Author: Ben

Rhubarb season is upon us.

• Make a very tasty, very tart rhubarb crisp for dessert tonight. I loves the rhubarb.
• Big meaty porting is still happening.
  • Most of dojo.dom is gone, so I’m having to pull some stuff into the bl namespace, or rethink how we’re doing a couple things. Walking the DOM element by element is pretty slow, so I’m moving more to dojo.query for most things. Need to dig into that a bit more and see if there’s a way to shortcut the results after the first one has been found.
  • Refactoring lots of our code, replacing convenience methods with inline code where it makes sense. For example, having removeClass and replaceClass is a bit silly when remove("foo") is really just replace("foo", ""). Also had a bunch of overlapping methods in DOM code that I’m consolidating.
  • Console test runner is working again. Yay! Need to get that integrated with our build in some way.
  • Most of the porting is pretty straight string replacement (dojo.event.connect → dojo.connect), but I’m having a good time cleaning up a bunch of old stuff along the way. Can’t wait to finish up and get numbers on how many bytes we’re saving.
• Tried to install Mono using MacPorts, but it’s hanging while trying to build ilasm.exe:

  MONO_PATH="../class/lib/net_2_0_bootstrap:$MONO_PATH"
  /opt/local/var/db/dports/build/
  _opt_local_var_db_dports_sources_rsync.rsync.darwinports.org_dpupdate_dports_devel_mono/
  work/mono-1.2.3.1/runtime/mono-wrapper ../class/lib/net_2_0_bootstrap/mcs.exe
  /codepage:65001 /lib:../class/lib/net_2_0_bootstrap /r:../class/lib/net_2_0_bootstrap/PEAPI.dll
  /r:Mono.CompilerServices.SymbolWriter.dll /r:Mono.Security.dll
  -d:NET_1_1 -d:BOOTSTRAP_NET_2_0 -debug -target:exe -out:ilasm.exe
  ILParser.cs  @ilasm.exe.sources

  • Update: Running the install again seemed to fix the issue, whatever it was. Might be that letting the laptop go to sleep while the compile is happening makes it angry? Either way, mono, mcs and gmcs are all working now.
• Getting excited to head down to NYC for DDD/NY.
• Food Report:
  • Brunch: Bacon, egg & cheese whole wheat bagel and regular coffee
  • Dinner: Chili con carne, baked ziti, cookies
  • Dessert: RHUBARB CRISP

Ah, the weekend.

• Up in Saratoga Springs at the new house.
• Yay, painting trim in the baby’s future room.
• Yay, espresso with fresh beans. Decaf is actually pretty good too.
• Dad is now pursuing independent contracting opportunities, possibly just plain old retirement.
• Picked out a crib and dresser for the kid’s room.
• Ate dinner at the clubhouse to chew up our monthly requirement. The food was… uninspired. Note: if you want medium rare steak, don’t go here.
• Tried to play golf this morning, but the course was packed till 10. Next time.

Better late than really really late.

• More portage.
  • Got the HTML test runner for 0.9 working and wrote some fancy tests for the string builder, all of which are now in dojox. Still some ongoing discussion of how best to implement such a class and how to get the best perf out of it. Should be fun stuff to look at during DDD/NY.
  • Started porting our code in earnest. Most of it is pretty simple removal of .event and .html and .style and .dom from dojo. calls.
  • We’re currently using the MD5 class to do part of the home-rolled digest auth stuff we do, but I’m leaning more heavily towards going with HTTPS instead. Just need to figure out a way to fit it into the flow.

Sometimes it’s a hard world for the small things.

• An entire stadium of people humming on a Baby Ruth is a bit disturbing. Ad people are weird. If you haven’t seen it, watch more ESPN.
• Took Jack/Spock/Fatty/Pest/Chunk (we’re renaming the cat) into the vet today as his asthma flared up. He’s also due for a checkup, so he’s off getting that. Poor hacky kitty.
• Disco Dressage? Who knew horses could dance? Show of hands.
• Port port port
  • dojo.string.Builder is missing from Core, so I wrote it today. Started writing tests and realized I didn’t know how the console test harness works. Email into -contrib to find out details. Changed the guts to do the branching on object specification instead of at call time. Should be slightly faster and use one less member variable.
  • Restructured some misguided ideas I had a long time ago. Though, higher-order functions are among the coolest things in the universe.
  • For a “simple” language, Javascript is amazingly deep. Learning how to use a language with closures and runtime function generation just takes a shift in thinking from anything else I’ve done. The whole concept of memoization is just amazing. I think I’ve fallen off the strong-typing bandwagon. Oh if Bart could see me now…
• Picked up a glider for $150 off Craig’s List. It’s the first thing we’ve ever purchased from the list and everything went smoothly. The seller even threw in a bunch of nice lightly used baby stuff that should be really useful…
• Foodah:
  • Breakfast: Coffee. Butter scone. Didn’t take my mug and killed a recycled tree.
  • Lunch: Chicken parm patty sandwich. I can feel the arteries clogging.
  • Dinner: Split pea soup and four oranges. Don’t ask. Slim pickings at the cafeteria tonight.
  • Snacks: chicken fingers in the afternoon and some fig newtons right about… now.

It’s time to rock.

• Spinal Tap is getting back together to save the world.
• Was reintroduced to Chris Jordan’s work. Definitely worth a peek.
• Turned our project spec into a set of issues in Jira. Yay for tracking.
• Port port port. Lots of weird little things are missing in Dojo Core that I’ve got to replicate.
  • I also made a really dumb decision a while back to extend dojo.dom (the object) inside our code, so porting other code that appears to use dojo.dom is a pain. It looks like we’re calling into Dojo, but really we’re calling into my lame extensions to Dojo.
  • add/remove/get/hasClass are gone, though from today’s Dojo meeting, it looks like they’re coming back
  • dom.destroyNode is currently gone, but looks like it’s making a comeback.
  • dojo.html.getElementsByClass is replaced by dojo.query
• I’m now on the hook to port dojo.undo into Core.
• Nice write up by Dustin on modern Javascript usage patterns
• Food Report
  • Woke up lateish. Brunch was coffee (Mexican Chiapas, took my steel mug along today) and taco salad.
  • Dinner: Pizza (other option was baked stuffed sole) and salad and twin pop. Mmmm cherry twin pop.