Creating softened CSS callouts Although I haven’t had much time to post on my blog, I’ve been doing a few things with CSS lately. One question someone asked me recently was how to get a nice soft callout triangle done using just CSS. I came up with three different basic solutions to this: Duplicate the element, changing the color and…

Parser jockeying – writing little languages in OMeta Writing domain-specific languages is something that I’ve been interested in for quite some time. I’ve done a few internal DSLs for various projects in the past including CrmQuery and one XML-based application definition language that is sadly not open-source. As nice as internal DSLs are, limitations of the host language are always…

Human-writable RDF I’ve done a little bit with RDF in some past projects where I used RDF entailment to do some logic for me. Once I had the data in the right format, I wrote some rules and let one of the off-the-shelf reasoners do a lot of the work for me. The trouble was, as simple as the abstract…

Writing a .NET unit testing framework in 100 lines of code Some time ago, I got frustrated with setting up NUnit for simple testing projects. I didn’t want to bother with the test runner, and I didn’t want to mess with any tooling in Visual Studio. My lazy default for doing the tests was to create a new console application…

Using the Mongrel2 web server with Mono I’ve been playing with evented web servers lately, and one of the projects that caught my attention was Mongrel2 . Actually I followed its progress via Hacker News and even made a small donation to the author during development. At the time I hadn’t envisioned myself ever actually using it. Later on I…

Method_missing in C# There have been a lot of instances where I wanted to intercept any call to an object in C#. In dynamic languages like Ruby, this is pretty easy, since there is a catch-all method that gets called if no method exists. This method is method_missing. Now that C# supports the dynamic keyword and the framework supplies a…

Using IronJS 0.2 on Ubuntu 10.10 The new 0.2 code drop for IronJS has been available for a week or so now, and I just went through the process of installing the necessary tools for coding against it with Mono on Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a quick writeup here. For starters, IronJS requires Mono 2.10, which is…

Refactoring, performance and programming languages I read a post on James Gosling’s blog today where he detailed an example of refactoring a bit of code to improve its performance. On first sight I didn’t agree with this as refactoring (seems more like a “de-factoring”), but according to the strict definition it counts as refactoring. Here is his example: for(....) {…

Embedding IronJS – Part II Over the past year or so I have been working on-and-off on a project called Node.NET in which I have experimented with embedding several different Javascript implementations within the .NET framework. Many different implementations exist including one integrated CLR implementation from Microsoft called JScript.NET. Although JScript is well integrated and allows us to write everything…

Consuming XML Web services in Backbone.js using Jath Update: This article is getting a lot of traffic lately so I want to draw attention to a discussion in the comments. Backbone no longer requires the patch that I have described below to work with XML. However the use of Jath to parse the results remains the same. Check out this…