Solving the alt-tab problem: My solution

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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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Drawing diagrams with JavaScript

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

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

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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

Password policies generally suck

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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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Benefits of Developing With Microsoft AND Open Source

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The Internet seems to be the latest battleground for the computer age-old struggle between Microsoft and open source solutions. For some reason, many web developers like to engage in holy wars over various web site hosting solutions and development platforms, fiercely defending their beloved vendor’s suite of products. They battle over their particular setup so much they block out any new ideas they might gain had they kept their minds open to how things are done on the other side of the castle walls.

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