Hacks from the kitchen

Comments

Smart "conditional compilation" commenting tip for C++ style languages:

foo();

/*

bar();

baz.foo = 200;

return{

  dolly:clone()

}

// */

 

The trick is the // before the closing */. With this you can just add another slash before the opening one and uncomment the block this way.

foo();

//*

bar();

baz.foo = 200;

return{

  dolly:clone()

}

// */

OOXML is too hard to implement

Amen to this. OOXML is a braindump of a 20 year history, not a standard. Braindumps are always messy. XML-ifying the mess Joel Spolsky describes here does not make for a nice implementable truly open standard.

Professional screen scraper

Good Jon Udell post on data friction and the strange but understandable fact that data is usually only made available in human consumption form, not machine readable form - making screen scraping a profession..

Genetic algorithm/travelling salesman

3D Travelling Salesman using Genetic Algorithms from Ryan Bateman on Vimeo.

It's intesting how erratic the development is - it's not like large swaths of the final solution are found early and stable for most of the animation.

The problem with strongly typed languages is all the typing

(a joke I never thought of before -

More CSS pseudo-class hacks

Very clever: Using colorchanges generated by the CSS :visited pseudo-class lets you test the client for previous visits to specific URLs.

CSS image-hider

Very nice - CSS used to hide images in plain sight - and you can make your own.