Graceful Exits

Bursting IE’s Javascript parser, or: generating bizarre error messages through subprocess apoptosis

If you’re about to start programming under the GPL, and you want to read just one article about it, then: don’t read this; read the Drupal licensing FAQ instead.

The Open Knowledge Conference takes place in London the weekend after this. Rufus Pollock, who gave a keynote at OGN5, will be introducing a packed programme which covers the principles of free and open information access applied to diverse areas such as education, the environment, transport and academia.
I’m realy looking forward to it, especially in [...]

One of my resolutions this year is to try to cut down on the carbon I spend on music. Notwithstanding my purchase of the In Rainbows discbox, I’ve amassed an awful number of discs of metallized plastic in barely-recyclable containers. (I say “barely” because K. got me a pencil for Christmas made out of old [...]

In previous posts (part 1, part 2) I established the possibility that there were advantages to making Javascript more functional, to bring it in line with CSS and XSL. I didn’t say what these were, particularly, but I then provided a few bits and pieces on top of jQuery to make Javascript just that: functional [...]

If you’re here, then you probably came from here, and you want to make Javascript more functional. If you didn’t come from there—and this is getting a bit like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, isn’t it?—then you might want to go there first, to see if you want to be here.
So: functional Javascript. Not just functional, but [...]

There are three main technologies that your browser employs to present HTML for you: XSL, CSS and Javascript. The first two of these are functional: that is, they turn your incoming (X)HTML documents into a set of functions, or behaviours if you like. Because CSS isn’t generally considered a language, let alone a functional one, [...]

Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in [...]

Creating your own arrows in OpenOffice (.org, 2.0) is a pain. There’s tutorials out there that claim to show how to create arrows from OOo diagrams, but I’ve not had much success with those. However, by taking apart an existing arrow, I’ve managed to work out the rather nasty syntax
OOo arrow libraries are suffixed .soe, [...]

Drupal, along with Plone and dotnetnuke, beat some monumentally big playas to the first awards of the OpenID bounty. This is awarded to projects which implement a number of requirements which, together, constitute agreed OpenID functionality. And these three projects passed the finishing line first, despite the likes of Microsoft’s lip-service to the OpenID cause.
Of [...]