Category: Etc

So simple, yet so profound.

• Three day weekends are really nice. Spent most of it cleaning up the apartment in preparation of the little guy and lying in bed reading David Eddings’ Belgariad and Malloreon series. Read The Belgariad Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Now I’m working my way through The Malloreon Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I never got around to reading The Malloreon before, so it’s been a fun read. I can usually get through one of the novels in about six hours or so. The novels employ a few heavily repeated catch phrases for each character and situation.
• I’ve started logging my listening habits to last.fm.
• Finally got around to purchasing some Johnny Cash after saying I needed to do it about 1000 times. Picked up The Essential Johnny Cash and At Folsom Prison.
• Kept up to date with Dojo for our trunk and pulled dijit core into our build.
• Still working on DnD for the tree.
  • Added a drag threshold, so a drag only starts when you’ve moved the pointer 5px or more.
  • Actually have drag events starting now, just need to start working on calculating drop targets, update the avatar, and actually do the drop.
• Michael Reichmann released the California segment of the latest Luminous Landscape Video Journal. I was very happy to see him move to digital distribution of the LLVJ, and to see the corresponding price drop. The series is definitely worth a look if you like photography. The California segment just reminded me how much I loved the redwood forests and the Big Sur / Mendocino area… Got to get back there soon.
• An underage girl who has an account on flickr just found out that a self-portrait she took back when she was 14 is now being used on the cover of a porn DVD. Raising kids in the time of the intertubes is going to be interesting.
• I’d always wondered what would happen if you tried to buy a ton of Sudafed now that they’re all paranoid about it. Apparently someone decided to find out.

My favorite thing to do is giggle so much my horn lights up.

• Today’s quote taken from Paul’s future birthday present.
• Figured out today that the DnD framework wants to own rendering nodes and selection for my widget. Time to refactor. I really need to figure out what it is I’m expecting DnD to provide and get it to provide that. Ideas:
  • Detect that a drag is starting.
  • Make, move and destroy the avatar
  • Detect what node the drag is currently over
  • Detect if the current spot is a valid drop place
  • Signal a drop and let me handle it
• I really want to start fixing our content display. It’s currently atrocious. Also want to start working on some alternate skins.

Fridaymus Prime!

•  Cat and Girl sums it up nicely.
• DnD is killing me softly. Working with Eugene to iron out some kinks in the Dojo DnD bits.
• ICANHASCHEEZBURGER is also killing, but in a very different way.

Dear Weather, please make up your mind.

•  All sorts of fun going on with Flickr and JPGMag. There are some great lessons to learn here about running a site that’s based on a community of users. Flickr reacted fairly quickly to stem the tide and I think they did a great job dealing with the problem. I think JPG’s finally coming around to the same neighborhood. Either way, it has been interesting to follow. Quick take on lessons I learned:
  1. Be as transparent as possible. If you do something, explain why. Listen to the reactions. Participate in the ensuing discussion. A lack of participation is often seen as lacking to care about the community.
  2. People remember prior interactions with people at the company. Getting to know your community and gaining their respect goes a long way when things go south. Strive to be honest, forthright, and polite. Don’t be a dick.
  3. Folks tend to be accepting of mistakes as long as you come clean, apologize, and explain what’s being done to prevent it from happening again.
  4. Your community is a bit like stockholders in a public company, except instead of voting directly, they vote via participation, and participation is their currency.
• More beating up DnD. Looks like the dojo.dnd is busted in some manner; the map on the the container isn’t getting filled in. Emails in to uhop to see what the story is.
• We’ve been working a generic method of exposing a server-side Model as JSON to a Clearsilver template. For now, we’re just exposing some extra stuff in the HDF tree, preformatted as JSON. Started work on a generic Clearsilver macro to do HDF->JSON, but there are some concerns about having two methods of turning a Model into JSON, one direct, one via HDF. Works for what we need now.
• Pulled in Dojo trunk again. I need to send the author of svn_load_dirs like a hundred beers.

Long time, no bloggy.

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.2. Mostly smooth. I wish they’d give you a way to have just Atom feeds.
• I’m now a Dojo committer!
  • Landed a port of dojo.undo.browser (now dojo.back) on core trunk
• Our port to 0.9 pre is done, now moving forward with DnD feed organization for the feed tree.
  • Some chats with Eugene and David on extending the classes in dojo/dnd/move.js a bit. I’d like to see some hooks on Mover / Moveable to allow you to constrain the move in different ways. Stuff’s looking good there.
• Now using a nice pattern for layered builds and our code. We layer on top of Dojo’s Base (the new dojo.js) and have a layer for each page in the site. That page includes a JS that require’s all of the code needed for the page. That JS is also the only dependency in a layer, and the layer overwrites that JS file as part of the build. So in your HTML, you just have one script tag for Dojo and one script tag for the layer. If you’re not in a build, everything gets pulled in via require magic, and if you are in a build, you just suck in two glomm’d JS file.
• Added support to turn on debug & switch to a non-shrinksafe’d version of the JS files using querystring args.
• The YUI guys have some videos up that are worth a look. I really like all the talks by Douglas Crockford on JavaScript and the talk by Venkatesan on writing efficient JavaScript. I’d like to see some examples for some of the bits in the efficiency talk, but maybe I can just write those up myself and see.
• Wore this shirt today. I’ve never seen so many people squint and sound out letters while staring at my chest before.
• Mandy’s at 34 1/2 weeks. Everything looks great. :) Every now and then, we’re seeing a knee surface like a shark fin. Can’t wait to meet the little guy!