I wrote a little while back about using Javascript and Ajax to build a dynamic and interactive interface for a site that would otherwise be flat HTML. My client is using a commercial ecommerce platform, ShopSite 8.1, which has a web-based admin interface for entering info about a product. The application then publishes summary and […]
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On Saturday Feb. 17, six balloons were raised around the Greenbelt Metro station to demonstrate how tall six planned buildings will rise. I am very tardily posting some photos I took of these balloons.
I’ve just spent about three hours debugging JavaScript. If you’ve never debugged JavaScript yourself, let me assure you, it’s a real pain. Rejoice that your life, whatever its disappointments, has not led you to this pass. If you have, and you know my pain, let me share some hard-won insight and advice. For instance, “this” […]
I’m a self-taught web programmer, and I’ve noticed that to a degree all technical books, inevitably, present best-case examples, in which programming is starting from scratch, and the project is fairly simple and well-defined. That’s a reasonable fantasy to use for didactic purposes. After all, it would be distracting for an author, or a reader, […]
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten back to working on my crime tracker. In the meantime, an interesting crime report came to our email boxes: a robbery on an illegal gambling house. The report got my attention for three reasons: 1) Apparently the operators of the illegal gambling house chose to call the police […]
I just posted a little fictionalized transcript of an NPR piece I could have sworn I heard in the last few weeks, although I can’t say quite when and where. For your consideration, The Algebra Study Group.
HOST: Next up on our program, we discuss the findings of the Algebra Study Group, the bipartisan panel convened this year to review the math-class policies of eighth grader Timmy Morgan. We will be joined by several members of the committee and ask what their consensus opinions are and whether they think Timmy will take […]
I’m happy to announce that my Crime Tracker, v. 0.4, is ready to unveil. You can test it out at http://michaelharrison.ws/projects/cpcr/public/. It’s not meant to be definitive, yet. It’s more of a demonstration of what can be done with Google Maps and Ruby on Rails. I’ve written a detailed account of the steps I took […]
We’ve had a little bit of a crime wave here in College Park in the last month. Although things have quieted down recently, for a while it seemed my wife’s email account was getting daily reports of a UMd student getting robbed at gunpoint or jumped. Campus and county police have flooded the area, at […]
I’m not the first to point this out, but among the hundreds of pieces of spam that accumulate in my Junk folders, which I occasionally sift for valide messages that got marked as spam incorrectly, a few real gems of drivel, nonsense, or prurience turn up. Such a treasure has shown up in my inbox […]