Digging My Blog

Last night I finished up my weekend project for my lovely wife, who was inspired by similar cabinets . This nifty little thing is a 4-inch wide shelf on casters that fits in the formerly unused space between the refrigerator and the wall.  The shelf will hold about 75 cans of various sizes, which...

Jim Holmes asked me to write an article about testing web services for his great 31 Days of Testing blog series and I gladly did so: 31 Days of Testing – Day 16: Testing Web Services The article ended up being less about testing web services specifically and more about tips based on our knowledge...

Last Friday someone who will go unnamed dropped our TV remote on the floor for the final time. Since replacing our carpet with oak flooring several years ago our remotes have been taking a beating. The occasional drop onto the carpet seemed to rarely hurt them. A drop from an end table to the wood floor...

Another post mostly for me. I spent some time tonight trying to solve a problem in a mobile/HTML 5 app I am building. I have two lists that pull data from a client-side database that could possibly contain many records. Rather than pull all the results on page load and dynamically build a huge list I...

Miso recently launched the initial phase of their API and make use of OAuth (similar to Twitter’s implementation) to allow user’s to authenticate with Miso and authorize your application to act on their behalf. The documentation is well written and easy to follow if you have experience working...

It was a much needed facelift. I liked the functionality of my previous blog home page and I liked the way it was implemented (mostly using JQuery plugins), but the design felt too cluttered and was just … well… ugly. Mostly it felt like too much of a “blog home page” and what...

Have you seen Brew Masters yet? The new Discovery Channel show focuses on Sam Calagione and his brewery, Dogfish Head. Never heard of him or the brewery? Go stand in a corner: you get a timeout for failing life. If you’re a fan of the brewery or of craft beer in general then you will like the show...

10. You do have tests, don’t you? 9. It’s the right thing to do - tests build up technical debt, too 8. Keeping your tests lean, mean, clean and tidy ensures that writing new tests is easy and pain free 7. It’s a nice break from working on your project/product code 6. Your boss will...

That’s a fairly long title to describe this: 1280296860 I found this value in a field of a JSON response from a web service where I was expecting a date. I’m used to seeing 13 digit timestamps so this date surprised me and looked a little odd. After some research I found that the 13-digit...

It has come to my attention that not everyone has heard of the “Buy & Fly Fry Tax”. I am shocked that there are people who have not heard of it - they must live under rocks. Please let me explain. Half eaten fries! Photo courtesy: EssjayNZ I am sure you have heard or used the statement...