A UI lesson: do not ask users to choose between Register and Login

I am developing a web site for playing bridge, a project which kicked off in March when lockdown caused bridge clubs everywhere to close. There are lots of sites where you can play bridge online, but not many options (particularly back in March) for clubs that wanted to run their own online sessions. It’s going … Continue reading A UI lesson: do not ask users to choose between Register and Login →

Cyber Privacy by April Falcon Doss

This is a book about pervasive data collection and its implications. The author, April Falcon Doss, is a lawyer who spent 13 years at the US National Security Agency (NSA), itself an organization controversial for phone-tapping and other covert surveillance practices. Disturbing though that is, one of Doss’s observations is that “in democratic countries … … Continue reading Cyber Privacy by April Falcon Doss →

Debugging Safari on an old iPad

Someone was trying to use the bridge application I have in progress, using an iPad 2.0. There were a couple of interesting things about this. One was that I had to rethink the warning thrown up, base on Modernizr, which detects incompatible web browsers. The problem (obvious when you think about it) is that if … Continue reading Debugging Safari on an old iPad →

Point-in-time restore: a handy built-in feature in Azure SQL

I am working on a project that is hosted in Azure and I made a mistake, running a SQL script that was dependent on another SQL script that I had forgotten to run. It messed up the foreign keys and I would have to restore a backup … but my most recent backup was from … Continue reading Point-in-time restore: a handy built-in feature in Azure SQL →

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