geeky

jQuery Is Awesome. Yet Again.

I know that this probably isn’t news to any of you who care about such things and follow the world of web development even a little… it’s not even news to me, really – I’ve been an advocate of this particular programming library for a while now. But today in particular, I just felt so enamoured by the elegance of the jQuery Javascript Framework that I had to tell you about it.

This line of code:

$('.alpha').not(':has(.beta:visible)').hide();

Hides all elements with the class “alpha” which contain no visible elements with the class “beta” (i.e. if it contains any visible elements of class “beta”, the “alpha” is not hidden).

And it’s just beautiful. Just to compare how elegant it is to something else, here’s the equivalent code in Prototype, another popular Javascript framework, which in itself still shortens the amount of code that this would take in plain-old vanilla Javascript:

$$('.alpha').each(function(element){ var has_visible_beta = false;element.childElements().each(function(inner_element){ if (inner_element.hasClassName('beta') && inner_element.visible()) has_visible_beta = true;
}); if (has_visible_beta) element.hide();
});

(okay, that Prototype code could probably be a hair simpler, but you get my point)

Wow.

My New Pet Hate

I have a new pet hate.

A personal pet hate of mine for a long while has been that often, when I ask somebody for a screenshot to show me what’s going wrong with some software they’re using, they’ll take a screenshot or two, then paste them into a Microsoft Word document, and then e-mail me the Word document.

Why would you do such a thing? You’ve got Paint: paste it into Paint and save it, and you’ll get:

A faster result. Paint loads a lot faster than Word.
A smaller file. Even a Bitmap saved in Paint (the default) will usually be smaller than a Word document. A JPEG or a PNG will be even smaller still, which means it’s more suitable for e-mail and be faster still.
A more-compatible result. Just about anybody can open whatever you produce with Paint, without requiring a word-processor that’s compatible with the version of Word you’re using).

And that’s without even looking at the benefit directly to me: that I don’t need to re-extract your pictures so that I can upload actual pictures, not a document, to our bug tracking system, or the benefit that I can view thumbnails of your screenshots to sort and manage them easily.

But no; I have a new pet hate:

It’s when somebody who’s using Microsoft Outlook sends me a HTML e-mail with several screenshots… each one of them inside a separate Word document attached to the message. WTF?

You could just have pasted the image straight into Outlook. Less work for you, easier for me, faster for everybody. It’s just like pasting it into Word, except you don’t have to open Word (or create a new document), and the images end up stored more-like actual images attached to an e-mail.
One Word document per screenshot? Why? Do you just enjoy thinking about the fact that I’ll now have to open 15 – yes, 15! – different Word documents just to extract the screenshot from each and save it as an image file like you should have in the first place!

Sorry; it’s probably just me who gets bugged quite so much by this.

Update, 15th June 2011: almost two years later, I’ve revisited this topic having found something even more annoying than using Word documents as a medium for screenshots…

My Firefox Window

It didn’t occur to me until somebody looked over my shoulder and commented on it, today, that I actually have an at-least slightly unusual layout for my Firefox window. I thought I’d share with you all the thinking behind the particular collection of add-ons and tweaks that go into my day-to-day web browsing:

I’m a big fan of maximising the amount of screen real estate available for browsing, minimising the chrome that surrounds it. That’s why I use the LittleFox theme. It’s not the prettiest theme around, but it’s tiny, simplistic, and works with every version of Firefox I’ve ever thrown it at. It saves space by reducing the size of icons and excess space around tabs and buttons, and it does a great job of it.

To save even more precious vertical space (and because I’m generally running at high screen resolutions, and can spare the horizontal screen space), I combine my menu bar, toolbar, address bar and search boxes into a single toolbar. You can do this by right-clicking on the menu bar and clicking “Customize…” I drop the refresh, stop, and home buttons. I never pressed refresh nor stop anyway, always using the shortcut keys (F5 or CTRL-R, and ESC, respectively), and I my homepage is about:blank. On computers running at lower screen resolutions I’ve previously used the Searchbar Autosizer add-on to tuck-away the search box when I’m not using it, but nowadays I rarely bother.

I frequently find myself with dozens of tabs open, and I loathe it when tabbed applications force me to “scroll” left and right through my tabs (I’d rather my tabs just got narrower and narrower, until only the favicon remains), so I use about:config to change the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting to 0, which, after you’ve restarted your browser, changes this behaviour.

