Category Archives: Software Development

Stuff about wordpress, firefox, agile and other soft-dev related stuff.

How Farmville caused Firefox 3.6.6

So I noticed that Firefox updated itself again today, only a few days after it did last time.  Why the short time-lapse between Firefox 3.6.4 and 3.6.6? Just one bug: 574905. The Farmville Bug No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash …

June 28, 2010 – 02:21 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | View Comments

Microformats to the Rescue

This one is for the CMS designers out there.  If you’re in the business of building platforms that people create content in, you undoubtedly have run into the problem of storing metadata.  It may seem easy at first, “just put it in a database!”, but then you start running into predictable problems: the context information …

May 21, 2010 – 16:26 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , | View Comments

Happy IDN Day!

Today is the day that internationalized domain names (IDNs) go live on the internet. As someone really interested in globalization, this is a huge development: this is the first time non-latin characters can be used as domain names in the public internet. Arabic nations especially are loving this, and I’m sure Hebrew and Chinese language …

May 6, 2010 – 09:11 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | View Comments

PHP on IIS

I’ve been playing around with IIS recently.  The Windows/IIS community is not nearly as well served by Open Source as the competition, which is unfortunate given that IIS is a really popular platform for intranets and other enterprise applications.  It’s not really fair to ask your IT department to support Apache + MySQL as well …

March 11, 2010 – 18:08 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | View Comments

Getting lucky with free mobile WiFi

Like lots of people in tech, I have a Blackberry with WiFi.  Regardless of how good Rogers has been with their 3G network, WiFi is faster to browse with, and free-er. With that in mind, I’ve added my home and work WiFi networks to my connections (Manage Connections -> Set Up WiFi Network), and just …

December 18, 2009 – 12:51 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , | View Comments

TorCHI Presentation: Sprint Zero and Agile Design

My co-workers Khan and Brian and myself went to the University of Toronto for a presentation at TorCHI.  It was by Lynn Miller, a  Senior Manager at AutoDesk (Maya, 3DSMax, AutoCAD, etc.) The presentation was about Sprint Zero: the lead-up work that is required before a team embarks on an Agile project, or any project …

December 9, 2009 – 15:23 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | View Comments

My new Dell Mini 10v: The First Day

Since I haven’t bought a laptop in over 3 years, I decided to follow the trend and pick up one of the ultra-portable notebooks / netbooks.   After reading some reviews, I picked up this Dell Mini 10v.  It arrived today, only seven days after I placed the order via a Dell Chat. Rather than …

July 22, 2009 – 13:58 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , | View Comments

Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache

Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way.  For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom.  This is great, …

March 23, 2009 – 10:31 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | View Comments