Tech Tip: Resolving screen flicker when a DOM element is updated asynchronously

This tech tip is useful enough to warrant its own post.
If you are updating a DOM element via javascript, for example replacing the content or changing the style, you may notice screen flicker during the update.  Screen flicker on any div update is usually the result of a collision of heights of the elements that are [...]

Themes, themes, themes…

You may have noticed that I’ve been changing the theme of the site today.
I’ll settle on one I like soon, but this exercise – which I undertake every 3 – 6 months – made me consider why I do this.  It would be easy to say that I simply bore quickly with any given [...]

Mountain biking in Vail

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve just returned from four days in Vail. This trip was to celebrate my birthday, but the theme was mountain biking.  On Sunday, we took the gondola up to the top & rode our bikes back down.
We stayed in Vail Village, which is a short bike ride from Lionshead, where we caught the Eagle Bahn Gondola [...]

Video of Greenpeace climbers on Mt. Rushmore

No matter your opinion of the political statement these activists were making, you have to respect someone who can literally get blown off the side of a mountain & not lose sight of the objective of the climb.  Pretty amazing stuff.

Tags: greenpeace, mt rushmore, gloabl warming

Tech Tip: Multi-line Perl regex pattern match

This post illustrates a complex pattern-matching technique in Perl.

Quick file & directory cleanup tools

Every sys admin needs to quickly free up disk space from time to time, and here are two well-tested scripts I use for exactly this purpose.
The first is a simple command-line use of exec that uses find to construct of list of matching file names, in this case all gzipped tarballs, and then runs the [...]

Don’t install TortoiseSVN v 1.6.2?

Update: TortoiseSVN 1.6.3 is stable and works well — jbminn
A friend of mine forwarded this to me a few days ago; I filed it away under ‘refer to later’.   Later just arrived, as I saw someone tweet about a TortoiseSVN issue on Vista.
I’m relaying this here in the hope that it saves folks the hassle [...]

Glue Conference 2009

The inaugural Glue Conference was held this week & it was, as expected, fantastic.
When I saw Eric last November at Defrag, he told me he was starting another conference.  My one sentence response was ‘let me know how I can help’.  He promised he would.
Fast forward a few months and there I was at Glue [...]

Astroturfing

Please don’t waste your time – and mine – astroturfing here.  I’ll just delete the comments as soon as I see them.
I really, really welcome genuine comments on any of the posts I’ve ever written (the ajax logfile tailer & the elliptical mileage calculation posts are especially popular), and I read them all.  But [...]

Pink Floyd – Which One is Pink?

Yesterday, @pkedrosky mentioned having watched a great Pink Floyd documentary on VH1.  I searched around a bit, and though I couldn’t locate the entire program, I did find these six parts.
Edit: The videos have been removed due to Terms of Use Violations… I’ll get some good sets up there – there are many.