Category: Etc

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.

Being a programmer in the spring is its own special ring of hell.

• I have a new desktop background. Thanks Dug.
• More integration of Dojo 0.9. Got our build playing nice with the new Dojo build system, which is JavaScript running inside Rhino (actually Dojo’s custom Rhino which supports syntax compression). There’s a ton to like here.
  • We maintain all of our JS in a bl directory, parallel to the dojo directory. The old build system didn’t do anything intelligent with this code, but the new one includes it in the release. Very nice. This makes copying a proper release a lot easier. Scons still makes my head spin a bit, but I think that’s mostly because I know about as much Python as I do Spanish.
  • We can layer builds, so we can have one glommed together hunk of JS depend on another glommed together hunk of JS. Technically this works with the old Dojo with a recent builder, but I hadn’t messed with it. This is great for different entry points into the site where we might be loading a ton of JS for the reader, but a subset of that ton for something like search or about. Figuring out how to partition things to best take advantage of the cache will be interesting. For the time being, I’m just going to do it per page and then revisit things once we have a handle on what’s needed where.
• My patch for cookie support was accepted into Core. Yay! It needs some more tests, though I wasn’t sure how to test the secure and domain properties sans a proper web sever. Have to see what the other devs think. Also got my feet wet with the test framework and test runner. So far, looks pretty good. Need to take a peek at how the async test stuff works.
• Main Street Sweets caught on fire yesterday. There’s a sign out front saying they’ll reopen soon… mmmmm ice cream. I was up the block at Coffee Labs when the fire happened; kinda wish I’d had my camera as it’s not often you get to see a ladder truck in action. Good luck and best wishes to them for a speedy recovery and reopening.
• Speaking of Coffee Labs, they’re now selling coffee wholesale to a few local Whole Foods and other various places. And they have a spiffy new web site!
• Food Report
  • Breakfast: Coffee (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe) from the Labs. Nice acidic, light body. I need to start taking my own mug if I’m going to keep getting coffee instead of caps. And a peanut butter sandwich. Mmmm dark chocolate peanut butter.
  • Lunch: Chicken fingers and rice from the Hack with a special treat: mocha bubble tea! The kids were all freaking out at how gross / awesome it was. The dichotomy was striking.
  • Dinner: Yankee Pot Roast and mashers (Hack) with a salty peach crumb cake for dessert. I had never thought to put salt in a crumb cake. I now know why.

Ka is a wheel.

• A clean(er) apartment is a happy apartment.
• Started the port to 0.9 in earnest. No cookies for me.
• Submitted a patch for a new dojo.cookie for 0.9. Cookies for me! The new test harness stuff is pretty sweet, need to dig into that some more.
• The new build system for Dojo is hotness incarnate. Layered builds + known Dojo + no more Ant + really really fast == happy Ben.
• svn_load_dirs and svnmerge are my friends. They really want to be your friends too.
• Definition of irony: Macy’s, who has huge “Celebrate Mother’s Day” signs all over the store does not have a maternity section.
• Food Report:
  • Breakfast at Coffee Labs. Small latte and butter scone.
  • Lunch at Hackley. Sloppy Joes, extra sloppy. “Georgia” salad.  Georgia salad is apparently salad with pecans and apples and blue cheese. Can someone from Georgia verify?
  • Dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. Weight Management Endive and Pear salad. Actually really quite good and supposedly around 500 calories. Keeping it south of 1000 at the Factory is quite an accomplishment. And I finally got the salad I kept talking about all last week…

Another good day around the new house.

• Played McGregor for the first time in the morning. Played the back first, went 41 / 46 with a tasty snowman on 7. It’s so April. The course layout is great, just need some time to get the greens smoothed out and rolling quite a bit quicker.
• Lunch at Panera, Crispini and a Greek salad. All in all pretty good.
• Packed up, drove back to Tarrytown, stopped in New Palz for dinner.
• Dinner at La Stazione. Nice place with fairly good food. Sitting outside for dinner is so nice.
• Back at the apartment in Tarrytown. Sigh.