Huy Nguyen has a great write up on implementing a generic repository interface that supports Entity Framework 4. His code is written in C# and today I had to rewrite it in VB.Net. The VB.Net version looks like this Public Interface IRepository Inherits IDisposable Function GetQuery(Of TEntity As Class)As IQueryable(Of TEntity) Function GetAll(Of TEntity As Class)() As IEnumerable(Of TEntity) Function Find(Of TEntity As Class)(predicate As Expression(Of Func(Of TEntity, Boolean))) As IEnumerable(Of TEntity) Function [Single](Of TEntity […] Read more »
Two minute timer feature update
The two minute timer that is available for download from the site has been featured and linked to from a couple of places around the internet. The technology it was built with is a few years old but still works in modern versions of Windows and is downloaded regularly by users around the world! I still use it myself for when I need to overcome some serious procrastination but more and more I am trying […] Read more »
Fixing pingchecker link locating code
I have installed the free pingback manager pingchecker since I wanted to be able to manually check and ping other blogs that I link to. Unfortunately for some reason the plugin doesn’t handle link tags with additional info/attributes like styles or a target. The problem is around line 270, the regexp which is used to find links needs to be updated to look like this: inputcontent.replace(/[^<]*(<a [^>]*href=(?:"|\')([^"\']+)(?:"|\')[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/a>)/g, function () { matches.push(Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1, 4)); }); That […] Read more »
Working fork of iScroll 4 with extended acceleration
The problem that I had introduced in my iScroll 4 code just needed a simple fix. This was the code I had in my local file. speed = m.abs(dist) / time + (addVelocity ? velocity : 0) Speed should always result in a positive number, when velocity was negative then obviously the end result could be negative. In addition the effects were quite strange since sometimes multiple touchmoves would result in the speed being lower […] Read more »
iScroll 4 first fix for acceleration on multiple touchmoves

iScroll 4 is a great library for adding scrolling to mobile Html5 applications. Unfortunately I found that there is something missing in how the scroller works compared to native scrolling. After comparing how one of my HTML5 mobile applications scrolls compared to an equivalent native app I found one major difference that changes the feel of the iScroll scroller – multiple consecutive scrolls on the native app speeds up the scrolling. With iScroll 4 multiple […] Read more »
Knockout js 1.3 external native templates using xui
caseycorcoran and maverix (Andrew Harry) have created a gist for an external template engine using jQuery for Knockout’s new native templating feature in 1.3. I am using Knockout in one of my Phonegap projects but I am trying to avoid jQuery in favor of xui.js which is a much smaller library optimized for mobile phone HTML5 development. I have created a fork of their gist changing the ajax loading from jQuery to the xhr function […] Read more »
Is Phonegap dead already?
Recently Adobe acquired Phonegap developers Nitobi, read about it here and here. Does this mean Phonegap will die? Phonegap has been an open source, free product from the start. Nitobi have had a business model where they provide training, consulting and other value adding services – like their build service. As far as I understand Adobe have a completely different business model, they sell software licenses… There have been other examples of free software being […] Read more »
Enable scrolling in html5 mobile apps

My recent forays into mobile app development with Phonegap have uncovered a couple of surprises (for me at least). Clearly mobile app development and specifically HTML5 applications are a very imature space! I have been focusing on getting to know a couple of different model-view frameworks (Knockout, Backbone, Angular) and also trying to get a simple UI based on HTML5 to render in a mobile phone, both with and without UI frameworks (JQuery mobile, Appmobi […] Read more »
W3 Total Cache and WordPress Network issues

I have setup this wordpress installation as a network of sites using the built in WordPress support for site networks. All of the sites are running on separate domains but WordPress is setup to use subdirectories for the different sites. So this blog is actually installed at /nsilverbullet in wordpress. To map from subdirectories to domains I am using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin. Unfortunately WordPress MU Domain Mapping and W3 Total Cache do […] Read more »
Still a cool keyboard

I just had a discussion about the future of human-computer interaction and the possibilities of gesture & touch. But I think old-school keyboards still have future, I know people who use vintage typewriters for writing! So far no-one has produced a wireless typewriter keyboard, until then the keyboard Optimus Maximus is still pretty cool! Each key is a programmable oled display so you can customize your layout and keyboard graphics pretty much anyway you like […] Read more »