Woohoo. Look at me, I’m all naked!

We’ll it’s public now. I’m currently hard at work writing AdvancED DOM Scripting: Dynamic Web Design Techniques, which is why my posts have been arriving less frequently lately. I’m soloing this one as author so it’s a lot more work compared to my last book, but still very enjoyable. I’ll post a bit more about the book in the coming weeks to get everyone excited.

I was just typing a search query into my Firefox Google toolbar. My query was going to be “scriptaculous draggable events” as I’m trying to squash a bug but apparently goggle had some other ideas:

Interesting how Google is trying to corrupt my young mind!

We’ll it seems my 9-month old MacBook Pro battery has suffered a fate similar to that of others.

About two weeks ago I noticed it randomly shutting of after a few minutes on battery power (not shutting down but rather completely losing power as if the battery died). This situation was rather scary as I’m currently working on my second book and a computer that loses power without notice isn’t a good thing while writing.

The battery indicator in the title bar read fully charged and the little green lights on the battery also indicated fully charged. iStat Pro indicated about 85 charge cycles and a battery health of 95%. This was strange. After a power failure, the battery indicated it was totally dead until it began to charge at which point it was full again. After trying this a few times, iStat Pro indicated a battery health of 3% — not good.

I searched the web for similar problems and began to fear the worst or at least I thought I would have to purchase a new battery. It seems there is a recall for batteries but it wasn’t for the 17-inch model that I have. First however I though I’d try 1-800-SOS-APPL — and it worked!

After briefly describing my problem, the Apple service rep — no questions asked — politely offered to send me a new battery at no charge! Sweet! I now have a new battery but while waiting for it to arrive I had left the bad battery in my MacBook to fill the gaping hole in the bottom. After only a day, I noticed that it wasn’t sitting quite so level on the desk and flipping it over revealed the problem:

It’s only grown bigger in the last few day. The funny part is the lights still indicate it’s charged! I guess It’s time to ship it back.

Defective products are never fun but congrats to Apple on not hassling me. I’ve only had a few issues with Apple products over the years and every time it’s been dealt with fairly and quickly.

Of all the software I have on my Mac, I’ve always been missing a decent JavaScript editor. I do have editors that support JavaScript syntax highlighting and such but they lack those extra features. For other languages such as:

• CSS I have CSSEdit and StyleMaster,
• PHP I have Zend Studio and it’s wonderful developing environment,
• HTML, JavaScript and general code editing I have the awsome BBedit,
• and for general subversion access there’s svnX.

(note the lack of a WYSIWYG editor! Everything by hand!)

But I really want a good JavaScript IDE. And I may have found one. A colleague pointed me at Aptana, I just downloaded it and gave it a quick try and looks very promising:

My only complaint is that it’s written in Java so it doesn’t use the standard windowing methods on my Mac but I can look past that if it’s good enough. Hopefully this will now complete my tool set.

Well it’s been almost a month since my last post but fear not as content will be flooding in soon. I’ve been busy busy the past month with several things:

• Writing my next book due out in May.
• Got the flu.
• Took some time off with the family at Christmas.
• Posting a bit and helping set up http://blog.wecreate.com.
• Starting a Web Developer group.
• Working on a new custom theme (getting close).
• Got sick again (it went around the office a few times).
• Writing a bunch of articles that are almost done.

and much more. If you’ve enjoyed my articles so far, fear not as more will be coming, I promise.

I’ve been searching high and low for an application that takes a screenshot of an entire web page, not just what’s on the visible screen and I finally found one! Paparazzi(http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/ “Check it out!”)! And it’s FREE!

I came across a great article about creating CSS production notes by Andy Clark. It’s a great idea to show co-workers the information and notes about a file but in my production environment I often use subversion so I’ve merged the two. If you use subversion and a dynamic language such as PHP there’s no reason why you can’t show the subversion log for the current file in the same way. Here’s a quick little PHP script that does exactly that. Feel free to use and edit it as much as you like, just let me know if you make a big improvement so I can post it here. Enjoy:

<?php

/**
 * A quick PHP script to produce the notes markup from subversion logs.
 * @see http://24ways.org/2006/css-production-notes
 */

//the current file in the repository, you could use $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']
$file = '/home/jeff/subversion/myproject/trunk/index.php';

//retrieve the log from subversion
$exec = array(
        'cmd'=> 'svn log --xml --verbose ' . escapeshellarg($file), //command
        'output'=>null,
        'return'=>null
);
exec($exec['cmd'],$exec['output'],$exec['errors']);

//make it a string.
$log = join($exec['output']);

//create the notes
$notes = '';
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($log);

//build the notes
foreach ($xml->xpath('//logentry') as $entry) {
    $message = nl2br($entry->msg);

    $notes .=
<<<NOTE
<li>
    <blockquote cite="{$entry->author}">
        <p>{$message}</p>
        <p class="date">{$entry->date}</p>
    </blockquote>
</li>
NOTE;

}

$notes = '<ul>'.$notes.'</ul>';

//do whatever you need with it.
echo $notes;

?>

I’ve been trying to keep up with at least one good long post a week but with the holidays approaching I’ll be spending some much needed time with the family and with the added need to work on my next book (which I’ll be announcing in the new year), I may not be posting as frequently. I will if I can, but if not I’ll try and make it up in the new year with a few extra posts here and there.

This past weekend my wife and I decided to check out the new Boston Pizza that was recently built near our house. It’s one of only a few new popular restaurants in town so we were told the line has been crazy long with more than an hour wait at times. We decided that before we went, we would check out the on-line menu too see what they had. That way, if the line was too long we could just order takeout and go home to enjoy our meal. The domain name BostonPizza.com wasn’t hard to guess so I pulled up the site and we proceeded to peruse the menu (I decided on a small hawaiian and my wife chose the Ultimate Pepperoni pizza). While browsing the menu I also noticed that the main navigation used a ‘drop-down’ effect:

Being the curios web developer I am, I decided to investigate a little further to see how it was done and if it was a semantic list a la suckerfish (though I had to work quickly as my wife was getting hungry after looking at the photos of pizza).

(more…)