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Internet Explorer debugging tools

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:47:00 +0000

While I’m on the subject of Internet Explorer, I thought I’d share some tools that I use for debugging sites for that browser.

Anyone who uses Firebug will testify how easy it makes tweaking CSS and debugging javascript in Firefox. However, IE doesn’t always behave like Firefox. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing that little yellow warning triangle in the status bar of IE, giving you a (seemingly meaningless) line number for an error that doesn’t occur in trusty Firefox.

Well, there’s a ‘Lite’ (javascript) version of Firebug which works in all browsers, albeit with a reduced feature set.

To use it, you can insert this script into the page you want to debug (this technique is good if you if you need to work while disconnected from the Internet – just download the js to somewhere local).

<script type='text/javascript' 
        src='http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js'></script>

... Or (and this is even easier) just drag this Firebug Lite link to your bookmarks bar, and you can use Firebug Lite on any page by clicking on that bookmark.

Another script I’ve found useful is CompanionJS. This only works in IE, and depends on the (free) Microsoft Script Debugger being installed first, but it’s really easy to set up and use (instructions here).

CompanionJS gives you a Firebug-like bar in the bottom of the browser, and will pop up a debugger if an error is encountered in your javascript – no more hunting for IE-specific javascript errors!

Google shuns IE6

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:19:00 +0000

Google are now actively discouraging users from browsing with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 – See this TG Daily article for more details.

For anyone involved in web development, this is great news. At Swirrl, we’d already dropped IE6 support, so that we could concentrate on new feature development – With our small team, we couldn’t justify the time it was taking us to make things work properly on that browser (IE7 is bad enough!).

However, according to Google Analytics, between 5 and 10% of our visits are still from IE6. I’ve always been a bit perplexed about why this figure is so high. I know that some companies may have legacy internal apps which were written solely for IE6, but why should they prevent their employees from browsing the rest of the web with a modern (not to mention more secure) browser like Firefox 3?

Hopefully, with Internet giants like Google actively trying to move people away from crummy old IE6, that percentage will fall away to a negligible figure.

Thanks to Richard Grundy for putting me onto this via Twitter.

MacBook Pro headphones jack interference

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:52:00 +0000

On my early-2008 15” MacBook Pro (the same one on which I experienced the strange vertical stripes), there’s always been a lot of sound interference on the headphones jack. This interference takes the form of a series of quiet R2D2-stylee electronic bleeps or pops, and is most noticeable on quiet sections of music or at the beginning or end of a section of silence.

It’s fairly easily to reproduce: Just turn the volume up and down a few times and every so often the noise would be heard after one of the little ‘blip’s that accompany the changing of volume.

This hasn’t bothered me too much as I normally listened to music through an Airport Express connected to my main sound system. However, I’ve recently moved my desk to another room, so I wanted to be able to listen to music via the headphones socket (through headphones or external speakers), and the bleeps were really annoying me.

This problem is well documented in various forum threads on the internets, and someone suggested that it was due to the sound card being poorly shielded and picking up interference from other components inside the computer.

So, I thought I’d try an external sound card. After a bit of research I settled on the Griffin iMic. It was only about £25 (~$35) and it’s done the trick – no more bleeps. It’s also really easy to set up: just plug it into a USB socket, plug your headphones (or speakers) in to the iMic and change the output via the sound preferences pane.

David Terrar and Enterprise 2.0

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:19:00 +0000

At the end of last month, I went to a Startup 2.0 event in Manchester which featured a great presentation by David Terrar. (Slides here).

In May 2006, Andrew McAfee of Harvard defined Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. More recently Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen redefined it as “A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”

Personally, I still just like to think of Enterprise 2.0 as simply:

the application of Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. blogs, wikis, social networking, IM, mashups) to the enterprise.

David’s talk put into words some of my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. that sharing in general is good for business: both inter- and intra-organsation. In applying Web 2.0 principles (i.e. principles of the community driven, participatory, 2-way web) to business and the enterprise, benefits can be had for all.

