Garbage collection, in a very real sense
Don’t get me wrong: I think that Stallman has contributed massively to the open-source movement. But Tim O’Reilly is right: he simply doesn’t get the problem that closed web services present. I think talking about open access to the data is missing the point too. Often I’ve no wish to access the raw data, and [...]
If your web application ensures that all your incoming CGI variables are free of the most common source of malicious site damage, can you stop worrying?
I wondered this as I got far enough into a PHP publishing system that I had to start thinking about adding new content through the system (rather than just jamming [...]
Programmers: know your Excel!
People who don’t know how to hide rows and columns still do hide them. They just find… innovative and unexpected ways of doing so. Changing row height and column width, then protecting the cells against being resized (how they can do that and not know how to hide the cells is beyond [...]
If you’re working with XML, as I currently am, XSLT can sometimes be a godsend. Something that would take ages to do in a structured, procedural way can be reduced to two or three lines of functional XSL code.
So it was with a growing sense of consternation that I noticed that adding XML namespaces to [...]