ben lowery

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.

Dear planet, please don’t explode.

• Port port port
  • This is taking longer than I thought it would. We have a lot of code to go through and I can’t help “fixing” it.
  • dojo.query is replacing a ton of custom DOM-walking code I wrote.
  • Pulled in dojo.widget.html.layout to help us out with IE6 horribleness.
  • Pulled in MD5 for now. We really need to go HTTPS.
  • Will is going to start helping me kill this tomorrow. Hopefully done by tomorrow night.
• Peller posted an agenda for DDD/NY. Here’s a map showing how to get from Grand Central to the IBM office. Nice location!

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