The adoption (or not) of Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to depend on generational or demographic boundaries, but rather whether those in decision-making positions realise how it can affect the bottom line, especially in today’s economic climate. As David said, Enterprise 2.0 can help with many aspects of business, including (but not limited to):

idea generation, co-innovation, customer service, amplifying word of mouth, new product development, capturing knowledge, market research, project collaboration, public relations, member networking and employee communication.

Some of these provide obvious efficiency benefits and some help in generating sales and revenue.

Additionally, Enterprise 2.0 applications are frequently available as SaaS (software as a service). This removes the requirement to hire someone to maintain and secure a server inside the organisation. Or, if a company already has someone working in this capacity, it frees them up to be assigned elsewhere.

Instead of investing a large amount of money in the development of a bespoke application (whether in-house or outsourced to contractors/consultants), many Web 2.0 apps are available free or relatively cheaply. They can be used in the enterprise to achieve perhaps 80% of what that bespoke application would have, at a fraction of the cost.

In my experience, it’s often the case that custom application development doesn’t achieve what it sets out in the first place (at least on the first iteration), and the very nature of Web 2.0 tools empowers users to customize their experience themselves, helping to alleviate this problem.

Redirecting Typo blog feeds to Feedburner with Apache

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:42:00 +0000

As I mentioned last month, this blog is now running on Phusion Passenger. To mark the occasion I’ve changed to a dark, Passenger-inspired theme. I hope you like it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the Passenger site).

Anyway, as part of moving across to Passenger, I also decided to sort out my feed-redirects. A while back, I had tried to ensure that all requests for a feed were redirected to the Feedburner version of the feed, so that I could keep track of numbers of subscribers. I had even found this blog post by Robby Russell which seems to describe how to do just that, but it wasn’t working for me.

It turns out that the version of Typo that I’m using redirects to /articles.rss or /articles.atom when a feed is requested, so Robby’s rewrite rule didn’t work. Here’s what I got to work for me…

Put this in your apache config (obviously use your own feedburner url!):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*$
RewriteRule /articles.(rss|atom)$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/richtext [R=temp,L]

Make sure that you’ve enabled the rewrite module:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

And turned on the rewrite engine in your apache config:

RewriteEngine on

I hope this helps someone out.

Adventures in Rails

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:49:00 +0000

I posted over on SwirrlSpeak today about Swirrl’s adventures in Rails.

Sorry for cross-posting, but thought it might be of interest to some.

Rails Myths and Phusion Passenger

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:23:00 +0000

I’ve enjoyed David Heinemeier Hansson’s Myths of Rails series of blog articles. In fact Myth #1 inspired me to stop delaying and finally try out Phusion Passenger.

It really is as simple as DHH says. Literally all you have to do is install the gem, run the installer and follow the (very simple) instructions which guide you through installing any missing prerequisites and setting up your rails app. For more details on installation and configuration, see the Passenger user guide. I got this blog moved over to Passenger a few hours after first visiting Phusion’s site.

Phusion’s Ruby Enterprise Edition is also worth a look – I’ve not done any thorough measurements myself, but on first look it does seem to use less RAM than ‘normal’ ruby.

If you like Passenger as much as me, you can buy (as I did) an enterprise edition for whatever price you think it’s worth, Radiohead-stylee.

Impressions from FOWA London 2008

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:02:00 +0100

Last week I was on the Swirrl stand at the Future Of Web Apps Expo in London.

I didn’t get to attend many of the talks, because the stand was quite busy. As with last year, I actually found the business track more appealing than the developer track. This is not due to the quality of the speakers, but rather the nature of the material – it’s hard for the speakers to give any unique insights about development that can’t be gleaned by reading books or searching the web.

My favourite presentation of the event was by Tim Bray (watch it here). I didn’t actualy sit in on this one, but Swirrl’s stand was just outside the business track auditorium and there was quite a bit of sound leakage, so I could hear what he was saying fairly clearly. I got the impression that he really believed what he was saying and he was giving it to us straight. Apparently, he’d changed the content of the presentation at the last minute due to the recent economic events, and he gave some very relevant advice.

