Hrmmm... looks like Davey hasn't finished his bio. Oh well.
Ubuntu 8.10 has a massive bug in the xorg window code at the moment. Originally reported in November when 8.10 shipped, the lack of action on this is kind of unusual for the generally excellent Linux community.
However I’ve worked out a minimally intrusive hacktastic workaround.
Read the rest of this entry »
Hi all.
This is just a short post to introduce myself. The talented Mr Selby has kindly invited me on board to blog about my experiences with mad scientist level JavaScript.
My names Davey and I work with Ian at Aptana, my role there is JavaScript Architect and as I result I spend a lot of time rooting around in the arcane depths of spidermonkey. I’m predominately interested in the topic of server side JS as it appears in our Jaxer product but occasionally venture out into the hostile environment that exists on the client.
I have an article primed and ready to go, but just need to put some finishing touches to it before publishing, In it I explore how to reproduce some of the interesting PHP capabilities that Ian is the master of. So it you have ever wanted to have the equivalent of __FILE__ or the __autoload function in javascript, keep watching all will be revealed soon.
As a first tip to any would-be JavaScript ninja, I heartily recommend The Douglas Crockford book ‘JavaScript, the good parts’, it’s just choc full o’ goodness.
cheers
Welcome to Gen X Design. The name’s a little corny, I know, but it’s one of those things I’ve used since I was a kid.
Anyway, I built this site for me (and some friends) to share their thoughts and ideas. I love all things web 2.0, shiny icons, and gradients. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, work for eMeter, and am sometimes available for contract work.
Mozilla announced a new feature for add-ons today: collections. It also looks like they’re getting the ball rolling with several useful collections, such as the Web Developer Collection. It includes all sorts of goodness like Firebug, ySlow, GreaseMonkey, ColorZilla, and many more. Well worth a quick visit.
FireFox Web Developer Collection
David Walsh has put together a really handy plugin for MooTools called ScrollSpy. What impressed me the most was the automatic display of a “Return to Top” link on your page once you’ve scrolled beyond a certain boundary. There are also a handful of other neat demos worth checking out. Sounds simple, but if you think about it, there are tons of great applications for this plugin.
http://davidwalsh.name/scrollspy
It’s been said a thousand times I’m sure, but picking the right JavaScript framework is a pain. There are all sorts of biased arguments for one vs. another, but there’s really nothing subjective out there… until now. Arguably, jQuery is probably the most popular JS framework out in the wild, but that doesn’t always mean it’s the best choice. What you choose should really depend on what you’re trying to do. Aaron Newton of Clientcide has put together a really impressive look at jQuery vs. MooTools, which doesn’t categorically say one is better than the other, but, rather, goes into detail about why one framework is better than the other based on your needs. Definitely worth a read:
www.jqueryvsmootools.com
ORM is certainly a very popular concept these days, but I haven’t really come across any PHP implementations that I found worth-while. Sure, big frameworks like CakePHP may have ORM functionality, but I’m not a fan of huge frameworks. I’ve also dabbled in my own implementations, but never got too far, as I’m not a fan of re-inventing the wheel. At any rate, I stumbled across Doctrine by accident (good ol’ RSS readers), and am impressed, mostly because it’s something that can be integrated into existing projects / frameworks.
www.doctrine-project.org
Ajaxload.info used to be the site of choice when it came to generating preloader images… unfortunately, I think it’s been bested. Preloaders.net allows you to generate not only the standard set of preloaders, but even 3D ones! You also get much more control (size, speed, etc.) and the quality of the final images is impressive. Definitely worth checking out.
www.preloaders.net
