Archive for 2009

Best of 2009

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

In the tradition of end of the year posts, here's some "best of" statistics from this blog for the year 2009. Next week we will return to our regular programming.

Vim / Opera tip: Open highlighted text in Vim

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Here's a quick tip for Opera and Vim users: How to add a menu item which allows you to quickly open highlighted text on a web page in Vim. This trick can be applied with any other application too, like <insert your favorite editor>

Rewriting TankWar: Assessing the damage

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I have decided to rewrite TankWar, and I'll be writing a bunch of blog posts about the process. If you ever wanted to know how to write a scorched earth/worms-like game using just JavaScript, now is your chance to learn ;) This is the first one: Assessing the damage. In other ...

Git interactive rebase tips

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Interactive rebase is one of my most used Git commands. It'll let me slice and dice commits in various useful ways. Here's a few tips for you to unleash the true potential of rebase :) Basics: editing, combining, reordering and removing commits Breaking a commit into two Taking a part of a commit ...

TankWar has online mode again: This time on Opera Unite

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

You may recall an earlier post about TankWar, my 100% JavaScript cannons-game. Back when I wrote it, I included online play, but the server went down with a hard disk failure. Now, I have rewritten the online mode - this time that part is also all JavaScript - continue reading to ...

Dynamic precompiling of JavaScript functions for fun and profit

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Hey it's Friday so it's time to try a fun JavaScript hack - Let's go and precompile some functions! What does "precompiling" mean? In principle, it means we take a function which takes multiple parameters and pre-define some of them. All this is done dynamically, so your code can do it ...

Git tips for SVN users

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

SVN is the version control system I've used the most, but lately I've been using Git more and more. I've also been using Git with projects that have an svn repository thanks to git's built in svn support. While working with it, I've ran into several typical cases that I've often ...

A simple way to make your code better: Stop adding more parameters

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

You need to add some new functionality to your function or class. Let's say you need to remove all objects stored, but optionally also call a method on them. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Let's just add a parameter to removeAllObjects! If you make it true, the additional method is called, ...

More blogs that I read

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Continuing the trend from last November, when I posted some of my favorite blogs, I think it's time to highlight some other good blogs! So here's a bunch of more - be sure to check them out: The PHPDeveloper blog: Many PHP programmers probably know the PHPdeveloper website, which links to a ...

The car steering wheel usability exercise

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Apologies if this post shows up twice for anyone using feed readers. Windows Live Writer screwed things up a bit...With today’s cars having more and more functionality – stereos, built-in navigation, the engine computer metrics etc. – the steering wheels start to have more and more buttons. Sometimes it’s on ...