rc3.org Rafe Colburn on software development (and other topics)

Posts Tagged ‘JavaScript’

Links from May 31st

In Commentary on 31 May 2009 tagged ajax, blogs, drupal, firefox, Google, JavaScript, links, Microsoft, search, security, The Media with no comments

• Security Fix: Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension. This is why nobody trusts Microsoft. Pulling this sort of stunt as an OS vendor is really irresponsible.
• Scott Rosenberg: Rosen and Sotomayor: Blame it on the blog. After writing a really irresponsible hit piece, Jeffrey Rosen tries to blame his own crappy reporting on the fact that he was writing a blog post. Even though he wasn’t.
• drupal.org: Apache Solr Search Integration. How to use Solr for site search with Drupal.
• drupal.org: Zappos.com and Drupal. A case study.
• Ajaxian: GWT team Wave’s goodbye to annoying question; It’s the API stupid. How Google Wave makes use of Google Web Toolkit.

Links from May 26th

In Commentary on 28 May 2009 tagged css, design, JavaScript, law, links, politics, Ruby on Rails with no comments

I have a number of Sonya Sotomayor links today.

• SCOTUSblog: Judge Sotomayor’s Appellate Opinions in Civil Cases. A review of her actual work. This is the important stuff when evaluating judges.
• Daytime Running Lights: Simple Wins. Case study of a realtime chat server built using CouchDB.
• The Quine Page (self-reproducing code). A quine is a program that produces its own source as its output.
• Tim Bray: The Web vs. the Fallacies. How the Web makes many of the fallacies of distributed computing less fallacious.
• SCOTUSblog: The Dynamic of the Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. She’s as qualified as any other recent nominee, she doesn’t seem like she’ll expand the ideological boundaries of the Supreme Court, and she’s going to be confirmed.
• Maintainable Software: Minifying Your Rails Javascript. Rake task to minify JavaScript as part of the build process.
• Glenn Greenwald: Justice Sam Alito on empathy and judging. The fixation on Obama’s empathy criteria for Supreme Court justices is a canard.
• Shhhaw! On Redesigning the Front Page of Talking Points Memo.

Links from May 22nd

In Commentary on 23 May 2009 tagged design, JavaScript, links, politics, privacy, security, transparency with 2 comments

Today’s batch of links:

• Alan Clarke. Saw a link to these brilliantly designed posters for the 2012 Olympic games on Twitter. I absolutely love the diving poster.
• Transformation in the Federal Sector: Data.gov Arrives!. Announcement from the consulting firm that built it.
• Sunlight Labs: Everything We Know About Data.gov. It’s a LAMP site.
• Jake Brewer: Data.Gov Launches: Why You Should Care and What You Should Do.
• Schneier on Security: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs. Sort of like my post about the uniqueness of various phrases this week. Generally speaking, the amount of data required to uniquely identify something is smaller than we think.
• Anil Dash: Flags, Windows, Lucky Numbers and Hidden Mickeys. How the new Windows logo builds on the old Windows logo.
• Schillmania: Javascript Malware Analysis: A Case Study.

Links from May 20

In Commentary on 20 May 2009 tagged economics, fonts, JavaScript, links, music, performance, public speaking, Ruby on Rails, sports, testing with no comments

Long delayed roundup of links:

