A Modest Construct

Last year, I moved our small programming department from using JDeveloper and editing shared files directly on a network drive to using Netbeans 6.x and a proper version control system (Subversion).

After the initial learning curve, this has all been going swimmingly. I merged my first development branch into the trunk…

This entry pertains to work done in the context of my employment. Please remember, however, that any opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or co-workers.

The Problem

Admissions needed help. They had been moved from their former product, Exeter, to Banner’s native admissions module.…

I personally think the friendly rivalry between the open-source Webkit engine (which powers Safari, among other things) and Mozilla (the Gecko engine, actually) is one of the best things to happen to browser development in years. The constant one-upsmanship can only lead to better browsers. Well, Internet Explorer will constantly be the…

My little blockquote title|cite extractor for jQuery has been updated just slightly when it appeared to have funny results. It may have to do with the element.attr() changes introduced in jQuery 1.2.6.

It’s not a particularly disastrous bug or anything, but I’ve altered the code to check string lengths instead of looking checking…

I recently performed some cursory Javascript benchmarks with the new version of Firefox and Safari; curious about performance, I decided to do some testing of 32-bit browsers against their 64-bit counterparts. On Windows Vista x64, the only two browsers so available to me are Internet Explorer 7 and a recent nightly…

Safari 3.1 has been released, bringing with it all the latest and great Webkit code. Even though the UI still sucks (at least on Windows; ever hear of native GUIs, Apple?)

I decided to benchmark the Javascript performance of the new Safari against its more immediate predecessor, 3.04. This testing was done…

Last December, I read Jeff Atwood’s write-up about SunSpider, a new Javascript benchmark created by the makers of WebKit/KHTML.

The world of Javascript is an interesting one right now; it seems like most major browsers are on the eve of a major new release, many with new (& improved JS engines).…

I don’t usually talk about work on this blog, simply because I’ve read enough horror stories about blogging work matters to know how badly it ends. Granted, if I were to blog about my job, it would mostly consist of technology bits, but it’s still one of those grey areas…

Two months ago, I wrote about using the jQuery library to extract citation information from blockquotes.

Just for grins, I’ve worked that snippet of code up into a genuine jQuery plugin. Go ahead and visit the page for more information. Or, download it directly.