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Posted: Apr 8, 2018
Tags: rant
Grocery stores are broken
Imagine walking into a new grocery store. What are the first things you notice? Maybe it’s the dim fluorescent lights. Maybe it’s the sound of low quality music on a lower quality speaker, quiet enough that you can’t tell what’s playing, loud enough that you can’t ignore it. ¶ As you...
Posted: Mar 21, 2018
Weird TFS Error Message
Ran into a fun little bug with the Visual Studio Team Explorer widget today. I clicked “check in” as usual, and was met with this error: “Value was either too large or too small for a UINT32”. Turns out what that error actually means is that one of the files...
Posted: Mar 20, 2018
Tags: testing
Setting up automated testing with MSTest and Selenium
I’ve started implementing automated testing on a project I’m working on using MSTest and Selenium. I’ve run into several issues that I couldn’t find answers for online so I thought I’d document my findings here. ¶ Creating the test project ¶ Create the project using the “Unit Test” template in Visual Studio....
Posted: Feb 22, 2018
Tags: poetry
Poetry
Some poetry I’ve written in the past couple months. ¶ Morning ¶ Soft and warm The golden paths And shadows On the carpet. ¶ Quiet footsteps, It’s morning And the baby’s Still asleep. ¶ Loss ¶ Milky, fuzzy, sweet and soft The odor still remains entombed 'Til mother lifting up the cloth Escapes the scent...
Posted: Aug 19, 2016
Tags: javascript
Getting started with the HTML5 notification API
I used the HTML5 notification API for the first time today, it’s actually much more simple than I expected. There are two functions you need to know about: ¶ // to ask for permission Notification.requestPermission(callback); // to display a notification new Notification(message); Before you actually display the notification, you need to...
Posted: Aug 7, 2016
Tags: vim
Getting neosnippet to work with deoplete
It took me a bit of searching, but I finally figured out how to get neosnippet to work with deoplete. The issue is that the deoplete auto-complete trigger is <Tab>, which is also the neosnippet expansion trigger. So we want to change the neosnippet trigger to something else, like <C-k>....
Posted: Aug 1, 2016
Tags: flight-simulator, fsx
FSX Review: L-39C Freeware
I just came across this excellent L-39C this weekend, and I had to share. Interestingly, the only references to it seem to be in a forum thread on SimOuthouse. To my knowledge, this is the first review ever written for it. ¶ Model ¶ Exterior ¶ The exterior model is very detailed, with...
Posted: Mar 6, 2016
Tags: programming
A thought on Self Documenting Code
At risk of sounding like I don’t know what I am talking about, I’m writing this post to document something that most programmers have probably known for a long time, even though I only just discovered it. ¶ Often when programming we may write something like this: ¶ // Checks if user...
Posted: Jan 17, 2016
Tags: linux
Setting up Linux on a Lenovo X1 Carbon
I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon (3rd Generation) to replace my old low-end Toshiba Satellite as my primary development laptop. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the laptop’s build quality and performance. I found the keyboard particularly nice, especially for a chicklet keyboard. ¶ Disassembly ¶ The X1 version I purchased was...
Posted: Aug 4, 2015
Tags: culture, programming
Don't Worry, Just Code
Use this chart to decide your first programming language. Hey, come back! I was just making a point. Hello? ¶ For those of you who stayed, charts like this are just about the worst way to choose a programming language. ¶ My Saga ¶ If you don’t want to read the long personal...
Posted: Aug 4, 2015
Tags: project
A Week in Quotes
This past week I have been making one codepen a day featuring an interesting quote. Here is an example. ¶ See the Pen Quote of the Day - Day 6 (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) by Mark Fischer, Jr (@flyingfisch) on CodePen. ¶ The most challenging part, and the part that spawned the whole...
Posted: Jun 26, 2015
Tags: frontend, design, tutorial, modern-website-series
Building a Modern Website: Part 2
This is the third of a 3-post series on building a modern website (if you don’t understand the post title, this may help you: the series started with Part 0. Lua developers are excused for not getting the significance.). The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post...
Posted: Jun 10, 2015
Tags: frontend, design, tutorial, modern-website-series
Building a Modern Website: Part 1
This is the second of a 3-post series on building a modern website. The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post covers the navigation bar and body text. The last part will go over the footer and finishing touches. This is what the site looked like at...
Posted: May 28, 2015
Tags: announcement
Announcing Tolkien Ipsum
I built a little website that generates Lord of the Rings themed Lorem Ipsum. You can check it out live or view the source on GitHub. ¶ For Geeks ¶ I am hosting the site on a Microsoft Azure Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. The setup process for serving Django was pretty straightforward,...
Posted: May 25, 2015
Tags: frontend, design, tutorial, modern-website-series
Building a Modern Website: Part 0
This is the first of a 3-post series series on building a modern website. The demo website is a fictional sailing club’s homepage. This post covers the mockup process and building the header. The next part will go into the navigation bar and body text. ¶ Layout ¶ The first thing I...
Posted: May 17, 2015
Tags: programming, web
Using REST Inside Programs
Rich Hickey proposed an interesting idea in his keynote at RailsConf 2012. The idea, if I understand correctly, is that if serialization is good between servers as a way to separate concerns, then why don’t we do it between different sections of code on the same server? ¶ Using REST between...
Posted: May 8, 2015
Tags: css, programming, web
Pseudo-Element Kung-Fu
I recently found that the content property can contain cooler stuff than just strings. For instance, you can show the href of a link in a cool popup with absolutely no JS: ¶ content: attr(href); See the Pen Pure CSS link hover popup by flyingfisch (@flyingfisch) on CodePen. ¶ This allows us...
Posted: Apr 25, 2015
Tags: announcement
Welcome
¶ Welcome to my blog. I am a frontend .NET web developer (mainly ASP.net MVC with C#). At home I use Linux exclusively and code in Python, Haskell, PHP (with the excellent Laravel framework), or any other language that fits the bill. ¶ I plan to post about programming mainly, but...