About time! Apple announced in Safari 14, Web Extensions will be compatible with those used by Chromium and Firefox. They’ve bravely added a tool to XCode to help people convert their old Safari extensions to the what they call the new format. Most people probably won’t find that useful, having converted their Chromium extensions to work on Safari in the… Read more →
Category: Programming
getDisplayMedia vs. getUserMedia
I’ve been messing around with the browser API navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia(). The question I hoped to answer: can I capture the content in some computer display surface and push it through the same sorts of process that I use with .getUserMedia()? I tested on Google Chrome 84. Answer: yes. It has some quirks. It doesn’t need, and indeed rejects, elaborate constraints. {… Read more →
New Microsoft Edge rolls out to everybody this month
About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. They worked well enough that… Read more →
Rig Windows 10 to make work easier
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make Windows 10 easier to use. X Window System display server Download and install the free and open-source vcsxrv package from SourceForge. Then, configure your ssh to forward X11 packets. Then, when you ssh to a Linux or FreeBSD box, you’ll be able to run X programs. They’ll show… Read more →
Web Services in C#: Status, Parameters, Cookies
Status Codes Real Web services have to be able to pass back a status code. Maybe it’s a plain 200 success code, or a 404 not found code. Whatever. We have to be able to control it. Here’s how. We’ll use the NegotiatedContentResult template class in the signature for the Get method. We have to cope with the pickiness of… Read more →
Web Services in C#: Payloads: PUT, POST, PATCH
We send data to a web service via POST, PUT, or PATCH. All these web requests carry a payload: one or more items of data. How do we code these web services to accept data? Read more →
Web Service APIs in dotnet C# made easy with ApiController: Part 1
Setting up your web service Dotnet’s stuff for developing web applications includes an inheritable class called ApiController. This makes it easy to develop REST-style web services, either for standalone API servers or in the context of larger servers. To start using ApiController, however, requires navigating lots of Microsoft documentation; as of early 2020 that documentation is pretty much all machine-generated… Read more →
JSDoc configured
JSDoc is a way to put programmer documentation in Javascript code. It’s in the tradition of Doxygen , Javadoc, and C#’s documentation comments. And what a sorry tradition that is. Tools for extracting that kind of documentation and making, well, documents from it are just atrocious. (Set me straight in a comment if I’m wrong.) Sure, the various IDEs use… Read more →
Handling errors in nodejs and express
Many people surely know all this by now. Still, here are some things I’ve recently learned about notifying clients (browsers, API clients) about errors. Delivering errors from route handlers to clients This is remarkably easy, once you figure it out. Just use the http-errors package. (Beware, not the http-error package; it does something different. Call next() with an object made… Read more →
Debugging web page code on Android from desktop machines
I needed to do some simple web-page / Javascript debugging work on an Android device. My need was simple: look at the console log. But setting things up to do it was not simple. It didn’t help that most of the online information about this is buried in edits to years-old Stack Overflow answers. Desired Result When it’s set up… Read more →