Last minute, and rather unexpectedly I found myself home this weekend in search of distraction. My tentative plans cancelled, no one else in town, between books, caught up on my various contracting gigs. A sensible person would start working on all those sensible items on their todo list, but with this looming emptiness of occupation, I could feel the impending presence of boredom, and its ever present companion depression. So I threw myself into the quixotic project of solving problems which have already been solved.

Spell Checker

Spell wraps a web interface around Aspell, supports personal dictionary and replacement lists (thats what name is used for) which are updated “in the background” by targetting an invisible iframe with javascript. Which is something like discovering fire I realize, but it was a first time for me. Limitations: Plenty I’m sure, but one is that it only works for English. Which is silly as it would be trivial to support multiple languages, but there you have it.

Compatibility Note: Not sure how well the Javascript/DOM/IFrame thing works in non-Mozilla browsers.

JS/CSS Maze

Arguably navigating through the various CSS specification, and their quirky browser specific implementations should be labyrinthine enough, and there are few CS problems which have been solved more times then maze generation. However, superflous complexity and a well solved problem could not disuade me from my recent insight that CSS borders are the new hedges. Limitations: Originally cell background toggled between black and white on mouse over allowing one to track progress through the maze. However this produced a more flickery behaviour then desired, as was turned off. Currently the same behaviour is available on mouse click, which is much less elegant.

Compatibility Note: Non-Mozilla browsers might have trouble with either the dynamic table creation, or the use of adjacent sibling selectors.