Alan Blaine Whitney

Microsoft just called me.  They wanted to conduct some survey and they were willing to pay $25.  I just didn’t have the time, plus something just felt wrong about it.

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In this era of the web, you need to have feeds and API’s.  At the very very least, something like an RSS feed.  If you have aggregated content, or updates, you need an RSS feed.

Since everybody has so much going, blogs, twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, youtube, flickr, etc, etc, API’s are so helpful in allowing people to use your service in the most automated way.

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If you already use jquery for your javascript framework.  May I recommend jquery validate.  Simply put, the just javascript form validator I have ever used, and I have used a few.  This is one is a real winner.  It’s one line of js, and you put stuff like class=’required’ or class=’required email’ inside of your input tags.  That’s it.

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Been working on a project for a while and it got me thinking about some project flow.  I use cakephp, yui, and jquery frameworks to help speed up development.  In general this makes projects go quicker, at least initally.

Once the broad strokes is done, development slows.  And this is to be excepted, when somebody builds a house, the framing goes really quick, but the finishing takes a long time.

When you get to the end that seems to be when the rush of feedback happens.  Feedback from the people that you are building the application for that is.  Sometimes the feedback is dumb, sometimes not, sometimes it means redo parts of the application.  Lots of wisdom applies here from the “eat your own dogfood” thinking or the “build for yourself” people.

Success often is in the details though.  Lately I have been thinking about just ignoring the details until close to the end, then really focus on them.  So far, I think this is a good idea.

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I use jquery a fair amount.  Overall I am very pleased.   I use the full effects and ui suite.  Both UI and JQuery offer a minified version of their libraries.  Which is great, but sometimes I like to have the source to look at, so I often download the developer versions of this libraries.  So to use them, I would have to use the non-minified versions and would have to make many more http requests then needed and now on top of that, include any of my own javascript code.

This could make things very slow.  To work around this, I wrote a bash script, that is executable in Linux and uses the wonderfully simply jsmin program.  I place all of the files that comes with jquery ui (along with thickbox) in the /js/ folder along with this bash script.

#!/bin/bash

gcc -o jsmin ./jsmin.c

cat jquery-1.2.6.js | ./jsmin > main.js

cat effects.core.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

cat effects.blind.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.bounce.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.clip.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.drop.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.explode.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.fold.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.highlight.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.pulsate.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.scale.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.shake.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.slide.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat effects.transfer.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

cat ui.core.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

cat ui.accordion.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.datepicker.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.dialog.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.draggable.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.droppable.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.resizable.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.selectable.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.slider.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.sortable.js | ./jsmin >> main.js
cat ui.tabs.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

cat thickbox.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

cat page.js | ./jsmin >> main.js

The file page.js is my javascript source. Sometimes I add additional files as well.  Here is a download-able demo of this.

Some other speedy libraries that I enjoy to use are CSSTidy and OptiPNG

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I bought an intel D201GLY2A from newegg. Just going to share what I had to do to get it working correctly in Ubuntu 8.04. The video had very strange lines, almost like static. Audio didn’t work at all. Those were the two things that needed the attention.

First the video, the SIS are crap

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-sis

Now the sound.

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

find “options snd-intel8×0 index=-2″ and set it to “=0″

sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa

Now reboot. That worked for me, I have 1280×1024 video with good quality and sound that works fine off the front headphone jack, and is quiet off the back.

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