I've learned an enormous amount from this web app project, but it's not even production-ready yet. I still have 3 fairly major problems to solve: - school choices displayed as a table - an interface to edit school data - producing a print-ready Word, LibreOffice or PDF doc I learned a huge amount of Javascript and jQuery pretty much from scratch for this project. I also refined my PHP skills rather a lot. But if I had to point to one major take-away lesson, it's not a technical one per se. Rather, ... (...more)

Was having some wretched file sharing speed issues between 2 Win7 Pro machines. Disabling MSSE real-time scanning didn't fix it. Control Panel -- Network and Sharing -- Advanced -- "Use users and passwords" (instead of "Let Windows manage security") didn't fix it. What did fix it was: right-clicking the wired-connection icon in the task tray -- "Open Network and Sharing Center" -- Active Networks / Local Area Connection link -- Properties -- adapter settings - disable "Ethernet@WireSpeed" and "Large Sen... (...more)

There's a snatch of piano motif that surfaces from memory every so often. I know it's Mozart. I know it's from a CD or tape of Mozart recordings I owned before I retired physical media as a form of music librarianship. I'm thinking symphony 40 or 41, but it could also be a piano concerto, because I had a few recordings of selected Mozart works shorter than symphonic compositions. I know it's not the Requiem. I don't think it's from Die Zauberflöte. Symphony 41: "Jupiter" in C major (K. 551) ... not he... (...more)

Maybe part of the problem is the Bluetooth driver implementation on my Lenovo ThinkPad T400, but if Skype itself wasn't such a jerk then that wouldn't be an issue. Skype really, really wants to run at Windows startup. I get it, it wants to be your go-to communications program. What's insufferable is that it gives power users no control over whether to let it run at startup. Even if you dig through the preferences dialogs (which for some reason are largely disabled unless you're logged on to Skype... nau... (...more)

Seems like every time I touch jQuery's "Deferred" facility, I discover new problems I haven't solved. My latest challenge is a long multi-stage processing function, riddled with jQuery $.post() calls. To illustrate, let's say I'm building an invoice object. I start with list of items sold, sum their prices, do a database lookup via JQ's POST to get the applicable sales tax rate, but by the time I've got my data back from the POST call, my code has proceeded to multiply the sum of item prices by the as-y... (...more)