• Dan Benjamin: Top 10 Programming Fonts. I’m currently giving Inconsolata a whirl.
• Jasmin Blanchette: The Little Manual of API Design. A very interesting looking PDF that I intend to read.
• John Quiggin: Austrian Business Cycle Theory. A very well written critique.
• Advanced NFL Stats: Draft Success by Team. Not enough attention is paid to the long term results of the draft.
• James Carr: TDD Anti-Patterns. I’m a sucker for lists like this.
• Firediff. A diff plugin for Firebug.
• Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: Ending The ga.js Wait.Using Dojo to address some of the problems with ga.js, the JavaScript file used by Google Analytics.
• Eliot Spitzer: If Judge Posner believes this, the world really has changed – One of the most prominent free market intellectuals thinks the market is incapable of setting CEO pay. Judge Posner has gone on to say many even more provocative things lately. This week he’s guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan.
• AisleOne: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Design. Very good article on improving your use of type.
• James Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers. Tips for conference speakers.
• Ajaxian: FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP. A means of packaging debug information for Firebug to consume with AJAX responses.
• LearnHub: How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!). DNS performance is an underrated piece of the overall site performance picture.
• Seed Magazine: Getting Past the Pie Chart. On the state of data visualization.
• USA Today: Announcing baseball’s all-stars in the broadcast booth. Ranking the baseball broadcasters.
• A.V. Club: Turn off the shuffle: 25 great albums that work best when listened to from start to finish.
• Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008. The results are interesting, but what I really like is the CSS used to create the charts.
• Web Style Guide 3. Filing this away for later.
• Chad Fowler: 20 Rails Development No-No’s. Compiled from responses to a request for feedback on Twitter.
• Last.fm Blog: Mapreduce Bash Script. Very elegant hack.
• Migrating from svn to a distributed VCS. This is specific to the Python code base, but it is a great general resource.
• Digg the Blog: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. Something I need to digest.
• Patrick Peak and Paul Barry: Presentation on BrowserCMS. It’s an up and coming CMS built using Ruby on Rails.
• Rogers Cadenhead: Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain. On the risks of relying on the technical governance of an authoritarian dictatorship.
• dotfiles.org: .zshrc. A collection of zsh init scripts.
• UXmatters: Refining Data Tables. Tips on creating usable reports.
• Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions. From my recent zsh obsession.
• Fried CPU: zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!. zsh advocacy.
• 2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment. This is where I got the idea to try zsh in the first place.
• Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline . An amazing set of photos.
• James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. This happens to me all the time.
• Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. Very much applicable to software development.
• Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. Who doesn’t want to confit their own duck?

Links from March 23rd

In Commentary on 24 March 2009 tagged browsers, financial crisis, Java, JavaScript, links, open source, pdf, Ruby, science, Web development, World of Warcraft with no comments

There are a whole ton of links in the backlog today.

• xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project. A tool to render HTML in PDF format (supports CSS).
• Antonio Cangiano: Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009. A plea for Ruby developers to move to Ruby 1.9.1. Getting all of the libraries and Rails plugins updated is going to be a big job.
• Ajazxian: Richard Stallman: Free the Javascript. People make full of rms, but he is an extremist for a good cause. His radical stance in many ways frames a debate that is worth having.
• TV Guide: Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore Answers Our Burning Questionsm. I totally get the unhappiness with all of the deus ex machina aspects of the series finale, but I enjoyed it anyway.
• Thoughtbot: Testing Rake’s Integration. How to write integration tests for Rake tasks.
• Doug Bowman: Goodbye Google. Remarks on leaving Google. Nice reading for all of us who were never offered a job by Google.
• The Big Picture: Scenes from 30,000 meters above. High altitude photographs taken by a weather balloon launched by Spanish students.
• The Best Pictures from the BOREALIS Archives. Another student weather balloon project.
• Karl Martino: Here’s to dreaming big and doing it. More links relating to the weather balloon project.
• What they make: The highest paid chief executives in digital media. I’m surprised the CEO of Tivo makes more than the CEO of Netflix.
• WoW Insider: Authenticator app coming to iPhones, iPods, and other mobile devices. Blizzard is expanding the authentication options that prevent World of Warcraft account theft.
• FiveThirtyEight: Why AIG Paid the “Bonuses”. Most interesting remarks I’ve read on this topic.
• istartedsomething: Expression Web SuperPreview makes cross-browser testing like moist delicious cake. Seems like a major advance in cross-browser testing.
• Laughing Meme: Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. Insightful remarks on the Facebook redesign.
• New York Times: Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search. I still don’t understand MapReduce as well as I should.
• Antonio Cangiano: Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database. Still looking for the right project to use this technology for.
• The Annotated Watchmen. For after I finish the graphic novel.

Links from January 24th

In Commentary on 25 January 2009 tagged copyright, DRM, education, games, JavaScript, links, Ruby with 2 comments

• Magnus Holm: When in Doubt, Turn to _why. A comparison of different algorithms for parsing nested parameters from a query string in Ruby. Very educational.
• Waxy.org: Pirating the 2009 Oscars. Andy Baio’s annual report on which Oscar-nominated films are available via file sharing. This year’s list is larger than ever.
• WoW Insider: Ezra Wheathoof is Thunder Bluff’s newest Elder. Ezra Chatterton was a young World of Warcraft player who died of cancer. Blizzard continues to memorialize him in the game.
• New York Times: Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. This is fascinating but I don’t really know what to make of it.
• John Resig: OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. Walkthrough of a GreaseMonkey script that solves one relatively weak CAPTCHA implementation. Put this in the “I didn’t know you could do that in JavaScript” file.