In addition to the add-ons that can be seen in my status bar – ColorZilla (in the bottom-left, so not visible in the screenshot above), Adblock Plus, FireGPG, Firebug (and a few extensions), Google Reader Watcher, Greasemonkey, HTML Validator, NoScript (with noscript.firstRunRedirection set to false, to stop it’s nagging), and ShowIP, I use one further add-on to tidy up my “bookmarks toolbar”.

The Status Buttons add-on gives you the capability to drag-drop any other user interface component into the right-hand side of the status bar: I use this to move the entire contents of the Bookmarks Toolbar down into the status bar, tucked out of the way. I remove the titles from most of the bookmarks (I can identify these, my most-frequently-used sites, by their favicons), adding them only where there’d otherwise be ambiguity as to the purpose of the icon.

All of these tweaks give me a huge browsing space that works the way that I want it to. I’m a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts – I pretty much only use the mouse to click hyperlinks and the buttons in the status bar – so this kind of layout suits me very well. One of the great things about Firefox is it’s flexibility: that you can make these kinds of tweaks so easily. And hopefully if you’re a similar kind of power user you’ll take some of these tips and be able to make use of them, too.

Internet Explorer 8 More Popular Than 6

Today is a good day for the web. Internet Explorer 8, which actually has reasonably good standards support, is now more widely-used than Internet Explorer 6, which is horrific to code for (Internet Explorer 7 isn’t much better).

It’s always been hard to write good quality web sites that work in Internet Explorer 7 and below: generally, I’ve always taken the approach of writing sites to comply with the standards and then to put in hacks specifically to address the problems introduced by IE6 and IE7. The sooner that we can disregard these browsers, the better.

Despite the stupid marketing campaigns Microsoft’s been pursuing to try to increase adoption of IE8, I’m at least a little thankful that they’re apparently working. I’ll be so glad the next time I can launch a site and not even have to think about using <!–[if IE 6]> conditional comments.

The Latest Stupidity From The Internet Explorer Team

Have you seen the latest stupidity that the Windows Internet Explorer team have come up with? Ten Grand Is Buried Here.

The idea is that they encourage you to give up whatever browser you’re using (assuming it’s not Internet Explorer 8), calling it names (like “old Firefox” if you’re using Firefox, “boring Safari” if you’re using Safari, “tarnished Chrome” if you’re using Chrome, and… “that browser” if you’re using Opera) and upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, and they’ll be giving out clues on their Twitter feed about some secret website that’ll only work in IE8 at which you can register and win $10,000AUS (yes, this is an Australian competition).

After looking at the site in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera, I thought I’d give it a go in Internet Explorer 8. But it didn’t work – it mis-detected my installation of IE8 as being IE7 (no, I didn’t have Compatability Mode on).

In the end, though, I just used User Agent Switcher to make my copy of Firefox pretend to be Internet Explorer 8. Then it worked. So basically, all that I’ve learned is that Firefox does a better job of everything that Internet Explorer does, including viewing websites designed to only work in Internet Explorer. Good work, Microsoft. Have a slow clap.

Zero Punctuation Reviews Duke Nukem Forever

And it’s a work of art. Go watch it.

What’s A Cripple Been Up To?

I’m sick of hobbling round on a crutch. Sure, it was an interesting novelty for the first couple of days, even despite the fact that I got almost no sympathy from folks (and, to be fair, I deserved none – what kind of idiot cripples himself while chasing after cake?). But now I’m just sick of it. Today, two weeks after my tumble, is the first day that I’m walking around outdoors without a crutch (and without being in pain). I still need a little bit of help from one when going up or down slopes (but not stairs), so I’m still carrying my happy little aluminium pole around with me, but I’m able to support my entire weight with either foot once more, so that’s a big step forward.

Helped out with Aberystwyth Samaritans fundraising event at Varsity, although as I wasn’t quite up to walking around on my bad foot I wasn’t able to go around shaking buckets, but I did end up with “24:7” face-painted on my forehead, and apparently a decent sum of money was raised by the event, so not all bad.

I bought myself an EeePC 1000 this last week, too. I’ve never had a very good relationship with laptops, but I felt that it was probably time to give one another go, and in particular I wanted something small, light, cool, and quiet, with a fabulous battery life, so the Eee 1000 it had to be. I’ve been really very, very impressed with it so far (at least, having stripped off the silly OS that came on it and replaced it with Eeebuntu). I’ll try to find time to write more about it in due course.

