http://www.duckwizard.com Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:03:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, you've probably heard that Warner has picked a side in the hi-def format wars, and they've gone with Blu-Ray. Here's why that's bad. Blu-Ray is technologically more advanced. It's about 200% more efficient to store video in h.264 than in MPEG-2 (which is used by HD-DVD). So ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2008/01/04/warner-goes-with-blu-ray-that-was-dumb/ Whenever I'm using a web application, and it's disgustingly slow and requests often time out, I think to myself, "I'll bet this is written in Ruby on Rails." Then, I check the response headers, and sure enough - nine times out of ten I see the telltale "Server: Mongrel ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/12/18/programmers-users-matter-more-than-you-a-rant/ I made a few changes to the syntax highlighting editor I introduced in yesterday's post: Added simple line numbering Added a workable (but not bulletproof) CSS sub-grammar to the HTML grammar. Check out the updated demo. IE6 has a fair number of bugs - for one, undo will probably never work in ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/08/02/updates-to-syntax-editor/ A couple of years ago I tried my hand at making a DHTML-based syntax highlighting editor, for use in web applications. The result has been posted in my portfolio for quite some time, but it never worked particularly well, and was quite feature-poor. It was also very heavy ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/08/01/syntax-highlighting-textarea-reloaded/ I finally upgraded this site to the latest version of Wordpress. Things aren't really working that well anymore, but hopefully I'll have time to deal with it at some point in the near future. I really wanted to ditch wordpress and roll my own publishing platform, but I just don't ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/06/17/upgrade/ I was unable to find any info on getting the DOM inspector working in Safari Beta 3 under Windows, so when I figured it out I thought I would post it in case anyone else is having the same problem. If you've tried meddling with the prefs files but ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/06/13/safari-on-windows-dom-inspector/ ORM: Object-Relational Mapping. Chances are, if you've been doing web development for a significant amount of time, this concept has occurred to you. It's the mapping of a high-level object definition in your OOP language of choice (e.g. a class) to a relational data storage scheme (e.g. your ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/05/08/whats-the-deal-with-orm/ Don't bother trying to comment here anymore. Unfortunately, I get so pounded with spam that I can't even filter out the legitimate comments from the spam without taking more time than I care to. So I've completely disabled any notification to me of comments because they are flooding ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/04/04/spam/ I think that PHP is a great language. It's useful. It's quick. It might not be the most namespace-clean, but it does what I want, and it's capable of some really great enterprise-class stuff if you take advantage of PHP5's OOP features and know what you're doing. ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2007/02/19/branching-out/ At Pinacol, I'm writing a web site framework, which includes a templating engine. Currently, for speed, the templates (in a manner similar to Wordpress) are simply PHP scripts that call various rendering functions embedded in the (X)HTML template. This is great for speed, but I got to thinking ... http://www.duckwizard.com/2006/08/05/php-domdocument-performance/