window.onload firing too early in IE

12th May, 2012 - Posted by David - No Comments

The Problem Where I work, our tool supports 6 different languages, where translations are contained in various sets of language files. One of these sets consists of the translations stored in Javascript files as JSON blocks Read More

php, error_log and newlines: a solution

15th March, 2012 - Posted by David - No Comments

When it comes to coding and debugging, I generally keep things simple, opting for a basic text editor (Sublime Text 2 with Vim key-bindings being my current choice) and simple debug output statements when trying to track down a bug. With my current job, I deal with an API over AJAX so it’s not easy » Read More

oAuth with the Twitter API in Ruby on Rails without a gem

15th December, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments

This post is a follow on from my previous post about the oAuth protocol in general in Ruby. Here I detail how to let a user authenticate themselves via Twitter to your web app, request a list of people they’re following (a GET operation) and how to follow a specific user (a POST operation). As » Read More

oAuth 1.0 in Ruby without a gem

10th December, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments

Recently I decided to figure out what the oAuth 1.0 protocol was all about and try to implement it in Ruby, as part of a way a) to practice by Ruby on Rails, b) have a look at the Twitter API and c) use both to get an understanding of how websites let you log » Read More

MySQL reached max integer limit

23rd August, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments

Whenever anything generates a MySQL error at work, the whole technical team gets an email about it, with full debug info. We recently got one for an area that I look after, so it was up to me to investigate. The title of the error was a slightly cryptic Error: Duplicate entry ’0′ for key » Read More

jQuery Mobile and Dynamic Data

23rd May, 2011 - Posted by David - 6 Comments

UPDATE: I’ve recently been asked by entertainment.ie to stop scraping thier licensed data, to which I’ve duly agreed. Thus, the app is no longer live. However, the lessons learned below are still valid. END Haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails, so haven’t created anything » Read More

Regular expression (regex) to remove double encoding of html entities

30th March, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments

When you have users copying and pasting in data to forms on your website, which then gets stored in your database, you invariably end up with all sorts of ways of encoding and storing special characters. Ideally, these will end up in your database as the correct characters (such as € for the euro symbol), » Read More

Planned site downtime: how to handle it with PHP

25th January, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments

Today I read an interesting article on Google’s Webmaster Central blog about planned down time, for maintenance or whatever. Basically, you need to communicate to users and potential site-crawlers/indexers that the site is down, but it’s ok, it’ll be back up soon! My suggestion would be to do a mod-rewrite (if using Apache, but other » Read More

Web programming with Python and web.py: my experience

2nd November, 2010 - Posted by David - 2 Comments

Quick Introduction I’ve written the front page and an ajax handler for a web application using Python and web.py. Here I give my thoughts on using a niche product (web.py) and some of the coding issues I had to figure out on my own, in case some one has similar problems. Read More

Google Maps API V3 Overview Control

9th October, 2010 - Posted by David - 6 Comments

In mid-2009, Google launched version 3 of their fantastic Google Maps API. This new version was a complete overhaul of the existing system, moving to an MVC-based architecture, with the primary focus on speeding up the code so it would work better on mobile devices. It has now taken over from Maps API v2 as » Read More