I have installed Windows quite a few times over this past year, from setting up different operating systems on my home lab server and installing Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows 8. You’d think that I would have spent hours downloading all the installers for Chrome, Flash, VLC, Notepad++, PuTTY, 7-Zip, and all the other common programs I use and having to click “Next” buttons a million times. Well fortunately there’s a better solution. I came across Ninite a while ago, and it has saved me a ton of time installing the basic programs I use on Windows. With Ninite, you just need to pick the programs you want from Continue Reading
Dennis
I am currently a software developer at A Thinking Ape Entertainment Ltd. I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science with the Software Engineering Option. I primarily speak Python and C# these days, but in the past I've also done Objective-C, Java and PHP.
Outside of work, I'm a volunteer on the youth ministry team at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, and also on the Canadian Ski Patrol team at Mount Seymour. I'm also an avid transit enthusiast/photographer.
When frames are too many
I was digging around my backups and came across this mockup of a site my friend and I worked on ten years ago, but never published. This was when Microsoft FrontPage was still around, frames were OK, and <blink>, <marquee> and animated GIFs were the rage, and when the whole world used Internet Explorer. I guess it didn’t occur to us back then that nine frames were eight frames too many. Oh, have times changed 🙂 Today, HTML framesets are rarely used. Server-side scripting such as PHP is used to replicate common code across multiple pages. Client-side alternatives such as CSS Continue Reading
Old blog posts from WordPress 2.6 found and imported
I spent this afternoon digging around my backups, and I was lucky to find my site backup from the end of 2008. I had to find a way to import the posts from WordPress 2.6 into WordPress 3.5.1. Since I had a full site backup, I was able to load the WordPress files and database backup onto my Mac’s local MAMP web development environment (Windows users might use WAMP). From there, I followed the WordPress upgrade procedure. I upgraded directly from WordPress 2.6 to 3.5.1 directly without a hitch, although it recommended to go version by version. Then with a Continue Reading
Using Mac’s Automator to Make Diffing Easier
Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
Make Word spell check uppercase words
It’s a little known fact that Microsoft Word by default does not spell check uppercase words. I had the opportunity to read through many co-op resumes from a couple universities this past week, and the typos I’ve seen seem to support this observation. The problem comes when you have a section heading in capitals, such as “ACHIVEMENTS” or “RELEVENT SKILLS”. Microsoft Word by default doesn’t indicate that the spelling is wrong! I’m not sure why this “feature” is enabled by default, as I’d think it would be better to have more false positives than to have typos go undetected. In Continue Reading