awesomenicles

Icicles? I think not. We gotta invent a new word for these babies. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you awesomenicles.

a decade later and still its not right

I remember making fun of MS Word's spelling and grammar checker, back in the days when it first came out. My best friend and I spent several hours one afternoon just typing in words and giggling at the suggested corrections. The only one I can recall now was our home town of Ilkley, which yielded alkali - for some reason that sent us into paroxysms of laughter (well, we were 13 - pretty much everything sent us into paroxysms of laughter).

It's not as if Microsoft hasn't had the time or the resources (new!Solitaire). How does Word still do things like this?

conference blues

Why is it that whenever people attend a conference, they always number among them those who think that it is cool to badmouth said conference? Even if it is interesting. Even if it is providing opportunities to enhance their skills and enable them to engage in more effective work, even further their careers. Even though they are enjoying themselves. Why is it cool to constantly make fun of it?

I'm no stranger to the sarcasm, and I get the whole "conference = boring" stereotype. It's a safe topic of conversation for people who are only occasionally acquainted with one another, for who would argue? Well, I did. I said, "No, actually, I am having a good time. Aren't you?" Apparently that wasn't cool. I ended no small number of conversations with that line. Well I'm sorry. I thought we were in teaching because we wanted to teach. I thought that any opportunity for improvement would be eagerly seized and made the most of. What an idiot I was.

I, for one, enjoyed the conference. Having been to it five times over the past few years, I can honestly attest that this year was the best. Not a single workshop didn't but yield some priceless nugget of inspiration. The keynote and guest speakers were a joy to listen to, and I've already implemented some of their ideas in class, with great success.

I care about being a teacher. I have done ever since I met my first really good one in junior high school. I'll do anything to make myself into a person who can inspire a new generation of kids the way that one inspired me.

making hijax jQuery form submit

Kinda obvious now, but I was tearing my hair out for a long time over this.

If you are trying to hijax the default submission of a form, with Javascript or jQuery, you need to make sure the .onsubmit() or .submit() is referencing the form, not the submit button.

primes

Example

Enter a number:

-

One of the first things I did, and one of the first things many programmers do to test their logical skills, is find a way to test for prime numbers. I've always had a thing for numbers, and primes are just weird.

In case you don't know, a prime is a whole number that cannot be divided by any whole number other than 1 or itself. To test whether a number is prime, therefore, we just need to divide it by all the whole numbers that are smaller than it. If it can be divided by one of these numbers, it is not prime.

Here's a simple script that tests if a number is prime or not.

riddle

One hundred billion (Zim)dollars to the person who can figure out what this says.

new kanji

I hereby present this humble offering for inclusion in the next version of the Japanese language, whenever it is released.

misleading ad

So... tell me what's wrong with this picture.

weird .test() behaviour in Javascript regex

In a previous post, I described how I implemented a search of words contained in an XML file by using a regular expression defined by the user. Well, I ran into a weird problem.

wildcard search using RegExp

So one of my current projects is the Vocablinator, a dictionary of the words used in the JHS English textbooks in Japan. Believe it or not, this is actually quite useful to some people.

unnecessarily .lengthy problem

*sigh*

jQuery object index

So always read the manual.

the big question

So, what's this blog all about, you ask?