Category: Etc

People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.

Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
Chinese philosopher (604 BC – 531 BC)

• Slammed 0.9 back into trunk. Let the madness begin.
  • Fixed a bunch of little bugs I’d missing during the port. Main culprits are dojo.publish needing an array for the second argument and missed transforms of dojo.html.getElementsByClass() into dojo.query().
  • Found a timing issue with application initialization and squashed it. Async application initialization is … tricky. Especially when you have things chained together using dojo.subscribe / publish. All sorts of stuff starts happening all over the application due to init, kinda like dominos. But async.
  • Saw a 50% reduction in overall code size with the port from Dojo 0.4.2 -> 0.9. So. Happy.
• Chip got a buildbot working that automatically builds the codebase and publishes it to the test site, and we can trigger it from the IRC channel. Freaking sweet. Just need to get it running the unit / smoke tests and I’d be super geeked. This is a great start though. Automated builds (and tests) FTW!
• I’m realizing I have a routine. I need a better routine. One that involves exercise.
• Attended a breastfeeding class with Mandy and learned a lot of stuff. I wasn’t sure how much I was going to get out of it, but it was good to hear about what going to happen and what the pitfalls are. As one of the women in the class said, it seems like it would be so easy, but there’s really a bit of a trick to it.
• Hopefully get to play golf a bit this weekend and better the 87 I opened with at MacGregor.

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Herm Albright

• Port port port
  • Almost ready to land the 0.9 port back onto trunk
  • Looks like we’re going from ~300K to ~160K for a shrunk build of all our source. Gotta love a savings of 50%. No idea on execution speed just yet.
  • Latest thing to bite me: dojo.xhrGet/Post now use a Deferred instead of direct callbacks. For JSON data, the callback that you register with the Deferred only needs to take one argument, the eval’d JSON object, instead of the old type,object,transport triple from dojo.io.bind. Also, remember to return the object from your handler so that others can chain onto the Deferred if need be. A typical handler looks like:

    var def = dojo.xhrGet("/my/json");
    def.addCallback(function(obj) {
      // work with the object
      console.info("here's my data: %o", obj);
      // important to return the object for future callbacks
      return obj;
    });

• Main Street Sweets, the local ice cream joint that had the fire a couple weeks back, is open for business again. They have a new flavor called “Holy Soot”, which appears to be chocolate ice cream with brownie and fudge swirl. My new fave.

Long days and pleasant nights are upon us.

• DDD/NY was a ton of fun!
  • It was great to see Alex and Chris again and meet and hang out with the rest of the Dojo crew!
  • IBM has one fancy building on Madison Ave. For such a fancy building, the internet access was spotty at best. No official guest network and some router on the network we were using was really really flaky.
  • People are building some cool shit on Dojo. Everything from really fancy one-pagers to subtle enhancements to existing apps. I’ll see if I can dig up some links.
  • Dijit (the new name for the widget project) is way better than I thought. I think we use a few of the new widgets in the redesign pretty easily…
  • Looks like we’re going to be one of the first big ports to 0.9. Fun. :)
  • Figured out a way to run layered builds and still have things work sans-a-build for devs. Need an enhancement to the build system to allow you to specify the output location of the layer file.Today, you just say name: "mylayer.js", but we really need to be able to say name: "bl.mylayer.js" and have it go in the "bl" module.
  • Went with Alex, Neil and two others (I’m so freaking bad with names) out to the Belmont Lounge for drinks. Good mojitos and great conversations…
  • I should really write something up on using Dojo and still having a fast experience. In the meantime, go read Serving JavaScript Fast. It’s a great start. The short answer is: you should make friends with the build system (so you can use it against your own code) and the HTTP cache.
  • Pictures coming…
  • Alex has a good writeup.
• Some friends of ours threw a baby shower for Mandy on Sunday. Thanks to everyone for coming and the well wishes, advice, and support. And thanks for all the great swag. :)
• Took a few street shots in NYC walking back and forth from Grand Central to the IBM building on Madison Ave. Only had one person ask me not to take a photo (shop owner), and got a few decent shots. Just need to find my card reader… I missed my camera.

Great weather is a blessing.

• Bi-monthly haircut!
• Worked from Coffee Labs a bit this morning; while sitting there a woman across from me started working on a side portrait of me. I was totally unaware of it for quite a while, then caught it out of the corner of my eye. So now she’s drawing me, and I’m not sure if she knows that I know and I’m blogging about it. If only I had my camera today.
  • Oop, she knows! And she gave me the finished portrait. :)
• Portage
  • I am dumb. I’ve been testing my portage by running it through the test runner, but I hadn’t bothered to modify out main entry point to use the new urls / djConfig attribute / lack of loader paths / no more dojo.require("dojo.debug.console"). So when Will started working with it, he immediately ran into a non-working front page. *sigh*.
  • Found a bug in the build w.r.t. setting up prefix paths and requires. jburke fixed it the same night.

Bloom cherries bloom!

• Spring is officially here. Everything is blooming and starting to show leaves. This is good for me, as I’m mildly affected by that seasonal mood thing.
• Port port port
  • Attended the #dojo-meeting yesterday and I’m officially on the hook for dojo.undo. Time to start peeking at what others have done.
  • Got another patch into base. Yay! Just a little typo in cleanNodeEvents, which may be going away anyway?
  • Started working on porting some of our code that uses node positioning and really felt hampered by abs and the pixelizer not being public. Had to pull some silly crap to make my rev of dojo.widget.html.layout work right.
  • sjmiles checked in a big change to how connect / disconnect works, which I think is a wonderful thing. connect now returns an opaque handle which you pass into disconnect to let go of the connection. Formerly, you had to pass the same arguments to disconnect as you passed to connect, which just doesn’t work well when you want to pass in anonymous functions, or bind a free function to another object as context. This way, it’s always consistent and it should always work.
• VPN went down after the firewall maintenance last night. Yay for web mail and an intranet that lives on the public internet. If you’re going to run a business with remote offices and/or folks working from home offices, you really really need this. If you have to get on the VPN to report that the VPN is down, you’re in a bad place. Thankfully, we’re not in that place.
• Crib sheets showed up. Yarrrrrrrrrrrrr! Avast, a pillow!
• Foodage:
  • Breakfast: coffee / scone
  • Lunch: Chicken breast sandwich and a few black beans
  • Dinner: Yankee Stew with noodles. Today was Hacktastic.