buckyschwarz.net

Given that I was laid off in October 2008, and that kind of experience is surprisingly relevant in today’s economy, a friend and former co-worker from college, Willie Jackson, asked me to write a guest blog post over at his site. It’s titled Why losing your job is not the end of the world and what to do if it happens: An essay on the interoperable relationship between business and fear, in particular as it relates to the current world economy, especially having to do with the prospect of losing one’s job vis-á-vis layoff. Head on over there and let him know what you think.

At work, I’ve been working with a user who needs a few certain pages on the site I’m developing to be printer friendly. These pages are usually ones that display data in tables with a dark blue/light blue zebra stripes. All the pages of the application (these table pages included) have a two-column fluid layout with the site navigation occupying the left column. Obviously, for printing tabular data, the navigation need not be displayed, nor do any kind of form controls that might be used for searching for particular data in that table, so obviously, those should be disabled in the print stylesheet.

So, for the first time ever, I wrote up a stylesheet with the media type set to print. I’ve just never needed to print anything from a website before. So I wrote up a stylesheet with the media type set to print. I just set the display properties of elements I didn’t want to show to none and went about testing it. During testing, I kept running into a problem where the left column, which should have been hidden, would still be causing the center content column to float right. The navigation menu wouldn’t be there, but the container the navigation menu lived in was still there, even though its border and content were hidden. This stumped me for a good day and a half, and after hitting my head against my cubicle wall I finally decided to try setting the media type of the main stylesheet of the app to screen. This solved every problem I had and now the tables are printing beautifully.

The moral of the story: Always set the media types of your stylesheets. It’s a good idea and a good way to add semantic meaning to your header files, and also, all the cool kids are doing it these days.

I’ve finished the second redesign of my site. After using jQuery extensively while preparing a presentation for my local ColdFusion usergroup, I decided that I wanted to redo my site with more jQuery. I initially wrote it using PHP, styled it, and published it, but quickly grew tired of the dark scheme. I’ve restyled it now with a lighter theme, which I’m pretty pleased with. I’ve also gotten my WordPress custom theme pages working correctly, and it was surprisingly easy.

So that’s about it.

I ran into an issue with Safari and jQuery 1.3 today that had me stumped. To keep things unobtrusive for the folks on the web who don’t have JavaScript enabled (and to keep current with good practices since no one except my girlfriend visits my site), I had a form which wasn’t needed if JavaScript was disabled hidden using the display: none property in the site’s main stylesheet. In the $(document).ready() handler for jQuery, I set the form to be visible using the show() method (which, to my understanding, set the display: property to block).

This worked fine every time in Firefox 3 and IE7, but in Safari, I noticed some strange behavior: Occasionally it would work like expected, but most of the time the form would stay hidden. It seemed the only times it did work were when the actual page load took longer to load than the stylesheets and scripts.

The following image shows the Safari Web Inspector when the strange behavior was occurring:

This image shows the Web Inspector when the normal behavior was occurring:

In all of the cases where the page behaved as expected, the page would finish loading after the stylesheets and scripts. I’m not really sure what this means, but it seemed like when the strange behavior was happening, the page would load, jQuery would show the form, and then the stylesheet would load and hide the form. I spent several hours searching for an answer to no avail.

The fix came when I changed the jQuery code. Instead of using the show() method, I used the css() method to change the css property, display: block. This fixed the problem in Safari, and did not introduce any strange behaviors in Firefox or IE7.

Well, I’m finally starting to get settled in to my new place in Cary, NC. I’ve been here for a few days now, and so far, I really like it. The weather has been nice and cool: in the 40’s and 50’s during the day, and the 20’s and 30’s at night. It rained and misted all day today. It’s weird; I’m not used to it being rainy and cold, I rather like it.

After two days, I want to say that my new job is fantastic, thanks for asking. I’ve signed on to be a ColdFusion developer with SRA International in Durham. Again, today was only my second day, but the first two were great. Yesterday was an orientation that was presented via a teleconference call with people across the country. Today was my first real day. I have to say, I’m very impressed with how organized and employee-oriented the company is. I have a nice sized cubicle that will have a name plate on the outside wall. Inside my cubicle today was a Dell PC with a dual LCD setup, which I thought was pretty cool. Also inside my cube were a stapler, a tape dispenser, a staple remover, a magnetized paper clip holder, paper clips, staples, and tape, two pads of paper, two pens, two pencils, two stacks of post it notes a telephone directory and instructions on how to use the phone. All of the office supplies were brand new in boxes. It was incredible, and also a little exciting to see the company that hired me putting in just a little bit of effort to show that I’m welcomed. That little bit went a very long way. It’s quite exciting to be working for a company that has their act together and tries to let their employees know how they feel about them.

I’ve made some changes to my site: I redesigned (read: designed) it with a new layout, changed the default behavior so going to buckyschwarz.net doesn’t take you to the blog, and played around with Wordpress layouts to integrate blog posts directly into the site, viewable by going to the blog navigation header tab.

All of this was done because 1) I had a lot of free time, not having a job, 2) I was bored, and 3) I wanted to refine my PHP skills and increase my knowledge and skill with the language. It’s a work in progress, as always, but so far, I’m pretty happy with the results. As of now, I haven’t gotten comments to show up or work when integrated with the site, which is fine because 1) no one is reading this blog in the first place and 2) when people are reading it, which they aren’t, no one is commenting. The tags still aren’t showing up, which is kind of disappointing and frustrating, so I’m going to work to get that up as soon as possible.

I wrote up a little review/call to action of a game I’ve been playing a lot of over at 2ndplayer. It’s on Betrayal at Krondor, one of my favorite games of all time. Seriously, the game will change your life.

So go check it out, I promise it won’t disappoint you. And if it does, be sure to go complain to someone else.

On Monday, Max gave a presentation at Adogo on creating custom UI components. As usual with his talks, it was informative and interesting without being very boring. He essentially did all of the hard work required to learn how to create custom components, then shared it with the rest of us. It got me really motivated and excited to start developing the UI of version two of my Audioscrobbler application.

I’ve played around a little bit with custom UIs, and generally understood the mechanics and how it should be done, but I feel like with the perspective I gained from this talk, I’m ready to focus my efforts a bit harder and buckle down and start making a slick interface.

So thanks, Max. At the last Adogo meeting, I asked if we could go over this, and I certainly plan on putting it to good work very soon.

Brian has posted the June Meeting Wrap-up to the adogo site. I gave a presentation on the first iteration of my last.fm AudioScrobbler Flex App. The meeting was a success; the code camp went well, and I think generally everyone was very pleased.

I’m putting the source code from my app up on a public svn repository, located at http://svn.assembla.com/svn/audioscrobblerflex/. The code is available by hitting that url in a web browser, or using an svn client. Assembla also has a nifty little code browser (powered by Trac) if you’re viewing it through a browser. It’s a public repository, so the code is read-only. If you’d like to make changes and commit them back to the repository, you’ll have to sign up for an Assembla account and be added to the project. The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

If you don’t know about Assembla, check it out. They offer free svn repositories, great setup options, and bug tracking with Trac. It’s all free, and it’s all very easy and very well done in the web 2.0 style.

Daniel was really fast with the editing and put up a new 2nd Player Podcast episode the night we recorded it. Yaaaaay Dan! Anyway, here it is, Episode 10: Off the Reservation. Let me know what you think. Ha, like anyone will see this post, much less respond.