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Category Archives: Dictaphone

The proverbial “proverbial notes to self”

Nifty jQuery trick: setting attributes

Thursday, November 26, 2009

I’ve been knee deep in the jQuery source code recently. It’s all gooey, but you do get to see some snazzy things. Today’s nifty jQuery trick is about programmatically setting attribute values via a function. To follow along at home you’ll need some scissors, a length of string, and some double sided tape…

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Closures with self-invoking functions

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Just a quick note-to-self… I’m a big fan of using self-invoking anonymous functions to keep stuff out of the global namespace, but I forgot that they are also nifty for keeping variables in scope via closures. Here’s the problem… Let’s say with have an array that we’d like to populate with functions. The functions simply [...]

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Convert Wordpress fetch_rss to fetch_feed

Friday, August 7, 2009

I realised that I wasn’t properly handling the return value on a feed I was grabbing to display the “Spiffy things from the Internet” section of the blog. I went to Wordpress to look up the fetch_rss API details, only to find that it had been deprecated in Wordpress 2.8.something. Being the ever-vigilant beacon of [...]

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Faking email delivery in .NET

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Well here’s a tip that would have prevented me from barraging the owners of test.com and asdf.com with mountains of garbage test emails, had I discovered it many years ago (sorry about that, guys!). In .NET you can easily specify a location to dump emails ready to be picked up by the SMTP server. If [...]

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Revisions in WordPress 2.7

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Quick note for those running WordPress 2.7, and are starting to freak out about the 500 gazillion revision rows that are now getting inserted into your database… There are a few ways to cull them – such as deleting all posts with type “revision”, but that’s pretty annoying. Thankfully, the WordPress docs now have a [...]

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Wolfram Alpha and jQuery Easing

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Wolfram Alpha is out and about, and promising to link all information in the world together in a way that will render further human thought obsolete. Most people who know that thinking is boring, and want to learn important things about b-grade celebrities, quickly realised this weird search engine wasn’t going to tell them anything [...]

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Vertical Selecting

Friday, August 31, 2007

Here’s a helpful little mouse-wielding tip for all you Windows users out there (Oops, “mouse” and “Windows” – there goes my geek cred.)… Did you know that you can vertically select text in some programs? Well you can, with the power of ALT + mouse!
Selecting text with a mouse is a very important computer-user [...]

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Javascript Hexadecimal Helpers

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Hexadecimal sure comes in handy sometimes. Like, say, um, if you wanted to know why there was some of the alphabet on your scientific calculator for example. Here are a couple of javascript objects to help you out with some hexadecimal byte conversion.

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Binary on your digits

Monday, May 9, 2005

Binary, like business ethics, has few practical applications. Here’s one: count up to 31 on one hand. Practical, and impressive at parties.

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