Fleegix.org

Comments are back -- die, spammer asshats

Just added a bit of anti-spam fu to the comments field. Not sure how well it will work, but I'll give 'er a go and see. Comments are back, as long as the spammers stay gone. Comments ::: {} mde (2008-06-18) ::: {} Can I actually post a comment now? Let&

Alex Russell's talk at Google I/O 2008 -- comments, nits, and a quibble

Just sat down and watched Alex Russell's talk at Google I/O (from the end of last month) on the state of the browser, entitled Can We Get There From Here? As always, Alex did a great job of weaving the disparate factors in play (and the weird,

Comments are shut down

Comments are currently down because of the usual spammer asshats posting spurious comments to plug the usual bizarre shit you'd never imagine anyone would actually buy. PmpknPi is nicely minimalist, so it should be easy to hack in some kind of spammer-asshat protection -- if someone hasn'

Up and running with PmpknPi

Time for a change -- I've been needing to move my blog to a different server for awhile now, so I'm using this opportunity to change from Typo (a Rails-based blog platform) to PmpknPi , which advertises itself as "A RESTful Blog API written in Merb.

OSAF 2.0 to Seesmic pre-alpha

Posted by mde [ Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT ] On Tuesday of this week, OSAF announced a significant restructuring of the organization. OSAF is now moving forward into a new phase of its existence with a smaller team -- a team that I will not be a part

Fleegix.js JavaScript Toolkit 0.4.1 release

Somehow amidst all the chaos that is currently my life, I've packaged up version 0.4.1 of Fleegix.js for release. You can download the new release at the usual location . This is primarily a bugfix release. Here are some of the fixes and improvements: * Fixes in

PHP is the McDonald's of programming languages

Tim Bray has a nice post that succinctly describes the situation with PHP in 2008 -- why it's still popular, but its growth continues to slow. I think that the various pluses and minuses could be reduced even more by simply thinking of PHP as the McDonald'

Rails polymorphic associations and migrations

Posted by mde [ Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:06:00 GMT ] In a Rails app I was recently working on, the data model called for associating sets of related business objects. Initially it looked like I was going to have to handle it with sub-classing. Sub-classing and prog-rock keyboardists I

FLOSS Usability Sprint V

I recently participated in FLOSS Usability Sprint V , an event run by the FLOSS Usability organization to foster better usability in open-source software, and to encourage collaboration between usability/design/UX practitioners and the free/libre/open-source community. Open-source software in general is sadly not known for its stellar usability,

Test for broken images -- works in Safari

Posted by mde [ Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:06:00 GMT ] I've been doing a bit of work recently on the Windmill project for OSAF -- it's pretty usable already, and we're just now approaching the 0.2 release. One of the pieces I

MS to deliver Silverlight for Linux

Posted by mde [ Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:45:00 GMT ] Okay, now I'm a bit more inclined to believe the guys at Microsoft are serious about this stuff. An MS press release has announced they're working with the Mono guys to deliver Silverlight for Linux:

BarCamp Houston 2007

BarCamp Houston 2 was great. The Houston Technology Center was a really nice venue, and it was cool to hook up with so many locals who are into bleeding-edge tech. Nice too, to get some faces to go with Twitter avatar pics. I was also pretty happy to see three

JavaScript lazy function definition

I've been off for most of the past week as my mom had our boys (keeping all the grandkids together for the week, frighteningly enough), and my wife and I took the opportunity to do some house-hunting. We're looking for something with a bit more yard

OSCON 2007

OSCON was great this year -- I'm really glad I was able to go, especially given all the added pressure of Chandler Server's end-of-release push. The content was decent, although I wouldn't say stellar. This time around I found a bit more value in

IE background CSS and onclick/onmousedown

I recently fixed an IE-only bug in Chandler Server that resulted from moving the base listener for some event delegation code from the body to another node lower down in the DOM tree. Interesting that I've never tripped over this before, because it's so totally glaring

2007 OSCON-season announcement bonanza

First John Lam announces Iron Ruby , to be released under something called the Microsoft Permissive Licesnse . It's basically a rebranded Apache license -- and honestly, seeing that stuff on a Web page with an MS logo had me envisioning some alternate-reality Steve Ballmer with a full head of

Hierarchical forms with fleegix.form

A common hack you see with both Ruby/Rails and PHP is the use of brackets in form element names (e.g., name="foo[bar]" ) to 'namespace' the form -- when values submitted from elements like this reach the server, they are converted into properties on

Steve Yegge's JavaScript port of Rails

Posted by mde [ Thu, 05 Jul 2007 05:30:00 GMT ] Man, I've really been buried in work and family stuff -- I totally missed this bit of news. Apparently when Steve Yegge couldn't convince the good folks at Google to start using Ruby and Rails,

JavaScript memory leaks fixed in IE6 on Windows XP

Looks like security update MS07-033 includes GDR fix 929874 for JScript memory leaks in IE6 on Windows XP . The description seems to indicate that the fix is good for memleaks of both the circular-reference and closure variety. There are of course a lot of people taking the "cold, dead

Fleegix.js 0.3.2 release

Took a bit of time this afternoon and put together all the recent fixes and improvements to Fleegix.js into a release, version 0.3.2 . There are a bunch of miscellaneous goodies in there -- a couple of handy utility functions in the new fleegix.dom and fleegix.css

Back from San Fran, and tag, I'm 'it' -- Firefox add-ons

I just got back from two weeks out in San Francisco at the OSAF offices. It was a great trip, and as always I really enjoyed the wonderful OSAF hospitality -- something that I always try my best not to take for granted. This time around, with the exception of

Down the Python path with Django

Working at OSAF, I am surrounded by a bunch of uber-Pythonistas, I'm pretty comfortable doing most server-side or scripting tasks in Ruby, but ever since I started work there, I've been wanting to give Python a go. So, the other night I decided to pull the

Fleegix.js, a lightweight JavaScript toolkit

Posted by mde [ Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:16:00 GMT ] Awhile back I took a bit of a break from blog posts, and created a Web site for Fleegix.js . Fleegix.js a lightweight, cross-browser set of JavaScript libraries for building dynamic Web-app UIs. From the Web site: Fleegix.

JSON, JavaScript, and CSRF security holes

Fortify Security's recent paper on JavaScript Hijacking (PDF) has stirred up a lot of interest online around the subject of JavaScript/JSON security. Some of the articles are a bit alarmist, but it is a vulnerability worth understanding a bit better. It's based on techniques similar

MSXML versions and XMLHttpRequest

I got an e-mail this past week with an interesting question from a guy who was reading my Ajax book: why you do the check for 'Msxml2.XMLHTTP' instead of 'Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0' which is apparently the latest release from Microsoft that has numerous improvements?