Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation

e*trade has buggy client-side javascript Aug 18, 2012 - 3 min read

Once a month I get a little reminder that I need to go pay my e*Trade credit card bill. Every month for as long as I can remember I’ve tried to use their user interface to pay off my current balance and been told by an error dialog that my selection is not valid.

I have clearly selected a frequency of “One Time” and not “Once a Month” as the dialog box indicates.

console.log anywhere Aug 5, 2012 - 1 min read

My current assingment for Improving has me writing much more client-side javascript. I’m not a javascript ninja, so I lean on the console window to confirm that the script is doing what I expected it to do. This approach works great until I view a page in IE, which has no clue what “console” means and acosts me with script error popups.

Doesn't Play Well... Apr 30, 2012 - 1 min read

I’ve been working on some “prototypes” for a new Improving client. One of our UX people told us to use Twitter Bootstrap and don’t look back.

These prototypes are for a data entry focused application, so we’ve been using the Autocomplete Combobox to help speed things along. I tried to also use the bootstrap-buttons plugin in conjunction with it, but the buttons weren’t working as expected.

I changed the markup to load the button plugin prior to the jquery ui script and the radio buttons looked and behaved as expected, but the auto complete comboboxes looked funky and were no longer acting like text boxes and default to select boxes. When I switched back to loading the jquery ui first, the comboboxes resumed their normal operation.

Adding CoderWall Badges Apr 22, 2012 - 2 min read

I’ve picked up a few badges via CoderWall and I wanted to include them on the blog with the rest of the information in the right side column.

CoderWall has instructions under the sub heading “Official blog badge” that detail how to interact with their web api for retrieving badges. My main investigation was how and where to include these snippets within the octopress templates.

The comments included in the Octopress _config.yml were quite helpful. This was exactly the guidance that I needed.

Fixed Navigation Bar With Twitter Bootstrap Apr 18, 2012 - 2 min read

Twitter Bootstrap has many very interesting features available. I really liked their fixed sub navigation menus for the feature pages. As you scroll past the subnavigation, it docs with the top of the scroll window and stays there. It also enables click navigation to other feature sections.

I wanted to have the same functionality for my own html pages, so I started digging around. Looking at the page source, I saw an include for “/js/application.js”, which is included in the github source project, but is not part of the downloaded assets. At the top of the file is this nice disclaimer:

Everything Old is New Again Apr 16, 2012 - 1 min read

I spent some time over the weekend dragging along old posts from my tumblr blog that deal with programming. I didn’t bother with the instagram pictures or the four square checkins. After a few failed attempts to get the tumblr posts where the were suposed to be, I opted to stash them in a working directory and move them by hand.

Now all of my <scarcasm>glorious code related posts</sarcasm> are in one place, it’s time to dust up some posts about my shiny new play things Twitter Bootstrap Octopress and Markdown. Stand by for more intesting things in the very near future.

Programming & Barriers to Entry Feb 27, 2012 - 3 min read

A fellow learner has posted “Programming & Barriers to Entry”. Cori has much to say in this article concentrated around command line tools, vim and Ruby. I’d like to comment on some of the perceptions and share my own opinions.

I picked up on some discord with regard to this type of interaction.

…Intellisense (or lack thereof). Ctrl-spacebar is my friend. It’s what I’ve grown to love. Typing /?—>enter—>up-arrow—>space—>command-I-really-need is a bit of a PITA. It feels like a clunky waste of time.

treetrim: Trims source code trees Jan 21, 2012 - 1 min read

Treetrim:

I’ve used this spiffy utility many times. Every time I see a need for it, I’m working on a PC that doesn’t have it installed and I can never remember the magic incantation that allowed Google to reveal it to me. So, since I’m starting to suffer from old-timers, I’ll keep a handy link for it right here ;-)

EF Code First & AppHarbor Aug 25, 2011 - 2 min read

Since my employer, Improving lined me up a new gig that uses Entity Framework Code First, I thought I kick off a learning side project with MVC3 and deploy it to AppHarbor. Everything seemed simple enough. Use Nuget to install the code first bits, hammer out a couple of model and a datacontext and BOOM! data goes into a database.

It wasn’t anything pretty, but I was ready to deploy it to AppHarbor. That sounded great, but my first deploy failed. The local build compiled and worked as expected. The source that I pushed to AppHarbor compiled without problem, but the deployment failed.

Javascript Programming Patterns Aug 21, 2011 - 1 min read

Javascript Programming Patterns

Nice reference material that I got from JR Garcia

I’ve been away from web development for just a bit too long and have a lot of catching up to do with respect to all of the great work going on in the javascript space.