Despite the wealth of ‘famous’ (in the geek sense, at least) speakers at the event, most of the value of the conference for me, was about talking with people about Swirrl one-on-one. It was interesing and enlightening to find out what people thought of our product, and for those who had never heard of it, discovering what worked best when I tried to explain it.

It was also great to meet some other UK-based ruby developers. On Friday Alex Young (founder of Helicoid, a company producing rails-based web apps), and Simon Starr came by our stand. We found that we agreed about a few things: that the UK ruby/rails scene is somewhat lacking; that it is possible to succeed outside Silicon Valley; and that there is a worrying trend for companies popping into existence purely with the intention of being bought out for millions. There’s an infinitesimal chance of being the next Facebook or Google, but a fair possibility of making a decent living from an Internet company. I believe the expected returns can actually be higher if companies ‘Get Real’ and start thinking seriously about just making a useful application that solves a real-world problem.

Don't let errors drive you hopping-mad

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:51:00 +0100

Since we released Swirrl to the public (my company’s rails-based, semantic data-wiki), we’ve been using Hoptoad, the “app error app” from Thoughtbot.

As was to be expected, Swirrl had a few minor teething problems in its first few days (as people started using the app in unanticipated ways), and I don’t think we could have handled everything so smoothly without our little green friend.

Hoptoad is a breeze to set up: To get started, you just install the plugin, change a bit of config in your app, and you’re ready to hop with the toad. The readme file that comes with the plugin gives you details of how you can customize things to your liking (such as which exceptions to ignore etc).

Once you’ve got it set up correctly, the need to scour your log files for errors is completely removed. It also has major benefits over rails’ standard error notification mechanism. Hoptoad lets you “reclaim your inbox”, as instead of mailing you all the error notifications, it presents them to you in a clean and uncluttered interface (no unnecessary bells and whistles – just the way I like it!).

As you’d expect, it provides all the important information about each individual error, such as exactly when it happened, the call stack, session-data, and information about the user’s browser etc. And once you’ve dealt with an error you can mark errors as ‘resolved’ – you can filter these from your list to help maintain a state of zen-like order. If you do want to be notified as soon as an error occurs, you can opt to be sent an email, or subscribe to your personal hoptoad RSS feed.

So, by using Hoptoad, when the unexpected inevitably ocurrs (nobody’s perfect), you can quickly identify the problem, resolve it and send your users on their merry way once more!

Swirrl is accepting public sign-ups

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:29:00 +0100

Swirrl, the project that I’ve been working on for a while now, has recently opened its doors to the public. You can now sign-up for free and try it out.

I’ve shamelessly plugged Swirrl a couple of times before in this blog, but never really explained what it does.

Basically, it’s a hosted wiki service, but instead of just allowing users to create text entries, it also allows the creation of what we call Data Set entries using a spreadsheet-like user interface. But it’s not just another simple online spreadsheet.

Using contextual clues provided by the user, Swirrl builds up a picture of your data and it’s structure behind the scenes, allowing some powerful searching and analysis. So, it’s it easy for the user to add semantic information to their data in the context of their normal work, with no need for any manual entry of semantic mark-up.

(Swirrl follows the principles of the Resource Description Framework, or RDF, which is one of the building blocks of the semantic web. However, you don’t need to know anything about RDF or the semantic web to use Swirrl).

So what’s the point of this? Well, with Swirrl we hope to help make the information held in an organization more accessible and exploitable. We hope that our approach provides a simple and effective way to collaborate and share information. With our Data Sets feature we aim to combine the power of a database and the flexibility of spreadsheets with the collaboration potential of a wiki.

Anyway, I’d love it if readers of this blog could sign up and have a play around, and let us know what you think (email hello@swirrl.com). We’re very keen to get some feedback and comments, so that the service can be improved. Thanks.