JavaScript – Page 2

Tag: JavaScript (page 2 of 3)

Links from July 9th

Discover Magazine: The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State. Neuroscientists explain my usual state of mind.
FireQuery. jQuery-specific enhancements for Firebug.
The Zinn-Segaran Experiential Greatness Scale. You never know when this is going to come in handy.
Bruce Schneier: The Pros and Cons of Password Masking. I think it all depends on the environment in which the password will be entered.
Threat Level: Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case, Overrules Jury. This lady is a hateful loser, but making it a crime to violate a site's terms of service is awfully bad law.
Shared Equity Mortgages. An interesting idea for people who don’t have enough money to make a down payment on their house.
Vanity Fair: Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin. An awesome article that ran on Sarah Palin just before she resigned.
Glenn Greenwald: The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture. In the discussions of torture, the number of people who were waterboarded is discussed frequently, the number of people in US custody who have died almost never is.
O’Reilly Radar: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard. Pretty amazing application of Drupal.
O’Reilly Radar: Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt. There’s a whole other world out there I barely know exists.
Firefox 3.5 for developers. The stuff you need to know.
Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today. I thought it was a bad idea back then.
Robert Reich: Why the Critics of a Public Option for Health Care Are Wrong. I’m not giving up on real health care reform.
FiveThirtyEight: George F. Will Admits Public Option Will Cut Costs. At least half the stuff people are saying about health insurance isn’t true.
Slate: Why do Iranian police uniforms say "police" in English? I was wondering.

Determining whether to hide a report filter

June 20, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Let’s say you have a report that has some filter controls on top that let you narrow the scope of the report. When the report loads, the filter is collapsed. The user opens the filter, changes some of the settings, and submits the form. What is the preferred method for determining whether the filter should be displayed? A related question is whether you should detect the filter’s visibility status in JavaScript or you should check on the server side and use the style attribute to control visibility.

Here are some options:

Always leave the filter collapsed initially. I hate this option, though, because it hides important information from the user. If the report is in some non-default state, the user should be able see when it loads what that state is.
Check to see whether any form parameters were submitted. If there were, add the appropriate style attribute to the form on the server side.
Assuming the GET method was used, check for a query string in JavaScript and hide the form using JavaScript if no query string is present. (Indicating that the filter is in its default state.)
Using JavaScript, check the values of all of the fields on the form to see whether they are in their default state. If not, display the form.
Use a hidden form field set on the server side to indicate that the filter should be displayed. In JavaScript, check that field to determine whether or not the filter should be displayed.

There are probably other options as well, and all of them will work. Choosing from among them is a matter of ease of maintenance, mostly. Ideas?

Links from May 31st

May 31, 2009 / Rafe / 0 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

May 28, 2009 / Rafe / 0 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

May 23, 2009 / Rafe / 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

May 20, 2009 / Rafe / 0 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

March 24, 2009 / Rafe / 0 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

January 25, 2009 / Rafe / 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

January 24, 2009 / Rafe / 0 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

January 14, 2009 / Rafe / 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.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held