jQuery.live("click") Gotcha

If you're using the new jQuery.live("type", fn) handlers in jQuery 1.3, be careful with the "click" event type.  Unlike jQuery.bind("click", fn) and jQuery.click(fn), jQuery.live("click", fn) doesn't distinguish between mouse buttons.  So while the "normal" handlers will only trigger when the left button is used, the live handler will trigger on any button.
The workaround is pretty [...]

CSS Naked Day

It's CSS Naked Day again, at least on the East edge of Earth, but we'll soon catch up.  Strip your <BODY> for the world!  After doing it manually the last couple years, this time I'm using the excellent CSS Naked Day WordPress Plugin by Aja Lorenzo Lapus.

Ben Nadel – At It Again

Ben Nadel posted another interesting code snippet this moring.  I think Ben and I stand in agreement on the technique: NEVER EVER USE IT.  It leverages a horrible bug in ColdFusion's implementation of struct literals that I've blogged about previously.
Here's the snippet:
<cfset objConfig = {
root = getDirectoryFromPath(getCurrentTemplatePath()),
tags = objConfig.root & "tags/",
[...]

Show Me Your Tool

If you read my blog regularly, chances are you write software and therefore can't, because your tools don't exist in the visual world.  They're just magic strings of minuscule magnets on a rapidly spinning chunk of plastic…
I took my chef's knife to the sharpener a few days ago.  Cost a whopping $4 to have him [...]

Firefox Spellcheck for Programmers

No, it doesn't exist, but shouldn't it?  I've found that when I write prose in Firefox, I almost invariably ignore the redlines.  Why?  Too many false positives.  Technical prose, which is usually what I'm writing,  is littered with domain-specific terms that no spellchecker will ever consider valid.  Obviously you can help your specific spellchecker by [...]

TurboTax For the Win

Every year I'm blown away by TurboTax's web version.  It's one of the few applications that is really a pleasure to use, and while I can't say doing taxes is any sort of enjoyable, the sting is greatly removed.  So once again, cheers Intuit.   Keep it up, we appreciate it.

No More AdSense

Tonight I removed my Google AdSense ads from my blog.  I installed it last April as an experiment, intending to leave the ads up for one month.  After a month I never took them down, but the results were about what I expected: virtually zero income.  Now, a year later, I just canceled my AdSense [...]

I'll be at cf.objective()

In addition to speaking at CFUNITED later this summer, I just registered for cf.objective() this afternoon as an attendee.  This will be the first time I've gone to that conference, but I've heard very good things about it.  CFUNITED has grown into a bit of a behemoth, and while that carries a number of advantages, [...]

xkcd Stuff

I just ordered some goodies from xkcd which should arive in a week or two: a couple t-shirts and a signed print of the Discovery Channel comic.  Unfortunately the store doesn't accept code (my favorite way to pay for zero-cost items), but I'll happily shell out a few bucks for all the entertainment if that's [...]

Mathematic Constraint Deduction

I did  Project Euler's problem 63 last night, and it was a good one:
The 5-digit number, 16807 = 7^5, is also a fifth power. Similarly, the 9-digit number, 134217728 = 8^9, is a ninth power.
How many n-digit positive integers exist which are also an nth power?
I love this sort of problem.  The algorithm for a [...]