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Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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....

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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>....

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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,...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

Author: Mark Fischer, Jr.
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...

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