Topics in ‘Home’

web|works content, part 1

Well, I haven’t decided the best way to export my slideshow yet since my pretty diagrams and such somehow resulted in a 40 meg Flash file. Wow. But what I will probably do is one PDF export and a couple of different Quicktime types. So, stay tuned to this location… I’ll post it tonight. In […]

web|works: almost there!

It’s 9:29am and I’m sitting in Rasmus Lerdorf’s keynote in Toronto, and I just finally wrapped up adding a couple new illustrations to my presentation for my first talk, which is supposed to be in 15 minutes. (But everything appears to be running a bit late.) Flying by the seat of my pants? Nahhhh. A […]

pros & cons — tech cons, that is

Well, I’ll be in Toronto next week, speaking about Ajax and UI-for-dum–err, I mean, UI-for-developers at php|works. If you’re around, you should come. Get yer employers to pay for it. And then, come mid-October, I’ll be out at RubyConf. To that end, I set up the RubyConf Social Wiki for hooking up with ride shares, […]

Yet more Ajax debugging

neillzero on #rubyonrails pointed us at this Greasemonkey script (blog post about it) which is even more appropriate for debugging Ajax stuff than the other techniques I’ve mentioned here. In addition to showing you the requests, it even lets you modify requests. As the author says: Each individual XMLHttpRequest invocation will get listed there, with […]

"Packets out of order" take 2

Daryl of Two Ells has come up with another way to solve that blasted “Packets out of order” error, without installing a new gem. Just a refresher, to anyone who’s finding me via Google and doesn’t know what this error means: It refers to the changed MySQL password hashing in version 4.1 and greater. You […]

Ajax Craziness with Amy

I’m prototyping an internal application for my company, and I’m using Rails to do it (yay!). It’ll probably turn into a Javascript-only application, with some hooks to the server, later on. In the mean time, I get to do such fun stuff as this: <script type=”text/javascript”> Droppables.add(‘conditional_<%= @id %>’, {hoverclass:’hover’, onDrop:function(element){ new Ajax.Updater(‘conditional_<%= @id %>’, […]

Troubleshooting Ajax Responses

Need to see Javascript generated by an Ajax helper in an Ajax response? Well, you won’t be able to see it by viewing source because, since it’s an Ajax response rendered by Javascript, it’s not technically part of the source at all. But you can still see the Javascript—and what may be going wrong—like thus: […]

Ajaxariffic Autocomplete with Scriptaculous

You’ve read the ONLamp tutorial, but you lust for more. So you want to autocomplete, do ya? Do ya?? You’ve come to the right place.

This is Your Brain on &lt;Insert Tool Here&gt;

I’d like to spend a little time today talking about the power that tools, techniques, and languages have on our brains. There seems to be fairly wide acceptance for the theory that language and literacy affect the structure and function of our brains. I think the lessons learned there can be applied to programming languages, […]

And I thought Ruby was crack…

Apparently it’s not crack that Ruby brings to the table. Witness: def date=(val) [:year, :month, :day].each do |meth| raise ArgumentError unless val.responds_to?(meth) end @date = val end Let’s see that one line again: [:year, :month, :day].each do |meth| Yes, you read it here first! Ruby, promoting meth use. The first one’s free! From this RubyTalk […]

Hey, why not get a shiny
Freckle Time Tracking
account?