Garbage collection, in a very real sense
Firefox’s implementation of Javascript is quite forgiving: often a little too forgiving, when it ought to be strict about issues that could pose a security risk. Indeed, Firefox’s silent “the programmer meant this” in the instance I’ve just been tackling was only revealed by the IE error:
No such interface supported
Enlightening, no? The error message is [...]
Seen the “sad iPod icon” recently on your iPod? I was greeted by it yesterday on my 4th generation podlet:
The sad iPod icon (SII). Usually accompanied by a generic, unhelpful apple.com URL, which just makes it all the more sad.
Unlike most people who see this, I didn’t seem to have the symptoms of [...]
After a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to get wireless networking at home. Unfortunately, my first attempts to test the connectivity to the rest of the world coincided with the power outages at Telehouse, a “bullet-proof” ISP that too many people rely on, including ADSL services, the BBC website, Nominet, some DNS servers….
I have [...]
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 [...]
Today has been a day of minor disasters. More on those once they come to some sort of resolution. But I’ve also effected a minor hardware triumph with my old Kodak CX6230 camera. For two years (and two house-moves: God bless my hoarding instinct!) I’ve occasionally switched it on to be confronted with the message:
Camera [...]
One of the last tasks that moving to my new machine involves is to stretch the Ubuntu desktop across both of my monitors. Our sysadmin had very kindly set it up to work with the monitor card integral to the motherboard, so in principle I only had to tweak the configuration for X, the standard [...]
Ever wondered just where in a complex database you stored that particular bit of information? Or ever had to reverse-engineer someone else’s database, about which you know nothing, with only the output from an application to guide you? In these cases it’s handy to be able to search every text cell, in every column, in [...]
E-mail-based error reporting, whether from a system specifically designed to provide it (like Nagios) or as a bolt-on to an application or framework, is only as good as the underlying error diagnostics. So when one of our clients’ Coldfusion app sent me a message today with the brief summary “null null”, the server might as [...]