Fleegix.org

Applying AJAX

AJAX is officially an entrenched technolgy buzzword. We've finally got Jacob Nielson intoning on his Weblog, "AJAX Sucks Most of the Time" . At least he did put that qualifier in there. I'm always inclined to take what Nielson says with a grain of salt,

When to comment code

I saw a pretty decent post off of Slashdot on commenting your code , from Make the Software Shine . This was interesting timing since yesterday as I was working on Scooby, I was noticing how many pieces of code were sadly lacking comments. Of course it was the knee-jerk guilt reaction

This one goes to 2.0

Just saw a link off Digg to an entry on the on the Microformats wiki about something called AHAH (Get it? "Aha!"). The article headline describes it as "AJAX 2.0," and breathlessly explains that is "backed by David Hansson, the creator of Ruby on

Bringing a tear to my eye

Today I had the unique opportunity to do a little work on OSAF's main application, Chandler , which is rapidly approaching its 0.6 release. The little pop-up box that displays when you select the "About Chandler" option in the help menu, as it turns out, is

Ruby CGI with DBI

I just got another e-mail about that old article I wrote for O'Reilly Network about using AJAX to do song search for my Webcast radio station. Interestingly though, this e-mail wasn't asking about the AJAX stuff -- this guy wanted to know about the server-side Ruby

AJAX/JavaScript libraries roundup

The guy over at EDevil's Weblog has done a really nice comprehensive roundup of AJAX/JavaScript libraries . OSAF has a similar page that we originally used to narrow the list for what we wanted to use in Scooby, and it appears people are adding to it, but EDevil&

Cross-domain AJAX requests

I got an e-mail last week from a developer who is trying to do something kind of interesting with AJAX and a networked application: I have a WebSphere application running on my local machine. I can't do some of the data validation myself so I have to connect

AJAX, AJAX, everywhere

Well, looks like everybody's finally on board the AJAX hype train, and it's pulling out of the station. There was an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal Online about what it describes as a "hot new, Web-based technology called Ajax" which is attracting

Missing dateAdd, dateDiff

Today one of my co-workers shared a post he found by Alex King on a Nasty PHP Oddity dealing with dates. The issue was caused by doing date incrementation using the simple expedient of adding or subtracting 86400 seconds to a Unix-style timestamp to move forward or back a day.

JavaScript ` strftime `

We have to do a lot of date formatting in the Scooby UI, and after about the fifth time of writing a one-off function to format a date in a certain way, I realized what I really needed was a JavaScript implementation of the normal strftime function you find in

Layin' it out old skool

Yesterday I spent most of the day working from a Photoshop file from Mimi, hammering together the new "Chandler Landing Page" for the upcoming 0.6 release of the Chandler PIM client. It's in SVN, so if you're so inclined you can see the

Firefox opacity irritation

Ever have one of those days where you spend hours and hours on a single bug ... and make zero progress? Yeah, that was me today. Firefox (both Linux and Windows, so far) exhibits an irritating bug with some very particular conditions, which is making me tear my hair out. It

Multithreadedness and DOM-node madness

Spent most of the day today wrestling with implementation details for Scooby. It was an interesting day in that my co-worker Bobby learned some stuff about JavaScript, and I learned some stuff about good appliation design. The first issue we sort of ran aground on was the weird 'multithreadedness&

Degradeable AJAX

There's a nice article over at ParticleTree on the Hows and Whys of Degradeable AJAX . The first suggestion they have for doing a really degradeable interface is to do your development with JavaScript turned off. Now, in today's day and age, I tend to think that

Ubuntu de Nihongo ga \...

Finally got around to trying to set up Japanese-language support on my Ubuntu laptop (running 5.04, "Hoary Hedgehog"), which is the machine I've been using day-to-day since starting work at OSAF. With each new Linux distro I've used, the process for setting up

Jedi mind-tricks?

A day or so ago I read Tim O'Reilly's long article on the question What is Web 2.0 -- part of the ongoing discussion of where the Web and technology in general seem to be heading. An interesting part of that seems to be the

Escape from Houston

This week I'm out here at the OSAF office in San Francisco. It's a nice change to be someplace where there are open businesses and the gas stations actuallly have gas. I rode out Rita in a hotel room in northwest Houston, after evacuating from my

Microsoft Office 12 Video

Yeah, so they did away completely with the standard toolbar in Microsoft Office. Here's fairly lengthy video interview with Julie Larson-Green, the manager of the Office team, describing the new interface. I really need to get my act together here. I saw this last week, and am only

Fleegix on FastCGI

I was seeing a lot of sporadic errors running Typo with mod_ruby -- typical of the problems I have seen trying to run multiple, disparate Ruby Web-apps under a single Apache instance with mod_ruby. This is apparently due to the way that the Ruby interpreter embedded in the

Fun with data islands

Besides all the recent work on the Scooby week-view prototype, I also recently got to work on a fun little one-off project that involved a presentation some of the OSAF folks are going to make to the Common Solutions Group . They wanted a chart-like document that showed the work going

A public spanking

I awoke this morning to find, via an e-mail from a kind co-worker, that I was the recpient of a very public spanking (and not the warm, sexy kind) in a post on Bob Ippolito's Weblog . Bob took serious issue with "misinformation" about his MochiKit JavaScript

Finally, Typo

Okay, I've finally decided to stop lying to myself. I know I'll never have the time to implement comments or RSS feeds -- or any of that other stuff you expect with a decent Weblog -- with my own handrolled Webapp. So, I finally did it.

The old-fashioned way

My new co-worker Bobby (congrats, man!!) just sent me an e-mail asking about my last post. He wanted to know what tools are available to find memory leaks in IE. Unfortunately, I don't know of any tool to find stuff like that. (I'd love to know

Surprise, surprise

Of course now I find out that indeed even my relatively simple prototype for the Scooby week view leaks memory like a sieve in IE. Yeah, it had that allocated memory in a seriously vice-like deathgrip. Ah, such a joy. After tracking down the offending closure (an event handler, natch)

Memory leakage in IE

Doing a little reading today about memory leaks in IE with complex JavaScript applications. I want to make sure Scooby's front-end code doesn't end up with any ugly, hard-to-track-down leakage. Does anybody know if Firefox or Safari suffers from this kind of stuff? I found a