Archive for June, 2005

Firefox Extensions: Web Developer

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

This is the second installment of my exploration of useful Firefox extensions

One of the most popular and highly rated Firefox extensions is the Web Developer extension. This tool adds one or more of the following to every web page: a handy context menu or a toolbar. Both contain the same list of tools […]

Firefox Extensions: Introduction and Live HTTP Headers

Saturday, June 4th, 2005

Background

Interacting with the web has gotten more fun in the last year or so. Browser technological improvements seem to be getting a higher priority as Firefox, Safari and Opera are competing to present a superior, standards-compliant environment that benefits both developers and end-users. This means that developers can spend less time working around […]

When caches go bad

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005

In general, caching is a good thing. Creating a temporary local copy of some data can dramatically speed up repeated access to that data, especially if it’s hard to recreate or slow to access. However, if the local copy falls out of sync with the real data it can sometimes be disastrous. […]

Working with UTF-8 on OSX

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005

One of my recent projects has been to port a Clotho application to Japanese. We chose this opportunity to convert the code base fully to Unicode. The other obvious choice would have been to port to Shift-JIS, a popular encoding for Japanese characters. However, we decided that this latter choice was not […]