I’m building a web-based version of the game of go called Tenuki. You can read more about it and try out the live examples over at the Tenuki GitHub repo. The general idea is to provide a complete, mobile-friendly, self-contained go board with enough logic to start and end a game, but which is easy for others to build on top of.
Every application has dependencies. Those dependencies can have bugs. Worse, those bugs can be security vulnerabilities. Security bugs are, obviously, bad. They’re also hard to detect. Everything will continue to run as if all is well, except there’s a hole in your application. How do you find out the hole even exists?
After discovering long ago that there’s more to HTTP redirects than just 301 and 302, I’ve often ended up scanning specs to remind myself which status code I really want to use. There isn’t actually a simple choice between “permanent” and “temporary.”
Somewhat annoyingly, Google hasn’t documented any of their Hangouts keyboard shortcuts to tell you that when you urgently need to insert 💩 (pile of poo U+1F4A9) you can just type ~@~. It’d be nice if there were a public list somewhere, or mouse hovering gave you some clues about using a shortcut. But there isn’t anything helpful.
All is impermanent. Except, perhaps, favicon.ico. Owing to the nature of browser address bars and bookmarks — hey, remember bookmarks? — /favicon.ico is one of the few paths that will work on any website you pick. So by grabbing old versions from snapshots in The Wayback Machine, you can see how the image has changed over time across popular sites. By picking the popular sites, you can also get a feel for how frequently they change.
While debugging some broken code for a website once, I had a terminal window open. Just white text on a dark background filling almost my entire screen. A non-technical colleague walked by and expressed both disbelief and amazement that this turns into a website.
For a direct flight from London Heathrow to Boston Logan International Airport, British Airways will credit a frequent flyer account with 3,267 miles, the great circle distance between the two cities. I have known this from memory for over three and a half years.
Every now and then, a library you’re using just doesn’t quite work. There’s a bug and a fix hasn’t been made available yet. You can add a work-around, but you can also automate its removal.
When Chrome is talking to a web server using SPDY, if you check the HTTP request headers in Developer Tools, you’ll find some non-standard-looking headers that all start with colons.
This completely passed me by, even though 24 ways covered it.