I'm Helen and helephant.com is where I write about my adventures as a web developer.
This site is currently about c#, javascript, debugging, firefox and tools.
Switching opera desktop to hand held mode for testing
Neat little tip I found (in my old, old blog archives) is that you can switch Opera into hand held emulation mode by hitting Shift+F11. It'll take your site and serialize the design to fit on a small screen like on your phone: It also will honour the @media handheld stylesheet so it's a convenient way to test the stylesheet without having to actually load it on a mobile device. Sadly... read article
My bad dev singing tapes
I spent a bit of time last weekend tagging some of my old articles. I was a bit gratified looking through the old stuff and realising how far my skills have come since I started in August 2004. I noticed that a lot of the things I blogged about then were things are so second nature to me now that I wouldn't spend the time writing them up. Things like what the c# protected internal modifier means, how... read article
Generic method return types
Generics don't just have to be used at the class level. You can also use them to pass type information to methods. My favourite example of this is having a generic return type so you can get strongly typed information from a generally useful method without having to cast the result. I first saw this when using ArtOfTest to write unit tests for webpages. Their API hads a nice feature where you can... read article
Firefox mouse gestures
One of the guys at work inspired me to try a mouse gestures plugins for Firefox today. For the uninitiated, mouse gestures are like keyboard shortcuts for the mouse. Instead of holding ctrl+c, you do a little drawing on the screen while holding down the right mouse button to make something happen. For example when you draw a line from right to left, it triggers the browser's back function and when... read article
JSAN open source code repository
Learnt something new today! There's a repository of open source javascript code called JSAN modelled on the perl version. There's a whole lot of interesting stuff on there like UI widgets, animations and AJAX. I haven't tried any but it's nice to know there's somewhere you can see what other people are doing. read article
Objects, event handlers and "this" in javascript
One recurring problem I've had when using a function from a custom javascript object as an event handler is that when the event handler is called the "this" property of the function no longer references the object it originally belonged to. To show you what I mean, take a look at this simple javascript object. It has a method called init() that is used as an event handler for the window's load... read article