Signs of Trouble

While we as software developers prepare for production releases as much as possible, the right sequence of events can still translate into something very wrong. This past week, visitors to this blog were greeted with the standard WordPress database error connection message, and I was unaware until I decided to share this site with a contact.

Tracking Canvas State Using Objects

Despite being a fairly simple animation to watch, the instructions for a fading grid of colors is actually very complex. By creating objects to track the state of the animation a lot of duplicate code can be avoided, and the concepts exposed by gridfader.js can be encapsulated for easier canvas manipulation.

The landscape of web development is extremely volatile, changing not only from year to year, but sometimes even day to day. The existence of tools such as http://caniuse.com/ should be enough to prove that.

The updated file can be found on the XCJS GitHub at https://gist.github.com/xcjs/6075914.

The updated script corrects the build configuration not being chosen automatically and provides additional commands in the command palette.

When I first started using Android, I would use file managers supporting various network protocols to download files from my PC over WiFi. While this was worked, it was still a constantly manual process of copying, deleting, or updating files.

For a long time I tried to locate applications that would allow a more automated approach, but the Android Market (eventually becoming the Play Store) had not yet matured to catch up with advanced demands.

An updated version of this configuration file can be found at https://gist.github.com/xcjs/6075914

Sublime Text 2 has become one of my favorite text editors, despite being only beta release software. The interface is very attractive and polished, configuration is very flexible through the use of various JSON files, and it is cross-platform so that my text editing environment is largely identical no matter which platform I am on.