The only other little bit of excitement for me, apart from being nicknamed “Hobbles” by just about everybody down here, was seeing the new Star Trek film at the Commodore last night. And while I thought the story was compelling and well-written and that the film was pitched right for a new generation of Star Trek fans, I can’t help but take issue at the artistic choices made by the director and by the special effects team. For example, whose clever idea was it that to show the vast, empty, hostility of space, the best way to shoot was entirely in close-ups? I’m pretty sure the only wide shot in the entire film is of the Academy! And what’s with all the lens effects? Barely a scene goes by without some digitally-added bloom or glare or lens flare. They were cute to begin with, when we’re panning across the bridge of the Enterprise in all it’s “this is what the inside of your iMac looks like” glory, but by the seventh or eighth time, it’s easy to get sick of. All in all, it’s a mediocre to good Star Trek film, not worthy in my mind of all the hype it’s attracting.

Is Cardiff Still Amazing?

If you’re planning to come to Cardiff Is Amazing next month, there’s some information on the website.

What do you mean, there’s not much information on it? That’s because you haven’t typed it yet! Get on with it, then!

Sleepless? Priceless!

Time for this iteration of a software project: 4 months
Time left after the client changed their mind about the “must have” requirements: 2 months
Amount of sleep within the last 40+ hours: 4 hours
Number of JOIN clauses in an eleventh-hour SQL statement that suddenly fixes everything: 12 (LEFTies, RIGHTies, INNERs… and also a UNION)
Time internal deadline missed by: 55 minutes… which isn’t actually that bad, considering everything that went wrong in the 55 minutes before them
Money earned: nil
Feeling after delivery complete: priceless*.

* also: knackered – guess I’d better get some sleep!

What Does This Bug Report Mean?

A bug report just came in from a client I’m responsible for at work. It reads:

…Main menu – home page – The ‘g’ of outstanding debts is permanently underlined.
Correct.

I’m not even sure what this message means. It looks like the client is telling me that the letter ‘g’ at the end of the word “outstanding”, which appears in the main menu of the software I’ve been writing for him, is underlined. I’m pretty clear on this bit of his message (although I’m as-yet unable to get the same effect on my own computer). What I want to know is, what does he want?

Is he saying that the letter ‘g’ is underlined but that it shouldn’t be? Or that it’s correct that it’s underlined (in which case, why is he filing a bug report?). Or is he asking, in a convoluted way, for it to be made to be permanently underlined (in which case: why – it doesn’t seem to make any sense?).

What a great start to the New Year’s work.

HttpOnly Session Cookies using ActiveRecordStore in Rails 2.2

If you’re using CookieStore to manage sessions in your Ruby on Rails application, Rails 2.2 provides the great feature that you’re now able to use HTTPOnly cookies. These are a great benefit because, for compatible web browsers, they dramatically reduce the risk of a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack being able to be used to hijack your users’ sessions, which is particularly important on sites displaying user-generated content. You simply have to adjust your environment.rb file with something like:

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => ‘_session_id’,
:session_http_only => true,
:secret => ‘your-secret’
}
config.action_controller.session_store = :cookie_store

Unfortunately, the Rails developers didn’t see fit to extend HTTPOnly cookies to those of us using ActiveRecordStore, where the XSS risk is still just as real. To fill this gap, I’ve produced a very simple and only slightly-hackish plugin which overrides the functionality of Rails’ CGI::Cookie to force all cookies produced by Rails to be HTTPOnly, regardless of the session store being used.

To use it, download this file and extract it into your application’s vendor/plugins directory, and restart your application server. You can test that it’s working using Tamper Data, FireCookie, or whatever your favourite cookie sniffing tool is.

The Fife Diet from Kamikaze Cookery

I’ve been following Kamikaze Cookery (three geeks doing cookery… with science!) for a while now, and it’s got some real potential, but what really sold me on it was their recent series on the Fife diet (yeah, I know, it’s been out for ages, but I’ve been busy so my RSS reader’s been brim-full and I only just got around to watching it).

If you haven’t come across Kamikaze Cookery before, The Fife Diet videos are a great place to start.

‘Nena’ – Christmas Comes Early For Dan

I thought I’d say a little bit about my new home desktop computer, because it occurs to me that I hadn’t said anything about it yet.

