Fleegix.org

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 why using JSON

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 a nice

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 a

'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

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.

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 apps

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

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 was that

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

CSS position and width in percents

Posted by mde [ Thu, 18 May 2006 16:18:00 GMT ] I'm in the process of converting all the positioning of UI elements in Scooby from absolute pixel positions to percents, to allow on-the-fly horizontal resizing of the entire UI. I've got it far enough along

The Ajax Experience conference

Posted by mde [ Thu, 18 May 2006 06:54:00 GMT ] This past week I was at the Ajax Experience Conference in San Francisco. Here's my general take on the Ajaxey festivities. General points of interest: 1. The number of people. The organizers said they were anticipating around

IE6 radio buttons with DOM

Posted by mde [ Sun, 30 Apr 2006 03:09:00 GMT ] In the process of working on some DOM code for Scooby that produces form elements, I ran into some really interesting speed bumps making sure the code works properly in IE6. One of them dealt with dynamically created radio

Tiling and a sparse matrix

Posted by mde [ Tue, 18 Apr 2006 05:33:00 GMT ] We've finally got code to deal with event collision in Scooby for both areas of the event canvas -- the timed events in the scrolling area in the middle, and now the all-day events at the top.

PHP scalability at Jobby and Digg

Posted by mde [ Thu, 13 Apr 2006 03:45:00 GMT ] Interesting look at PHP scalability in comparison to Java -- specifically its use at two 'Web 2.0' companies, Jobby and Digg . Does a decent basic breakdown of the different costs -- and the conclusion seems to

Event overlap in Scooby

Posted by mde [ Tue, 11 Apr 2006 02:47:00 GMT ] Over the weekend I went on a bit of a coding binge and implemented event block overlap in Scooby's 'timed' events (events that have a start and end time -- not 'all day'