Latest blog posts

Popular open source e-commerce solution Magento can be quite slow, but there are ways of improving its performance. Caching is one very effective way and Magento supports various caching backends out of the box, including Memcached. If you write your own Magento extensions, be they plugins or templates, you might benefit from using the cache for things that might otherwise tie up a lot of resources to recompute. This is quite easy to do, but information on caching is surprisingly rare. So how do you do it?
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If, like me, you grew up in the 80's and 90's, you know that there's only one thing that can follow the words "Duck Tales" and that's "Woo-oo!". You can probably even sing along to the theme song. Apart from the highly popular TV show, there have been several video games about loveable old miser Scrooge McDuck and his three nephews. Very much a product of the time, the NES version of this was a platform game. It is considered by many to be among the best such games ever made. Now, more than 20 years later, WayForward Technologies has updated the iconic game for the modern age. Is that a good thing? Let's find out!
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Sometimes it's cool to just try stuff out in web development without having to support every old browser. Here's the result of playing around for an afternoon attempting to recreate Windows Aero look using just CSS in the current browsers (Firefox 21, Chrome 27, MSIE 10).
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After ensuring that your newly created website works great on all desktop browsers, you put in the effort to make the site responsive. Everything is spot on with any of the Android browsers, but then you test on iOS/Mobile Safari and some of your click events aren't registering. Why is that? In my most recent project, I've encountered two different causes for this. Oddly enough, neither has anything to do with JavaScript, but CSS is the culprit. While one of them might be by design, the other is most definitely a bug, in my opinion. Since Mobile Safari is hell to debug (especially since in iOS 6, the developer console was removed and the only way to debug is by using desktop Safari, which isn't even available for Windows any more — probably a good thing, as the Windows versions were utter crap), it took ages to find the cause of this and I figured I'd spare you the trouble. Here's what happens and how to fix it.
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Windows Vista and later no longer include the MIDI mapper that was used in earlier Windows versions to route MIDI output to the preferred device. Vista did away with this, supporting only the rather underwhelming "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth". While this is adequate for most users, it simply won't do if you have a proper MIDI synth for retro gaming or for playing MIDI files through Media Player. There exist several tools on the net that can change the default MIDI output device, but it appears there are differences in registry keys used between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The tool for one simply won't work on the other, so unless you knew which one to use, you'd still be stuck with Microsoft's softsynth.
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