Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

When I saw this I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looks like an upcoming version of Firefox will have run-time byte-code compilation of script, giving near-native code performance to some JavaScript. What does this mean? basically 5 to 6x improvements in performance for many JavaScript-intensive applications.

Read all about it here.

Update 2: I posted another fix to the file I posted yesterday to correct an issue with text objects inside iFrames.

Update: I posted a fix to the file I posted yesterday to correct an issue with weird characters appearing at the end of textareas in IE.

Wow. I was so surprised today to find out how hard it is to reliably get the current text selection and caret position through JavaScript in different browsers. Ok, Firefox is easy. Internet Explorer is profoundly hard and weird. I looked at a lot of different methods including (but not limited to):

• http://www.teria.com/~koseki/memo/xbselection/
• http://www.bazon.net/mishoo/articles.epl?art_id=1292
• http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread147441.html

.. and of course the official docs, which suck:

• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535869(VS.85).aspx

None of these methods worked for me, for various reasons. The biggest issue is IE6/7 differences in the techniques, and also differences with how TEXTAREA’s versus INPUT fields work.

I have tested this script and it appears to be working on:

• input text fields
• textareas

on..

• IE6
• IE7
• Firefox 2
  
• Safari (PC 3)

It probably works on Opera too.
For my full script go here:

getcaretselection3.js

This has come up a couple times for me now so I thought I’d post this information for others so there is yet another place to find it.

It turns out that there are limits to the size or your querystring (what’s in your address bar). This depends on your browser:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

The maximum length of a URL in Internet Explorer is 2,083 characters, with no more than 2,048 characters in the path portion.

Firefox

After 65,536 characters, the location bar no longer displays the URL in Windows Firefox 1.5.x. However, longer URLs appear to work.

Safari

At least 80,000 characters will work.

Opera

At least 190,000 characters will work.

Apache Server

The official Apache documentation only mentions an 8,192-byte limit on an individual field in a request. However, independent tests indicate it’s closer to 4,000 Characters.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)

The default limit is 16,384 characters (yes, Microsoft’s web server accepts longer URLs than Microsoft’s web browser). This is configurable.

Perl HTTP::Daemon Server

Up to 8,000 bytes will work. Those constructing web application servers with Perl’s HTTP::Daemon module will encounter a 16,384 byte limit on the combined size of all HTTP request headers. This does not include POST-method form data, file uploads, etc., but it does include the URL. In practice this resulted in a 413 error when a URL was significantly longer than 8,000 characters.

Often times, I want to take a screenshot of a website that I either really like or really hate. Of course there are ways to do this in your OS – with some keystroke, then opening the file in photoshop or something for editing.. but there is an easier way.

Fireshot! This is a great little plugin for Firefox that lets you take an image of the ENTIRE page (even if its really long) or just the visible area. You can automatically save it to a certain folder or open it up quickly in the lightweight editor to add captions or black out personal details if necessary.

Anyway, if you are an admirer of design and want to capture things you see online for inspiration later, try Fireshot.