I’ve worked on several new and different things since July, and all thanks to my new job. Say “hooray” with me… Hooray! Luckily I recently got to do some compiler-style expression parsing. Not sure whether it’s my 100% favorite brand of problem to solve, but anything compiler-related is very, very near the top of my list. We’re working on a jQuery plugin that I won’t share the details of yet, but the API contains a way to filter data using string matching expressions.
Continue reading

Trying to do a brain-dump of things I’ve encountered at my new job, since I’ve been doing work in several new areas. My employer’s website was crashing on IE7. When I tried to re-create the issue on my IE8 machine, it crashed for me as well. Also crashed when I put IE8 in IE7 mode (the Developer Tools are quite nice). Took me a while to get used to the IE Developer Tools, and eventually I found the JavaScript debugger.
Continue reading

Won’t fire: $(‘section’).live(‘click’, function(){ … }); But if the element you’re binding to is an anchor tag, it WILL fire. The workaround: add onclick=“” to the element you’re binding to. This applies to iOS 4.0. Update (Oct 7, 2010): I should add that this is a known bug. And that I’ve discovered a workaround.
Continue reading

In January 2010 I decided to break from common database convention and design a new style of ORM. It was also an excuse to dive deeper into Python 3. The result is my Data Type Tables project, which currently only supports sqlite3. Features: You don’t have to write any SQL to use it, not even create table statements. Right, you’re not impressed, given that you can do the same with Ruby on Rails.
Continue reading

A month ago I got excited about node.js. Watched two presentations, installed it, ran a few tests, and then ran out of steam for lack of a real project idea. Hate when that happens. At the same time I also got excited about learning advanced Javascript concepts since it would no doubt help me with node.js, so I decided to investigate jQuery and see what makes it tick. And what better way to really investigate jQuery than to try to build something similar on my own?
Continue reading

The hacker community is impressive. You’d expect all programmer nerds to be far-removed from reality, but a good number are not. The new breed of computer scientists is much like the new breed of computers. They’re self-aware, they control themselves, they’re finally cool, they work great in all settings, and they’re running some of the best companies in the world. Matt Maroon wrote an article last year that really struck a chord.
Continue reading