Category: Etc

I did some more digging and finally figured out what we were doing to tickle this error in Firefox. Short story: passing a null to dojo.getComputedStyle(). In particular, we were making calls like dojo.marginBox(dojo.byId("a-bad-id")) which in turn calls into dojo.getComputedStyle() to do it’s work, and hence, the error. I updated the repro case and the original blog post to reflect the findings.

…are just poor rip-offs of the Apple iPhone ads. How sad.

I’d completely forgotten about this old TV show until Kotke mentioned it. I watched it whenever I could and was always jealous they got to place Dragon’s Lair (too rich for my blood) for the end…

One thing I’m noticing with all these old game shows and shows from the 80’s in general: the production values are really low compared to today’s stuff, but I find the shows were a lot more entertaining. For all the flash and polish on today’s stuff, there’s just no meat any more. I mean, Deal or No Deal? Very fancy, but it’s horribly dumb. I dunno. Maybe I’m just getting old.

(via Kotke)

I really enjoyed Mitch’s article on YUI Lang’s little gems and thought it might be handy to see how to do the same things with Dojo. Here’s the translation:

Trim

var trimMe = "  trim me please  ";

//YUI 
var trimmed = YAHOO.lang.trim(trimMe);

//Dojo
// - exactly the same
trimmed = dojo.trim(trimMe);

Substitute

var processText = function(key, value) {  
  return value.toUpperCase();  
};  

//YUI
YAHOO.lang.substitute('Hello {world}', { world: 'earth'}, processText); 

// Dojo
// - Named placeholders are prefaced with a $
// - No support for extraValues from Mitch's example
dojo.require("dojo.string"); // not in base distribution
dojo.string.substitute('Hello ${world}', { world: "earth" }, processText);

Later

// YUI 
// - Docs indicate this return type void, which is a timer object?
YAHOO.lang.later(200, foo, "method", [{ data: "bar" }]);

// Dojo
// - No abstraction for timers in Dojo
// - Can use hitch to set calling scope for function
setTimeout(dojo.hitch(foo, "method", { data: "bar" }), 200);
//  or
setInterval(dojo.hitch(foo, "method", { data: "bar" }), 200);

Merge

var defaults = { color: "red", answer: 42 };
var config;

//YUI
config = YAHOO.lang.merge(defaults, { color: "blue" });

//Dojo
// - mixin takes a variable number of arguments
// - Values are written to the first object, hence passing {}
// - Later values have precendence
config = dojo.mixin({}, defaults, { color: "yellow" });