Dualitoo, my PC of the last few years, kicked the bucket on Friday a few weeks back, at a most inopportune time – I was due to write heaps of code over the weekend as part of a dangerously-close-to-overrunning project. But, as Rory said, ’tis the season of hardware failure, and with Ruth‘s laptop dying a death and Paul‘s overheating problems, I should have expected that maybe my turn would be next.

It’s probably no coincidence that it died the very next day after the storage heaters in The Cottage came on for the winter, one of which was directly behind the poor box. When it failed to turn on (fans spun, but no keyboard lights, monitor output, or even beep-codes), I started swapping out components for spares (many of them not “spares” so much as “parts of Claire‘s PC”). Power supply was the first thing to try, because in always-on boxes in a dusty environment, they’re usually the first thing to go. After it turned out that the PSU was fine, it was on to the expansion cards, then the RAM, and so on (I’d already disconnected all the IDE/SATA devices just to free up room in the case in which to wave my huge hands around).

Sadly, it turned out that malfunction was in pretty much the worst place it could be: either the processor or the motherboard, and – not having a spare of either that would be compatible with the other, I had to write off both. This left me with a defective computer requiring significant repair right before what was supposed to be a busy weekend of code.

On Saturday morning, I resolved to fix the problem – I couldn’t afford the downtime not to! – and so, not wishing to lose further time waiting for delivery of mail-order components, I decided to see what Aberystwyth could supply me with “over the counter.”

I dropped into Crosswood Computers, on Chalybeate Street, first, and stated my unusual requirements. I needed, as economically as possible:

An ATX motherboard and a processor at least as powerful as that which had died (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4GHz) – I didn’t want to feel like I was paying for a downgrade
With two IDE ports: my old board had four IDE devices attached to it, as well as one SATA hard drive – unless I was to ditch some of these I’d need two IDE ports on the motherboard, which is getting hard to find in this age of SATA
And a stack of features that are commonplace: 4 DDR2 slots, PCI-E (don’t require SLI or CrossFire-compatability, I guess: I never got round to using the SLI on my old board so I probably wouldn’t on my new one), onboard LAN, etc. – I still had perfectly good RAM, an aging-but-still-workable graphics card and so on that I’d like to still be able to use!

Crosswood were able to find me one – yes, just one – board and processor that fit the bill: that dual-IDE request is hard to meet. It’d have cost me about £140, which is more than I was comfortable paying for the hardware in question, which was – in the end – pretty much identical to that which had broken. I wouldn’t mind paying that kind of money if I felt like I was getting an upgrade, but to pay that just to “get running again” (plus, of course, all the hassle of un-mounting and re-mounting a motherboard, moving around all those stupid little brass screws, etc.) felt like a bad move.

Before having to rethink things, I thought I’d try what is Aberystwyth’s just-about-only-other computer shop, Daton (can’t link to their actual domain name because they’ve let it expire and it’s now an ad farm). I’ve always had mixed experiences with Daton – they’ve surprised me with bargain computer bits before, but they’ve also managed to unimpress me: for example, with the network cabling they half-heartedly lay at my old workplace. My conversation there on this day could be summarised thusly:

Dan: Hi, I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking to buy a motherboard and a processor for it: ATX form factor… either Intel or AMD – I’m architecture-agnostic these days… but crucially, it must have two IDE ports.

Daton Woman: Uh. Hang on. /goes into back and repeats everything I’ve said to Daton Man, then returns/ You’ll probably have to bring your computer in.

Dan: No, there’s really no need. I just need to buy a motherboard and processor from you. What do you have in stock?

Daton Woman: Well, we’d really need to be able to see your PC to know what’s wrong with it…

Dan: I don’t need you to tell me what’s wrong with it. I know what’s wrong with it. That’s why I’m asking for a motherboard and processor. Now can you sell me some, or should I shop elsewhere?

Daton Woman: …and we’ll have to order the parts in to repair it.

Dan: /sighs and leaves/

I trekked back to Crosswood, and on the way, I spoke to my mum on the phone – it’s come to that time of year when I call her up to hunt for tips on what my sisters are “into” these days, so I have a clue as to what they might like for Christmas. While talking to her, I mentioned the fun and games I was having with my computer problems. “Would you like some computer parts as an early Christmas present?” she asked. Suddenly my options were expanded.

