Counter

Here’s a way to put a counter that updates once a second in a page. It’s based on the time. This isn’t some earth-shattering discovery, it’s trival. But somebody asked me. 123 is the count now!

Jetbrains Gateway is really nice

Jetbrains, the Czech company that makes PhpStorm, WebStorm and Intellij-Idea, has their Gateway product in beta. It works like this: you run the Gateway software on your desktop machine — you know, the one with the nice display — and it connects to some other development machine to run your IDE. I’ve been using it … Read more

Porting from CEFSharp to WebView2

I have a Windows Presentation Foundation app using CEFSharp as a browser control. I’m porting it to use the new WebView2 control from Microsoft. That’s a workable idea now because it embeds a new Edge object in the WPF app. So, there’s no need to download the whole Chromium Embedded Framework mischegoss which saves download … Read more

Firefox has limited ability to handle H.264

The Firefox browser’s WebRTC and MediaRecorder functionality can handle H.264 (Advanced Video Codec) coding and decoding, but only with H.264’s constrained baseline profile. Other, higher, profiles just don’t work. And in Firefox’s WebRTC implementation (v87) attempts to use higher profiles fail more-or-less silently. Firefox works around all the patent issues with H.264 by using an … Read more

Web Beacon API

There’s a sweet little function in web browsers called the Web Beacon API.  It’s a simplified version of the XHR or Fetch API that does a fire-and-forget POST operation to a server. It’s nice for a few reasons.  First, browser Javascript (front-end Javascript) can use it without any need to process results coming back. Just … Read more

Choropleths: color-coded maps showing data by state or other geography

A Choropleth is a colored map, typically showing information gathered by some kind of census. A well-known example is the New York Times’s COVID-19 map. Let’s say you have some data that’s coded by geographic area. For example, you might have a table showing the number of COVID cases per 100,000 people county by county in … Read more