Feast on slides: How Custom Events Will Save the Universe, a talk I gave yesterday at TXJS. (Travel can be fun, but you can’t beat conferences held where you live.)
Category: Development
Jun7
Mar26
GitHub now has even better commenting on commits. Better UI (collaborator highlighting, comment preview), better functionality (repo collaborators can edit anyone’s comment), better aesthetics. I use Git. I’m not wild about using it. I could take or leave it, to be honest. But I would stand in front of a tank for GitHub.
There are many geeks out there with a soft spot for Mercurial, or Bazaar, or darcs, or an even-more-neckbeard-y DVCS, and they often wonder why Git is getting all the love. It’s because Git has GitHub. Mercurial seems to be feature-equivalent to Git (at least in my limited experience), and Mercurial has BitBucket, which seems to be pretty good. But it’s not as good as GitHub.
Nobody should be ashamed that they can’t replicate GitHub’s success. It’s really hard to do the web well. It’s hard even to really smart people, of which I’m sure there are a few at BitBucket. The only people who think it’s easy are idiots. You can spot these people easily: they’re the ones who comment on TechCrunch posts and chortle that they could build a Stack Overflow clone over a weekend.
Feb13
Don’t slip a concrete dildo into someone’s box of Fruit Loops. They won’t be happy with your Morning Breakfast Surprise. Put the concrete dildo in a clearly labeled box, with instructions. Then when someone encounters a problem, “Hey, something is screwing me here. Maybe it’s the concrete dildo?” at least they know to ask.
Jan19
Mock geolocation
Useful if you’re working on a website meant for mobile devices. Firefox 3.5 has geolocation, but I use this with Safari and GreaseKit. Replace with whatever latitude and longitude you prefer, naturally.
if (!('geolocation' in navigator)) {
navigator.geolocation = {
watchPosition: function(success, f, options) {
var broadcast = function() {
var position = {
coords: {
latitude: 30.2696384,
longitude: -97.74947,
accuracy: 10000,
},
timestamp: (new Date()).valueOf()
};
success(position);
};
broadcast();
window.setInterval(broadcast, 10000);
}
};
}Jan2
A stream-of-consciousness browsing session brought me to this writeup on how the Source engine deals with lag. Also serves as a parable for web developers — don’t rely on the client to validate input, for the same reason that a game server can’t trust a participant to tell it if that bullet hit anything. See also Ninjam, a clever latency workaround for online jam sessions. And consider that even without the inherent delays of Internet traffic, the speed of light would be a constraint on distant collaboration.
Nov25
Thomas Fuchs just pushed out the alpha 5 release of scripty2. This is the first release to include the small handful of UI controls I’ve been writing. The controls are designed to be compatible with jQuery UI’s Theme API — meaning that, for instance, a theme built with ThemeRoller could be dropped into a site using scripty2, and vice-versa. More to come!
Sep12
The “Configurable” pattern
If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML).
I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart (line chart, pie chart, bar chart) …
Aug28
Deep-extending objects in JavaScript
Today I’m going to be talking about Object.extend without much introduction or context. Bear with me. This is a prerequisite blog post for something I’ll be talking about in a few days.
Extending objects in JavaScript
Prototype has a function named Object.extend. It takes two objects and copies all properties from the second object onto the first. This is …
Aug25
Panel audio from The Ajax Experience
I just discovered the existence of audio (and slides) for two of the sessions I was involved with at The Ajax Experience 2008, held in Boston last September.
Which is to say: I knew that audio existed, but didn’t know it was yet available anywhere.
The first was PPK’s main-hall session: Top 10 Cross-Browser Issues. This was a …
May23
Yesterday, Sunlight Labs announced Apps for America 2. The follow-up contest marks the recent launch of data.gov
by soliciting apps that find interesting ways to crunch that site’s numbers. (Not sure if I’ll enter yet; I haven’t had much time to see what data.gov has to offer.)
