I’ve been stuck in javascript hell for the last couple of weeks, and “Prototype”:http://prototype.conio.net/ has been a large part of keeping me sane. That people then write all sorts of extensions for it, including one for “using data structures to generate HTML”:http://www.arantius.com/article/dollar-e is just great.
Month: March 2006
Ruby On Rails 1.1 is out
“Ruby On Rails 1.1 has been released”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/28/rails-1-1-rjs-active-record-respond_to-integration-tests-and-500-other-things.
Although I’m not using it now–my current project has too much code that’s always going to be Perl for me to consider switching languages–it’s something I’d seriously consider using for the future. It does seem silly that they just came out with a book about using it and then introduced a major upgrade, though.
Sometimes I miss Miami
While it’s true that I love where we live, sometimes I feel a burst of nostalgia for Miami. It’s especially true when I read about a an “exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s sculpted glass”:http://www.fairchildgarden.org/publicprograms/Chihuly_at_Fairchild.html at the “Fairchild Tropical Garden”:http://www.fairchildgarden.org/ (we have the map of the FTG that we got when we joined hanging up on one of our walls.
Fortunately, GNOME guy Luis Villa was there “and he took a lot of pictures”:http://tieguy.org/pics/v/Miami/Chihuly/.
So, I dispute the author’s claim to have “invented” the Flash Mob
since, “as everyone knows”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd, the concept appeared in a Larry Niven story in the 70’s. But, I have to admit “the article”:http://www.harpers.org/MyCrowd_01.html, online from Harper’s, is kind of interesting.
One of the Debian developers got a serious camera lens
So what did he do? He used it to take a picture of an ant that is so detailed you can “discern the structure of the eye”:http://b9.com/archives/000079.html. Not that I needed to see an ant that closely, but damn.
Simon Willison teaches about JavaScript
Or, more accurately, _taught_ about javascript at the ETech conference. And he has very graciously made both “his slides”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/sets/72057594077197868/ and “his notes”:http://simon.incutio.com/slides/2006/etech/javascript/js-reintroduction-notes.html available from his blog.
These are mostly oriented towards people who already know how to program, but haven’t taken JavaScript seriously. I’m definitely in that camp, and I found his notes to be a very clear, consise introduction to some of JS’s more advanced programming features–some of which I’d been exposed to already because of my spelunking around AJAX code, but I’d just been inferring their use rather than knowing exactly what was going on.
Coming back from being AWOL
“An interesting article on coming back to things you’ve fallen away from”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney.
Although it’s couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it’s influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle–it’s all too easy to draw in and ignore things–but it’s also a learned habit.