Occasionally, I encounter someone who proclaims the death of books. The digital realm has deprecated the print realm, so the argument goes, and books are unwieldy/unsearchable/bad for the environment/etc. The same argument is more often applied (I think) to magazines and newspapers, which (so the argument goes) should be present these days only in museums [...]
For those of you who might be interested, I’ve slapped together a little command-line area code lookup tool. It’s a really simple couple of scripts using grep to locate what you’re searching for. It works on Unix-like systems with bash installed (Linux, OS X, etc).
You can download it here. Follow the enclosed instructions to [...]
Note: Please contribute to this code in comments, if you find mistakes or know of improvements.
It’s surprising to most people – especially computer programmers, it seems – that the English language actually has more than one kind of single quote and one kind of double quote. In fact, if you go back to single-quote characters [...]
If you’re working with forms in PHP, and especially if you’re working with forms that have multiple steps, you’ve probably run across the “back button” problem in IE6. Here’s what it looks like:
1) you fill out a form and click the “submit” button – this takes you to another page.
2) you click the “back” [...]
Maybe everyone knows this, but I’ve seen very little about it online. The vast majority of AJAX-oriented functions looks something like this:
var xmlHttp
function showHint(str)
{
if (str.length==0)
{
document.getElementById(“txtHint”).innerHTML=”"
return
}
xmlHttp=GetXmlHttpObject()
if (xmlHttp==null)
{
alert (“Browser does not support HTTP Request”)
return
}
var url=”gethint.php”
url=url+”?q=”+str
url=url+”&sid=”+Math.random()
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged
xmlHttp.open(“GET”,url,true)
xmlHttp.send(null)
}
This function (taken from a w3schools tutorial) calls a function named stateChanged() when it receives data. stateChanged handles the display of response data, and looks like this:
function stateChanged()
{
if (xmlHttp.readyState==4 || xmlHttp.readyState==”complete”)
{
document.getElementById(“txtHint”).innerHTML=xmlHttp.responseText
}
}
Note that this function accepts no [...]