By the end of Saturday, I’d built Nena, my new desktop PC. She carries on the hard drives from Dualitoo, alongside the RAM and – of course – the peripherals, but the rest is all new. She’s running an amazingly cool-running Intel Core 2 Quad Q6660 (2.4GHz quad-core) on an Intel-chipset motherboard from ECS. I got myself a new graphics card (a sexy-as-fuck Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT), too, replaced my two IDE optical drives with a shiny new high-speed SATA dual-layer DVD rewriter, and gave myself an extra 750GB of hard drive space (taking me up to 1.25TB – plenty for films and games and whatnot) with an extra hard drive. She makes light work of Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: World at War, which is nice, because I might find time for more than a half-hour game of one of these ace games someday when I’m less busy… although by that time, my system’ll probably be out of date again.

Nena, of course, fits in with my current home computer naming scheme of “female one-hit wonders,” joining Tiffany in our living room.

What have I learned from the whole experience? Well, I’ve learned that:

It’s perfectly possible to get hold of all kinds of great computer components at short notice, even in Aberystwyth, and doing so only cost me about 3% more than I’d have expected to have paid online, and got me the goods instantly.
However, amazingly, nowhere in town could supply me with a case, so I had to loot one from my employer, SmartData, who had a spare (I couldn’t be bothered stripping down Dualitoo‘s case only to have to spend the next half hour removing and moving all those annoying brass screws: plus; her power button was dodgy).
I should have ditched my aging IDE optical devices long ago.
There’s a huge difference between an Nvidia 7-series and an Nvidia 9-series, and it blows your socks off.
Daton Computers don’t trust their customers enough to sell them what they’re asking for.
Crosswood Computers provide sound, helpful advice, and – if you’re friendly and buy enough stuff from them – are more than happy to “throw in” cables and adapters as freebies (I realised that I’d need SATA power adapters and data cables, one of those PSU 6-pin adapters you need for powered graphics cards if your PSU doesn’t already have one, and so on), which the chap at Crosswood was happy to just give me without charge, even though I didn’t buy the PSU from him in the first case.
The quad-core Intel processors actually seem to run colder than the dual-core ones.
My mum is ace.

OMG Child Pr0n (or is it?)

What a mess this is turning into! I am of course referring to the UK-wide internet censorship of a Wikipedia page (the one about the Scorpions album, Virgin Killer – if that last link doesn’t work, you’re among those affected).

The thinking is, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, that the cover of the 1976 album constitues child pornography and therefore we all need to be protected from it. It’s all a little controversial, though, because they’re not suggesting that Amazon US be blocked, for example.

But the worst of it is the amount of news exposure it’s generating is actually drawing traffic to the banned content. I wouldn’t ever have seen the album cover if it weren’t for the ban, for example, after which I realised how trivial it is to see the offending Wikipedia page. And that without the offending content appearing in a Wikinews article about the ban!

It’s hard to justify this kind of policing. In accordance with Wikipedia’s own policies, it is not a creator of content so much as a distributor: it takes content that is already “out there” and, in theory at least, legal, and disseminates it in an approachable form.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

Environmental Awareness and Yes, I’m Still Busy

The Technium‘s just hosted a seminar on environmental awareness. Walking past the conference room a few minutes ago, I noticed that the folks running the event had managed to leave running the projector and all of the lights, despite the fact that it had ended some time ago. Ah, the irony.

Went to a céilidh at the Morlan Centre last night with Ruth (as my date and – generally – dancing partner) and Sarah (who had a few words of her own to say about the event), and had a fabulous time: lots of dancing around in complex and silly ways, forgetting which partner I’m supposed to link arms with next at any given time and eating lots of cake. Also, lots of failing to win at the tombola. I can’t remember how to make binomial theorem work, but I’m pretty sure my odds of winning at least one prize when one in five tickets is a winner, if I buy ten tickets, should be reasonable, right? If anybody else can work out the odds and explain it in a way that I’d understand, bearing in mind that I haven’t done any real maths in years, that’d be cool. I could re-learn, but I don’t have time (nor a calculator with a “P” button!).

What else? Matt P, Ele and Helen visited town, which was nice; my main desktop PC, Dualitoo, broke down in a horrible way, which wasn’t so nice; and I built a new desktop PC, Nena. All of this has been responsible for putting me back a few days further in my already cramped schedule of volunteer coding for the next month, but a meeting I had last week has re-filled me with faith that Things Will Get Less Hectic [TM]. That’s my mantra right now: I’m seriously looking forward to having more time in my life for the important stuff like video games and hanging out with people. Someday, someday.