Skip to content

{ Author Archives }

Audible DRM issue

I hit a very annoying issue using Audible.com on my Mac with iTunes and my iPhone. I thought I’d document it in case others hit it.
Setting the Stage
I got a MacBook Pro in early 2009. I buy audiobooks from Audible.com and store them in iTunes. From iTunes I sync the audiobooks to my iPhone so [...]

AppleScript to resize Safari for recording a YouTube HD video

Occasionally I need to produce YouTube HD videos showing me doing something in a web browser. Up ’till now I’ve had to painfully, manually resize the browser window to 1280×720 so that the video didn’t get unnaturally shrunk or expanded by my screencast rendering software. Tonight I figured out a way to automatically resize my [...]

Tagged , , ,

Jazz extensibility evolution

Shortly before winter vacation, an IBM colleague contacted me to learn more about how extensibility – particularly web UI extensibility – works in the IBM Rational Jazz Platform on which I work. After typing up my response I thought it might be interesting to a broader audience so I’ve reposted it here (with some minor [...]

Knuth on email

Don Knuth: Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

ebook love

I used to read a lot of tech books, like a an hour or two a day. Several years, several promotions, two kids, and one deteriorating eye later, I realized I wasn’t reading much anymore. The combination of work commutes / Audible.com / iPod helped me keep up with novels and non-techy non-fiction, but I [...]

detecting that you're in an IFrame

I hit a JavaScript issue recently that stumped me. I’m trying to detect if the code I’m running is in an IFrame or not. It seems like the safest way to determine this would be the following comparison:
if(window !== top) {
var mode = “frame”;
}
‘window’ of course is the global object in which [...]

frameworks and building blocks

Between early 2006 and early this year, my team at IBM Rational and I built a framework for component-based Ajax development for use in the Rational Jazz platform. The framework’s capabilities aren’t the focus of this entry, so I’ll just list some of them briefly:

A nice component model based on OSGi bundles and the Dojo [...]

Tagged

the awkward url-uri terminology dance

As my dear colleagues Simon Johnston and James Branigan have mentioned in various blog posts, on the Jazz project that I work on, we’ve (finally) fallen in love with the web/REST story. Because of this, we spend a lot of time in technical conversations using the standard REST alphabet soup vocabulary you’d expect – HTTP, [...]

Tagged , , ,

from Windows to Ubuntu

Well, as we mentioned over on the Jazz Team Blog, my Jazz teammates and I just shipped Rational Team Concert 1.0, the first GA product built on the Jazz Platform. More on that later.
Since I’ve been working on what became Rational Team Concert for the last three years, I’ve gotten into quite a groove with [...]

Tagged ,

RIA weekly podcast and errata

Last Friday I did an RIA weekly podcast (mp3) with Michael Coté of Redmonk and Ryan Stewart of Adobe. This was a fun and interesting experience. Fun because I like Coté and Ryan a great deal and enjoy talking to them and interesting because of the subject matter and also because it was the first [...]