Blog

Calcatraz has just launched its second free online offering, Typist, an optimized touch-typing practice app. A while ago I decided to try and up my typing speed. I tried out as many online tools as I could find, but found they all fell into one of two categories: fancy full-featured desktop programs with free trials [...]

I’ve recently got involved with a careers website as a bit of an advisor and contributor. The site is The Day in a Life Database, run by my brother, Jim. The Day in a Life Database is a website devoted to helping people answer that burning question: what should I do with my life? But it’s [...]

Anyone watching the site will have noticed that things have been a bit quiet for the last few months. Calcatraz has definitely not been forgotten, however. I’ve been busily working away on a complete redesign of the calculator, which I hope to begin rolling out soon. I’ve also been working on a number of other [...]

While working on the back-end Calcatraz management system, I came across a situation where I wanted to display strings, but if they were too long I wanted to truncate them and add three dots (ellipsis) to the end to show that this had occurred. I first got on Google and looked for a solution. The [...]

In Firefox, it is easy to create an inline div (i.e. a div which adjusts its width to fit its contents). You just do this: div#elemid { display: inline-block; } However, it doesn’t work in IE. It took me a while to figure out how to get it working, so here’s the solution: div#elemid { [...]

If your web pages have a large number of nested div and table tags you may end up wondering whether they are all really necessary, and whether you might not be able to get by with less. While you could run through your code and assess each one individually and decide if it can be [...]

I’m trying to implement a Getting Things Done (GTD) system which works for me and which I can stick at on an ongoing basis. I’ve tried various set-ups in the past but constantly find them becoming derailed and eventually abandoned. In the process, however, I’ve seen enough to know it is something I want to [...]

Recently I attempted to define in as objective a way as possible how much value my online calculator is providing to its users. The idea is to come up with an equation which gives me a ‘score’ of how much value has been provided to users. With this, it will then be possible to optimise [...]

Recently a number of changes I made to the calculator have been causing a bit of a performance hit. To counteract that I’ve been through and made a few simple changes: Removed some external file includes which were no longer needed Implemented better caching to prevent unnecessary re-requests Modified the core to minimise the amount [...]

Happy new year, everyone! 2009 was a very exciting year for me. The idea for an online calculator  has been kicking around my head for a few years, getting progressively refined. As of March 2009 I began work on turning it into more than an idea. The first few months were spent progressively refining the [...]