information, so my first thought was to consult with them. Since the characters appeared to be showing up in non-english songs, I…

While attending the JavaScript conference FluentConf last week in San Francisco, I heard a few people talking about a tool called Errorception. They said it offered an easy way to track all the client-side errors your users are experiencing. Since I’m a fan of an error-free website, I decided to give it a try. Signup…

We all hate captchas, so when I saw a new captcha alternative called Qaptcha I was slightly intrigued. Instead of typing in mangled words, you simply slide a slider bar to prove you are human. How simple! See the demo here. But the more I looked at it, the more I thought about how it…

I was curious if javascript was still executed by the browser even if it was within an element that is hidden in the DOM. A quick search yielded no conclusive evidence, so I decided to test myself. Quick answer: Yes, it does still execute – for both inline and included javascript regardless of how it’s…

If you have a PHP script that may take a long time to process (more than a couple minutes), make sure you’re printing output as it gets generated. If the page takes too long to load then some browsers will close the connection if nothing is being sent to it. All you have to do…

I used the Codiqa Screen Designer on the JQuery Mobile homepage and while at first I was impressed, I noticed quite a bit of extra padding and spacing. I tried to override the CSS, but the best way to get rid of it was to remove all of the fieldcontain and controlgroup divs that it adds in:…