New Skins for Vistered Little

The default-flex theme was getting a little heavy for my liking and with inspiration from Chris vs Chris I decided to create a lighter version of the default and default-flex skins for vistered little. You can download them using the links below. Just extract them into you skins directory and change the skin via the 'vistered little 16a' section of the presentation panel. Enjoy.

• default-light
• default-light-flex

Event Driven AJAX (Comet) - Part 2 - Handling Concurrent Views

Demonstration Quick Link

In Part 1 of this series, we saw how event driven AJAX (a form of Comet) can be used to push data to the client without the need for periodic client side polling. However, we also observed that event driven AJAX broke as soon as the client had multiple views of the same page. Worse still, event driven AJAX in its current form also fails to support having more than one page open on an event driven AJAX site. This this article we will investigate how to solve this issue.

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Vistered Little Theme

Please read the Security Alert for Vistered Little

I have just stumbled upon the Vistered Little Theme for WordPress and I have to admit I'm smitten. I've switched the site to use it and in the process found a few bugs/issues:

• The default wallpaper is not available in the wallpaper list
• The wallpaper thumbnails require the entire set of wallpapers to be downloaded, making the site very very heavy (at least on first load)
• There are extra images in the images directory that are not references (e.g. old wallpapers)
• There is some redundant PHP code and redundant generated CSS/JS

I've tweaked the theme to fix these issues and you can download it for yourself below:

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The AJAX Errors That No-one Else Talks About

Handling AJAX errors is about more than just checking the readyState, status and statusText.

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(Re)Introducing Javascript And Hidden Applets (JAHA)

Java applets are so late 90's and so web 1.0, so what place do that have (if any) in the web 2.0 craze?
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Event Driven AJAX - Part 1 - Pushing Server Side Events

Demonstration Quick Link

Event Driven AJAX is inspired by Comet to provide a mechanism for updating a page based on server side events, rather than waiting for user driven requests or client side polling. In this article an overview of the event driven AJAX concept is provided, along with a proof of concept demonstration of its use.

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No Built-In Virtualization in OS X 10.5?

Over at Mac World they quote analyst Charles Wolf: "I had a talk with Phil Schiller at the opening of the 5th Avenue Apple Store, and I asked him the question, "Will Apple include a virtualization solution in [the next version of Mac OS X] Leopard?" He said, "Asolutely not, the R&D would be prohibitive and we're not going to do it. Our solution is dual boot."

Called it back in April

Salvation from the click of death

It's not a good day when your iBook starts making noises you know it shouldn't. Referred to as "the click of death," it is generally regarded as a precursor to a fatal hard-drive crash with the only solution being a new hard drive. Fortunately there is a much easier and cheaper solution provided by the repair disk function of Disk Utility that comes with OS X.

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Using GPL code within proprietory code

Does the GPL allow proprietary code and GPL code happily co-exist? Do we want it to?
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Rapid Development using Graduates whilst maintaining code quality

Graduates heavily outnumber your senior developers? Get the graduates to get the code working; Get you senior developers to re-factor. Result? Rapid development of good quality code.
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