This is an awesome couch with tons of storage place and you can build it at home, although it doesn’t appear to be the easiest thing to build, its still a rather cool design.
Author Archives: Dale Nunns
AJAX – Do I dare code it from scratch?
When “ajaxyfying” (my new word for when you add AJAX to a site) a website do you code all the java script your self or do you go use one of the many AJAX libraries/frameworks?
I’m currently working on something that has lots of forms for inputing values and tables for viewing the values, and I would like to make the interface a little snappier by adding some AJAX to update things without reloading the entire page. Obviously this is relatively simple to do and can be done without a fancy library by coding things myself… but is it actually worth it? I realise that knowing how AJAX works “under the hood” is a good idea, and the ability to actually code that yourself is an important skill, but other than a simple test app is it actually worth doing it yourself?
At the moment I’m playing with Prototype, it wasn’t chosen through some kind of scientific process it was just the first tab I happened to open in Firefox. I’m trying to make the webpage more responsive, not “flashy” so I don’t need any fancy visual effects just want to limit the amount of times a page loads when things are clicked on.
Any opions? let me know below.
Edit: After writing this I took alook at the WordPress code and found out it uses jQuery, so I’ve downloaded that and gonna have a go with that too.
Apple Macintosh – Folklore
I missed this one, but for those of you who don’t know it was the Apple Macintosh’s 25th Birthday on January 24th. I love reading about the history of computing and in particular about the early days at places like Apple, much of what they were doing back then was new and uncharted and no one knew if it was going to work or how to do things.
I love reading Folklore.org which is written mostly by Andy Hertzfeld and tells the stories of things that happened at Apple while they were designing the Macintosh.
Disk Latency from Shouting
Some guys from the Fishworks project over at Sun discovered something rather interesting, that shouting at a disk array while the array is in use can cause latency on the disks. This does actually make sense as any vibrations can make a difference to the disks as it causes the heads to move a bit and therefore they have to re-read that part of the disk.
I wonder if this will prompt people to make quieter server rooms? Found via this blog post and this one.
Sewing machines aren’t what they once were.
While browsing through the MakeZine blog I came across this sewing machine, the Brother Quattro 6000D. This one impressive machine and I don’t even have any interest in sewing! It’s got high powered lights, an LCD screen and onboard computer. It’s designed for embroidery, sewing, quilting and crafting (hence the “Quattro” name.) It’s also got a very long and impressive Features list.
nPOP Mail Client
I was looking for a mail client that would connect to a POP mail server and pull down the headers and then allow you to delete the messages you no longer wanted straight from the server. (Very useful if you have a giant email cloggy your mail.)
Alot of mail clients will do this, but they’re all rather bloated and need to be installed. Ideally I was looking for something small, that didn’t need to be installed. After a bit of searching I found nPOP, it does exactly what I wanted and has become an extremely useful little mail app. I’ve used it a number of times with my clients who have a habit of receiveing emails with 30mb mail attachements. All the settings are stored in a .ini file in the same folder as the .exe which makes moving it around or carrying it on a memory stick possible.
Works on Windows (including Vista) they also have a pocket pc version which looks interesting.
You can get it here. (Only a 94KB download, works on Windows including Vista.)
The Price of Piercing
My girlfriend and I were chatting about piercings a few days ago, sparked by a friend of a friend of a friend mentioning that they have a nipple piercing (on a girl) and the conversation went sortof downhill from there as we chatted about what the most painful place or most awkward place to be pierced would be. My Girlfriend only has pierced ears, I have none so it envovled lots of guess work, but we decided that neither of us are adventurous enough to get any in any other places.
A few days later this picture from the Washington Post came across my screen via twitter (I think). After reading all the notes on the picture I realise that have piercing in other places may not be such a great idea.
*sigh* I can see that I’ll be getting comments about this post 🙂
Wordwrapping Crystal Text Fields
Puting this up so that I don’t have to do as much head scratching next time around. To make a text field in a Crystal report wrap, Right Click the field, Select Format Object then tick the “Can Grow” field and you can then enter the number of lines you want to allow the field to grow too, in my case I set it to 0 then it’ll keep growing.
Adding Save As PDF into Office 2007
Microsoft had to remove the ability to save a document as a PDF or XPS file thanks to a legal battle with Adobe. But thanks to a free download from Microsoft you can add this feature back into Office.
AJAX Loading Gif Creator
If you use any AJAX based sites you’ve probably seen the spinning “loading” icons people use to indicate something is loading (like the one on the right). I’ve been looking for somewhere I can get one for a website I’m working on.
I wondered onto this site AjaxLoad via this Stack Overflow Entry which has a web based image generator, its actually very cool. Now I just have to work out how to get the image to work correctly in ASP.Net.