All posts in Outer Monologue

Ok, so before you get too excited it’s not really a fully fledged version fantastic Firebug Firefox plugin, but the lite version does go some ways to easing your cross browser development.

If you’re not aware what Firebug is, the official site quote is:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

But that doesn’t explain just how excellent Firebug is, it is by far and away not only the most complete debugging plugin I have found for any browser, but it also seems to be one of the most complete and professionally executed Firefox plugins around.
Continue reading this entry »

cross trainer

I’m currently in the middle of writing a reusable little JavaScript utility, which I’ll probably release when it’s finished, for one of my many projects and I wanted to employ unit testing as part of the development process, as I believe in the benefits of it quite strongly.

However my previous experience with unit testing JavaScript haven’t been the most pleasent, I have tried the most common nUnit variations for JS, the best of which was JSUnit. But I always found this a little cumbersome and difficult to use, however I had recently read about the unit testing available with script.aculo.us and although the only documentation I could find was the PDF available at mir.aculo.us I thought I’d give it a go.
Continue reading this entry »

TV Networks Suck

0 comments, why not be the first?

Day Break
I don’t really get into new TV series that much, due to a few facts, the main ones are that I don’t really watch much TV outside of things I know I like so I don’t get any exposure to them and that I don’t like being tied to TV schedules e.g. having to wait for the next episode. I long for real TV on demand. I prefer TV that I can dip in and out of, usually comedies like Family Guy, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, American Dad and South Park and anything on Discovery etc. especially Mythbusters, this is TV made for my PVR, I don’t need to watch the next episode and I can watch them when I please and in any order I like.
Continue reading this entry »

Last night I came home to an email from my friend Stuart with the subject line This is special.

The email simply contained 2 links to some videos on YouTube, which turned out to be (the cryptic YouTube URLs don’t reveal the contents beforehand) two videos of guitarist Andy McKee.
Continue reading this entry »

Has Been

2 comments, join the discussion.

William Shatner, Has Been CD front cover photograph
Has Been implies failure, not so. - William Shatner, "Has Been", "Has Been" 2004

The William Shatner album Has Been was recommended to me by a work colleague earlier this year (but the album was released a couple of years ago) and I feel it’s about time to pass on this recommendation to anyone I can because it is simply fantastic.
Continue reading this entry »

As I’ve mentioned before I’m a little bit anal when it comes to organising things on my computer and just have to have it all the way I want it. When listening to a recent edition of the Security Now podcast (that’s right I said podcast, Netcast my ass) on my way home last night I couldn’t help get excited by the mention of allSnap. As, from the description of it, this offers something I’ve wanted for almost ever, but never really searched for — it allows all top level windows (in Windows) to snap to each other and the desktop boundaries.
Continue reading this entry »

Picture of a can of Spam
I’ve had this on my list of post ideas for months now and haven’t seemed to get round to posting about it, but a recent question from a friend about what I used to handle comment spam reminded me about it.

I use WordPress to power this site and ever since day one I received lots of spam, at first I just manually cleaned them up but once I started getting some decent traffic I had to move onto a more automated solution. So looked at lots of different plugins for WordPress and tried about 5 or 6 until I came across the fantastic Spam Karma plugin , since that day I haven’t looked back.
Continue reading this entry »

Birthday cake with 1 candle.
My website is 1 year old today, OK so it’s really about 7 or 8 years old - but in it’s current version which works and receives semi regular updates it’s been a year since the relaunch.

What better way to celebrate than with a new release of my most popular piece of code, with just shy of 3,000 downloads so far, the JavaScript image cropper UI is now at version 1.2.0.

So looking forward to the next year I’ll try and post more regularly and hopefully get the 4 or 5 code based projects I’ve been working on (and off) released.

For those of you who have had the pleasure of dealing with browser testing slightly complex CSS the title explains it all.

For those of you who haven’t, all I have to say is this: you lucky bastards.

At work today I spent quite a bit of time shouting and throwing things at my monitor, it tends to take the brunt of my frustrations when things really annoy me. The reason for my frustration today was Coldfusion’s WSConfig tool, which is supposed to easily allow you to configure web servers or individual sites (in the case of IIS anyway, I’ve not tried with Apache yet) to work with the Coldfusion JRun connector.
Continue reading this entry »