Due to an issue with the way angular handles dom changes, there is an interesting problem when attempting to send a position object from an angular service using a deferred promise. If you treated the geolocation API as an asynchronous function—which it is in practice—and used the $q service to return a deferred promise from an angular service, nothing will happen when you enact the .then() method in your controller.

Character Encoding: Redux

Character encoding reared its ugly head again soon after my last apparent fix, only to not be fixed at all in any way. I was forced to abandon my efforts to fix it to focus attention on more pressing issues so it remained in the shadows, though a persisting pain in my neck.

utf-8 encoding and drama

After many hours of trouble, I have finally figured out the issue with encoding using UTF-8 Unicode on the HTML-rendered pages. While the ISO Latin1 encoding worked partially, it only encoded static or pre-rendered content, not dynamic content such as that added through AJAX. I troubleshooted this at various points, changing the collation in the database to be uniform, first as latin1, then as Unicode.

In a world where devices are getting more portable as well as more numerous and have better access to a universal web, the concept of ‘responsive design’ is becoming more attractive every day. Being able to effectively use the same web on a device the size of a credit card, the same as you would on a desktop computer is, I believe, one of the greatest leaps in the internet’s relatively short history. Yet, as much of a logically sound idea responsive design may be, on first hearing of it, it is still stuck with the stigma of being a gimmick. It is abuzz word that is thrown around to attract customers or to show off skills of would-be designers or developers. It is a part of the HTML5 hype that is circling around the opinion-o-sphere that is web-media. However, it really goes, or should go, far, far beyond that. A mobile-friendly web is a must-have in the near future. Mobiles are becoming the primary way we access the net and we simply cannot avoid this trend. Responsive design is not a gimmick or anything like it, it’s a completely necessary, if over-hyped, method of designing the web.