A problem I encountered while doing my homework last night (more details) led me to think about an important feature in software design. That feature is insulation.

No, that doesn’t make much sense. I’m not entirely sure there’s an “official” term for this concept, so I made one up. Hope nobody minds; I’m open to corrections in the comments, of course.

Anyway, the sort of problem I’m hoping to bring to the attention of developers occurs when a user’s action interrupts a critical function in the application they’re using. Whether it’s a website or a desktop program, the result is the same. The application will fail to complete what it was doing and cause a potentially irreparable failure.

The situation that happened to me last night involved a JavaScript click handler (that’s speculation; read the detailed post for more info) interrupting the load of a page within the Blackboard Learning System test-taking environment. The subsequent problems got me locked out of a test, because the buttons to save/submit the assessment hadn’t loaded. My click (a user interaction) interrupted a function critical to the application (loading the page).

So here’s my point — I’ll make it short and sweet. Make sure the users of your application can’t mess up its behavior through expected actions. (Ideally they won’t be able to mess it up even through deliberate action, but let’s take this in baby steps. ;-) ) They’ll definitely thank you for building a resilient application. Who’d think that opening a menu or section of additional information would stop the entire page (or data in a desktop app) from loading? Probably not most people. Keep that in mind when designing your applications.

I’ve finally put up an example of actual AJAX, where an HTTP request is made after the main page has finished loading. You can see it in action, or just view the source.

The previous post in this series was not true AJAX, but if you want to see it, you can find it here.

I’ve always wanted to control the video on my computer with a remote control. The computer that I received in December had Windows Vista Media Center and the remote. I’ve never been able to get LIRC working properly, so I’m stuck with Windows Vista for my remote-control-related fun.

The result is that I’ve figured out how to play an iPod or camcorder in Windows Media Center, in order to control it with the remote.

You can see the full tutorial here. Beware as it has 23 images. Not for dialup.

Just now, I’ve been Twittering a bit and realized some things. First, pointed out by @brianshaler, the characters “<”, “>”, and “&” are converted into “&lt;”, “&gt;”, and “&amp;” (though still displayed the same). These are more characters than are counted by some clients.

Also, the new Friendfeed feature where comments on Twitter posts is a bit misleading. If you count the characters in the textbox, you might forget the additional characters from the “@nick” text that doesn’t appear in the textbox.

I have just registered the account @radio_show on Twitter. I currently have not set a time or date for such a radio show. However, I am looking to gain popularity to the point where the account will be able to get user-submissions like answers to radio “games (ex: the tenth direct-messager wins …).

Although the first radio game cannot be on the first radio show as the first radio show would have almost no live readers.

Currently, I want to get the word about the idea of the radio show, and then I will plan a date and time.

One of the greatest annoyances is when you receive an email that has been CC’d (carbon copied) to dozens of other people. Each of those dozens of other people now have access to your email address, which can be annoying if the revealed email address is a personal one that you only give to a few people.

What I think is the solution is for an email client to put a “Not recommended, use BCC (blind carbon copy)” right next to the CC textarea. There should also be a checkbox that appends the number of people that received the BCC’d email. That way, the sender can avoid annoyed recipients that thought they were the only one that received the email.

Of course, you do not need a new email client to achieve this. A Greasemonkey script, Firefox extension, or some type of plugin for any browser could be written to work on popular existing webmail clients like Gmail.

However, you do not even need to write code to accomplish this. Simply use BCC and tell people that they are not the only one that the message was sent to.

In the past, I haven’t shown much source code because a lot of what I write is in PHP and you can’t open a PHP script in a browser window and see the PHP source code. I’ve fixed that with the CodingExperiments Code Browser. It features all sorts of neat things that I’m working on. Best of all, the source code is syntax-highlighted.

If you wish, you can see the code of the “Headliner” script that I wrote about earlier.

I haven’t worked on it too much, so it’s a bit rough around the edges.

I had an idea today about a text-based radio show that would take place in Twitter. A person could broadcast a series of messages via Twitter at a certain time of day so people that wanted to could tune in.

A text-based radio show would be nice for people that multi-task on the computer. Whenever I try to listen to a podcast while working on the computer, I find that I’m not really paying attention to what the host of the podcast is saying. With the Twitter radio show, a person can simply have a Twitter client open and scan the short messages every once in a while.

Twitter radio shows could also have user interaction by having other Twitter users direct-message the radio show’s Twitter account answers to riddles and stuff like that.

Possibly, a Greasemonkey script or a web Twitter client could be used to create an interface that would be optimal for a Twitter radio show.

A Twitter radio show would be a really easy way to “live-blog” or for a blogger to get in touch with his or her base of readers.

I write little tools to help me all the time. An example of this is “Headliner” (source code coming soon). Headliner is a small prototype web app that takes in an essay title or newspaper headline and gives it the right capitalization. To save space, newspapers only capitalize the first word in each sentence in the headline.

Essay titles capitalize every word except for prepositions and articles (a, an, the). Headliner knows these rules and applies them on the headlines that you enter into it.

A few weeks ago, I switched from this current WordPress installation to a multi-user one to give the guest bloggers their own blog. The problem with that was that they are guest bloggers. They only blog once in a while as they pay attention to their own blogs more than they do to their CodingExperiments blogs.

So, I was smart enough to back up the old, single-user installation and now everything is back to normal.