Matthew Eernisse

'Jibe' vs. 'jive'

I figure it's about time for another nice, refreshing round of English Totalitarianism. Here's another one I hear surprisingly often -- people saying 'jive' when they really mean 'jibe.' 'Jive' has two basic meanings. One is musical: "jazzy music or

HaXe universal programming language

Now that I really have a look at it, I wish I'd gone to this OSCON session. HaXe is a high-level programming languaged developed by Nicolas Cannasse aimed at use in Web-application development. According to the haXe site, it will compile to JavaScript, Flash, or to

Multi-select for JavaScript form serialization

I just got an e-mail yesterday from Craig Anderson at SitePoint, letting me know that one of the folks who bought my book had noticed a small deficiency with the function that handles form serialization for the example code in the book -- the mellifluously named 'formData2QueryString.' (Man,

Second Life and avatars

This past weekend was the Second Life Community Convention in San Francsisco. I happened to be out at the OSAF office this past week, so I was lucky enough to be able to check out some of the festivities on Friday night, but missed Mitch's talk on Saturday.

DDOS spam attack on EpiphanyRadio

Nothing like a nice denial-of-service to end your day. Last night at exactly 9pm CDT, my server was hit by some heavy DDOS spam siege. This site (Fleegix.org), and my Webcast radio station, EpiphanyRadio , are on the box -- along with a couple of other sites. I still

Label placement with Web form elements

Amy Hoy's talk at OSCON 2006 reminded me of a really nice study I saw on UXMatters on that provides some emperical data to back up the 'common wisdom' for placement of labels for elements in Web forms. The study uses eye-tracking data to measure

OSCON 2006

Our presentation for OSCON 2006 on Cosmo/Scooby went fairly well it seems, especially given how much content we were trying to stuff into such a short amount of time. Kevin Yank over at SitePoint did some really nice reporting on the presentation for the SitePoint blogs. Here's

Blogging at SitePoint

I've been invited to be an 'occasional blogger' over at the SitePoint Blogs . I'll be posting stuff about Web tech mostly, but also probably some on design and open source as well.

Joel on JavaScript

Joel Spolsky talks about how handy those first-class functions can be. Kind of eerie seeing Joel putting up example code in JavaScript. What is this world coming to? Nice shout-out to Steve Yegge at the end.

JSON is a Web standard -- RFC 4627

My colleague Lisa Dusseault just sent an e-mail to the scooby-dev mailing list saying that JSON is now an IETF standard. Check out RFC 4627: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt This is great news for all the Web devs trying to explain to the PHB

Steve Yegge: Web apps will 'win'

I'm in Portland, Oregon this week for O'Reilly's OSCON . I'll be presenting a bit about Scooby's Web UI on Friday. Over at the Sztywny Blog (wow, someone with a last name as hard-to-spell as mine), there's

Speak JavaScript or die

Another interesting couple of salvoes in the ongoing "is not, is too" argument of whether or not Real Web Developers have to know JavaScript, or if it's okay for them to rely on server-side 'helpers' and JS libraries. Over at DOM Scripting, in

'Flesh out' vs. 'flush out'

Time to let out my innner English Fascist. Yeah, sure, I'm a programmer now, but I have a degree in English Lit, and I spent three years teaching English in the public schools in Japan . I may have an unhealthy obsession with English minutiae, but at least I

Form input buttons and the box model

Posted by mde [ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 02:42:00 GMT ] I was playing around with styled buttons and text inputs for forms yesterday, and ran into an interesting (yeah, we all know what that means) CSS issue. A text input and button input with identical styling (it was something

Mac switchers -- to Ubuntu

Posted by mde [ Wed, 05 Jul 2006 04:50:00 GMT ] Now even Tim O'Reilly has chimed in on the subject of the announcements by Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow that they are switching to Ubuntu Linux. All I have to add is that the story of a

Spoo on YouTube

Posted by mde [ Tue, 04 Jul 2006 03:28:00 GMT ] I can't stop giggling. I was checking out BoingBoing and noticed this post that talks about NHK getting its collective panties in a wad about a raft of parody videos on YouTube involving a character from one

Scrambled eggs 'round midnight

Posted by mde [ Mon, 03 Jul 2006 05:20:00 GMT ] Sometimes when my little boys are riding that fine line between the normal level of screaming and hyperactivity (i.e., Monkey House at the Zoo Level) and and completely out of control (i.e, Total Intergalactic Destruction Level), it

BYOAWA Errata/Comments, Part 1

Posted by mde [ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 04:22:00 GMT ] I kind of like how the acronym for the title of my book starts with 'BYO' -- kind of makes it sound like you might start doing keg stands a few chapters into it. It's only

Rails with Ruby from source on Ubuntu Breezy

Posted by mde [ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 04:04:00 GMT ] Trying to get Rails up and running on my laptop under Ubuntu Breezy Badger, I ran into some serious irritation. Rails is fairly picky about which version of Ruby it will work with -- it requires either 1.8.2

Tasty Ruby-on-Rails Kool Aid

Posted by mde [ Sun, 18 Jun 2006 02:13:00 GMT ] Holy crap, does this stuff taste sweet. After playing around with Rails for awhile now, I can understand why it's gotten so over-hyped. As a guy who's been working on different types of Web

Ajax book launch

Posted by mde [ Fri, 16 Jun 2006 04:25:00 GMT ] According to the nice folks at SitePoint , my book, Build Your Own Ajax Web Applications (AKA the 'jigsaw book'), will be launching at the beginning of next week. A quick note -- SitePoint has agreed to release all

Table cellpadding and cellspacing with DOM methods

Posted by mde [ Fri, 16 Jun 2006 03:59:00 GMT ] It's right there in the spec , plain as day, but it still makes no frigging sense. I can understand the camelCaps when using DOM methods to set CSS properties with hyphens in them -- like 'borderRight'

A sentence you don't type every day

Posted by mde [ Fri, 02 Jun 2006 05:07:28 GMT ] Putting my boys to bed tonight after their baths, one of the twins was running around his room naked, wearing a Darth Vader mask. Ah, the joys of fatherhood.

Getting the scrollbar width in pixels

Posted by mde [ Wed, 31 May 2006 03:42:00 GMT ] Working on the new fluid layout code for Scooby, I had a seemingly intractable problem -- I needed to do percent-based side-to-side alignment of elements inside two div elements, one positioned directly above the other. The catch

Vitamin article on serving JavaScript fast

Posted by mde [ Wed, 24 May 2006 05:25:00 GMT ] Just read a nice article over on Vitamin about Serving JavaScript fast , written by Cal Henderson from Flickr. He touches on a pretty broad range of techniques -- caching, reducing the number connections for downloading, loading your JS libraries asynchronously,