Links from January 23rd

In Commentary on 24 January 2009 tagged css, design, games, human rights, icons, Java, JavaScript, links, sports, war with no comments

I’m going back to packaging up my del.icio.us bookmarks daily and posting them here.

• The Black Triangle is an article from 2004 about game development found by Jason Kottke. It describes the disconnect between programmers and users, where users are unimpressed by seeing something relatively simple on the screen, and developers are thrilled at the huge amount of work that into getting that simple thing onto the screen. I’ve found it’s never a good idea to show customers the Black Triangle. It always comes later in the process than they’d think and often freaks them out.
• waferbaby: The Setup. Interviews with people about their computer setups. I can never read enough of these.
• New York Times: Gazan Doctor and Peace Advocate Loses 3 Daughters to Israeli Fire and Asks Why. The horrific cost of war.
• Dr. Saturday: Australian Rules’ blood’s worth bottling. A proposed playoff structure for college football. A more interesting approach
• Going.com: Newspapers Covering Obama’s Inauguration. A huge collection of newspaper front pages from President Obama’s inauguration. And yes, it still feels weird to type “President Obama.”
• CSS Newbie: The EqualHeights jQuery Plugin. I’m always looking for better ways to set columns to equal heights on a Web page.
• Glenn Greenwald: Mohammed Jawad and Obama’s efforts to suspend military commissions. When anyone questions whether the United States tortures people or tortures the wrong people, you can forward them the story of Mohammed Jawad, a teenager captured in Afghanistan who was coerced to confess to killing US soldiers with a grenade. The military prosecutor in his case petitioned that he should be released and ultimately resigned rather than prosecute him.

jQuery is awesome

In Commentary on 14 January 2009 tagged JavaScript, jQuery, open source with 2 comments

I’ve been convinced for some time that jQuery is the best JavaScript library around. What I am coming to realize is that it’s also one of the best-run open source projects around as well. jQuery 1.3 (released today) has a new selector engine, a key component of any modern JavaScript library. To encourage other projects to adopt their selector engine, the jQuery project has turned it over to the Dojo Foundation, which currently manages the Dojo Toolkit, a jQuery competitor:

More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers. We saw an opportunity to give something back to not just the jQuery community but to the JavaScript development community as a whole; and at the same time be able to collaborate with developers of other libraries on a single, unified, selector engine. We feel that there’s too much competition and not enough collaboration occurring and so we put our coud out on the line as a good first step towards working together.

As a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve turned over Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation (an excellent non-profit well suited for this project, not to be confused with the Dojo Toolkit). We wanted a common meeting ground where all developers would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.

Beware excessive abstractions

In Commentary on 9 December 2008 tagged JavaScript, software development, SQL with 1 comment

jQuery creator John Resig warns developers away from libraries that hide JavaScript behind other programming languages, and makes a great point about relying overly much on abstractions to make your life “easier”:

When you use a pure-JavaScript library (such as jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, etc.) you are still programming using the JavaScript language. In the case of jQuery a large number of users, who have either never programmed JavaScript before or never programmed before, acquire a good grasp of how to use JavaScript – accented by the use of the library. A pure JavaScript library makes annoying tasks simple, the largest of which being cross-browser support. It does nothing to dilute the quality of the JavaScript-authoring experience. In fact I would argue that JavaScript libraries do much to give JavaScript a particular style and feel. Code written with Prototype feels very different from code written with jQuery – and this is fine since it’s giving the user the option to develop in the JavaScript language how they best see fit.

In the case of these language abstractions you are gaining none of the benefit of learning the JavaScript language. When a leak in the abstraction occurs (and it will occur – just as it’s bound to occur in any abstraction) what resources do you have, as a developer, to correct the problem? If you’ve learned nothing about JavaScript then you stand no chance in trying to repair, or work around, the issue.

This is a problem I often run into with developers who rely on persistence/ORM frameworks. They’re great, but if you’re dealing with relational databases, you really need to know SQL. These frameworks make a nice supplement, but they’re no substitute.

Update: Be sure to read the comments for a well thought out counterpoint.

Why Firebug is awesome

In Commentary on 1 July 2008 tagged JavaScript, Web development with 1 comment

jQuery creator John Resig explains the advances that FireBug brought to JavaScript development. I’d say that I didn’t really take JavaScript seriously until I started using FireBug.

He also has a list of potential improvements to FireBug, including porting it to work with Internet Explorer. Given the amount of time Web developers spend debugging weird issues in Internet Explorer, a tool like FireBug would literally be life changing.