2020 Oct 21, 3:50
Its rare to find devs anticipating Unicode control characters showing up in user input. And the most fun when unanticipated
is the Right-To-Left Override character U+202E. Unicode characters have an implicit direction so that for example by default Hebrew characters
are rendered from right to left, and English characters are rendered left to right. The override characters force an explicit direction for all the text that follows.
I chose my Twitter display name to include the HTML encoding of the Right-To-Left Override character #x202E;
as a sort of joke or shout out to my favorite Unicode control character.
I did not anticipate that some Twitter clients in some of their UI would fail to encode it correctly. There's no way I can remove that from my display name now.
Try it on Amazon.
How about pages that want to tell you about the U+202E.
Unicode 2016 Apr 22, 4:40
Hi, you may know me from space, but did you know Earth is my favorite planet? Love it & each other.
#EarthDay
2016 Jan 18, 12:11 2015 Apr 14, 9:51 2014 Jun 1, 4:16
MotherJones - Meet the people behind the Wayback Machine, one of our favorite things about the internet
technical internet-archive 2012 May 9, 3:30
Fixed in Windows 8 is intra-line tab completion - you can try it out on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview now. If you open
a command prompt, type a command, then move your cursor back into a token in the middle of the command and tab complete, the tab completion works on that whitespace delimited token and doesn't
erase all text following the cursor. Like it does in pre Windows 8. And annoys the hell out of me. Yay!
cli technical windows cmd32.exe 2012 Feb 29, 3:05
I've been working on the Glitch Helperator. It is a collection of tools and things I've put together for Glitch. It has a few features that I haven't seen elsewhere including:
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Favorite Streets
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A notebook in which you can save information about interesting streets and later use it to find your way back to them.
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Birthday
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Find out how old your Glitch is and the date of your next birthday in Glitch time or Earth time.
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API Update History
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A history of changes to the streets, skills and achievements of Glitch noting when new ones are added and when existing ones are changed.
It also has an interactive skill tree, find nearest feature tool, and achievement display. If you play Glitch, check it out.
glitch tool glitch-helperator game 2012 Jan 26, 12:03 2011 Dec 3, 6:46
Cool and (relatively) new methods on the JavaScript Array object are here in the most recent versions of your
favorite browser! More about them on ECMAScript5, MSDN, the IE blog, or Mozilla's documentation. Here's the list that's got me excited:
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some & every
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Does your callback function return true for any (some) or all (every) of the array's elements?
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filter
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Filters out elements for which your callback function returns false (in a new copy of the Array).
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map
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Each element is replaced with the result of it run through your callback function (in a new copy of the Array).
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reduce & reduceRight
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Your callback is called on each element in the array in sequence (from start to finish in reduce and from finish to start in reduceRight) with the result of the previous callback call passed to
the next. Reduce your array to a single value aggregated in any manner you like via your callback function.
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forEach
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Simply calls your callback passing in each element of your array in turn. I have vague performance concerns as compared to using a normal for loop.
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indexOf & lastIndexOf
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Finds the first or last (respectively) element in the array that matches the provided value via strict equality operator and returns the index of that element or -1 if there is no such element.
Surprisingly, no custom comparison callback method mechanism is provided.
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javascript array technical programming 2011 Sep 28, 10:22They've got maps from your favorite NES games as giant images. I'm using SMB3 1-1 as my desktop background. I've got a four monitor setup now and so its tough to find desktop backgrounds but Mario
levels easily cover my whole desktop.
game videogame map nintendo nes 2010 Jul 5, 9:49"This a small crocheted Brain Slug for your favorite Futurama fan!"
humor purchase futurama wishlist gift brain-slug etsy 2010 May 6, 5:48New IDN TLDs are up. Try out http://xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ (aka http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/) in your favorite IDN implementing browser.
idn tld dns icann technical web language 2010 Feb 1, 7:57Interesting Q&A on TED plus Chris Anderson's list of favorite TED talks.
ted video qa chris-anderson interview reddit 2010 Jan 29, 3:54
Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:
Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with
MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).
The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers.
Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end
up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard
essentially has had decisions made for it.
technical design principles software development 2009 Aug 18, 4:19
Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web
services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a
similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:
- The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would be enough to
create an Accelerator.
- The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an
Accelerator based on that.
- I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can
use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
- If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web
page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
- When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On
this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
- If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you
can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
- Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
- The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".
technical accelerator ie8 ie 2009 Jun 19, 8:07
The weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the
new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my
new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do
more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep
her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!
While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate
with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all
hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun
setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.
personal2 train address sarah house new-house birthday 2009 Mar 7, 4:56Its my favorite song done Mario Paint style.
paranoid-android mario-paint mario radiohead music video youtube videogame 2008 Oct 29, 9:50MTV's new music video web service's API. The API provides feeds of music videos by artist or search term, list of artists that are 'like' other artists. Things it doesn't do: doesn't provide access
to the video files instead provides URI to flash player. Also doesn't provide access to user's favorite videos or other user information.
api video music mtv web feed rss