CodeUtopia

Moving hosting providers

I’ll be switching hosts from Dreamhost to MediaTemple this weekend, so you may experience hiccups. There will be a new post when the blog has moved.

Posted in general | 1 Comment »

Solving the alt-tab problem: My solution

Lately there’s been some discussion about “the alt tab problem” – In other words, when you have lots of windows open and when working on something you constantly jump between a few of them. Basically when doing this, it becomes tricky to recall which window you get when you alt tab once, or twice, and so on.

If you’re not familiar with this, the aforementioned link contains a good explanation and some solution ideas as well. However, the solutions others seem to suggest for this all assume we even want to use an alt-tab style window switcher to begin with.

This is a problem I’ve ran into as well, so I present thee with a question: What would be better than good ol’ alt-tabbing? Let’s find out!

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Posted in general | 9 Comments »

Drawing diagrams with JavaScript

Opera was holding another widget competition, this time for more desktop application type of widgets.

I was working on a widget as well, but sadly did not have enough time to complete it. Part of this was due to problems that I ran into in development.

The widget was going to be an easy to use diagram editor. I managed to get as far as having basic diagram editing parts implemented.

Read on for some more details of how it was going to work and what sort of problems there were.

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Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »

Building a lightweight application framework around custom Dojo MVC

Continuing from last week, where I introduced a simple but powerful Dojo MVC solution, let’s look at how to put it together into a simple but useful application “framework”.

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Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »

Using Dojo’s dijit widgets for simple controller/view layers

More complex JavaScript applications benefit from the MVC pattern just like other sorts of applications. Just like for other sorts of applications, there are dedicated MVC libraries for JavaScript, such as JavaScriptMVC.

Dojo, in my opinion one of the most powerful and flexible JS libraries, can be easily adapted to provide a reasonably well working MVC scheme, so why use a separate library?

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Posted in Programming | 4 Comments »

Packageizer and ZF modelform now on GitHub

Due to popular demand, I have now pushed both packageizer and ZF modelform to GitHub. Feel free to fork them or do whatever

Posted in general | 1 Comment »

Come to the best LAN party of 2010, Solid Mojo @ Vantaa 14th May

If you live in Finland or just happen to be in Finland in May, come to this year’s best LAN party event, Solid Mojo! I will be there so if you want to come laugh at me or something that should be possible too.

With 1 000 places for computers, lots of activities and competitions, it will be a blast. Oh, and the place reservation, intranet and point-of-sale systems are based on PHP, utilizing Zend Framework and Doctrine amongst other things

Disclaimer: I’m a member of the organization behind the event, The Group

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Password policies generally suck

The other day I was talking with someone about passwords. They had a policy that you are not allowed to use your old passwords again, and that got me thinking: Is this actually improving or reducing password safety?

Especially bringing this topic to spotlight today is a recent password leak from a popular finnish online game, Älypää. Their site was hacked and over 120 000 passwords were acquired, many of them very, very weak.

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Posted in general | 12 Comments »

Google Nexus One review: Is it a superphone?

For the past few days I’ve had the chance to use the Google Nexus One as my phone. Now it’s time for the bottom line: Is this phone great? How does it compare to some other smartphones, such as the Palm Pre or Nokia’s N900?

Read on for a thorough look at various aspects of the phone and how it works in daily use.

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Posted in general | 3 Comments »

Should a failed function return a value or throw an exception?

You have created a nice, well written function, but you realize you forgot something: The failure case.

What should a function do when it fails? There are two schools for this – the “throw an exception” school and the “return an error value” school.

But which of these is the correct approach?

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Posted in Programming | 22 Comments »