The Dojo folks have a site setup for examples and a little learning. For example, you can see examples of all the dijit widgets at: http://dojocampus.org/explorer/#Dijit. The main site is of course at: http://dojocampus.org.
I haven't looked at the tutorials yet to see how good those are. The dijit examples are very helpful. Will post more if I get a chance to take a better look at this.
Just wanted to provide this link to a page that describes the difference between dojo.byId and dijit.byId. The page describes the difference in a very concise manner.
Did you know if you double click the tab bar on Safari or Webkit, the browser opens a new tab for you? Well it does. lol. I wish I had figured that out about 2 years ago. :-p I think God is teaching me about humility this week. :)
I just found the "Fixed Width Page View" view for Google Docs. This is great cause I hate it when I have a wide browser view and each sentence is 12 inches wide. That stinks. Its nice to have it limited to what looks like a page. Just like a word processor. Why I haven't found this sooner? I'm an idiot. lol.
I need to see if I can get my parents to use this. They have trouble with any word processor that is not a simple typewriter metaphor. Will need to do some testing they next time I'm at their house.
Well I setup a new GMail account today with a more normal name for the address. Thusly, I needed to a way to run an extra browser session, without messing up my current setup. So after a little research, I decided upon SeaMonkey. Why?
To make this happen, you need to do a couple of things
The shell script for each browser session looks something like this on OS X.
#!/bin/bash /Applications/SeaMonkey.app/Contents/MacOS/seamonkey-bin -P profileName &
That's it. Enjoy your monkeys!
Ajaxian has this good post on some browser specific CSS features that have been added to Mozilla and Webkit. Basically, the new properties allow you to rotate and scale parts of the DOM using CSS properties. Looks like cool stuff. In my opinion, no point in playing around with this much until its standardized. But, it looks like this is something that will be added.
Found this post on ProBlogger today about updates to Google Analystics. Looks like we are gonna get some detailed reports on what page are getting all the clicks and making the most money.
Very Good news. The current Adsense reports are pretty vague and not very helpful.
A follow up to my last post. A List Apart has this post on using DOCTYPE processing instruction in your HTML files. A listing of all the various types you should use is included. Very helpful.
I found this link on Ajaxian today listing 10 tips from CSS masters. Most of the tips seem pretty good. I haven't been putting my CSS rules on 1 line. I kind of like that. Also the trick for clearing the float looks quite cool.
I'm working on updating one of our EJB courses and I needed to add a Java DB database to my machine so I could deploy an Enterprise Application. Of course, in my first attempt to create the database, I completely hosed it. Consequently, I needed to delete it and start over. Now this isn't very easy cause a bunch of configuration files get created when you create a Java DB database with NetBeans. So here is what I learned from my little escapade.
This is where I should have gone first but didn't. All the information about databases for an EJB project can be found in: project-ejb\setup\sun-resources.xml. This file shows the database name, user name, password, port number, etc... Go here first if you need to figure out this information when it isn't provided to you.
Java DB is based off of the Apache Derby open source database project. So the database files are stored in a Derby directory. But where? On Windows you can find the directory here: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\.netbeans-derby. You will find a directory for each Java DB database you have created. To delete the database, just delete the directory.
When you create a Java DB database, NetBeans automatically creates a connection for that DB. Now you should be able to delete the connection from the UI by right clicking it and selecting delete. For whatever reason, that was not working for me. So I had to find where this list was stored. I found it here on Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\.netbeans\6.1\config\Databases\Connections. Each connection is stored in an XML file. Delete the file and the connection is removed. You may need to restart NetBeans to see the connection removed from the UI.
This sums up my little adventure. After installing the database with the correct user name and password, deployment was a breeze. Woo hoo!
Kris over at digitalinsane.com has written an all JavaScript Pacman using the YUI toolkit. Its not perfect, everything moves too fast on my MacPro with Firefox 3. But it is impressive nonetheless.
Over the weekend I had a brainstorm and made quite a few changes to this web site. I have been using a Ruby script and regular expressions to generate all my non blog pages. Basically, the script reads an XHTML source file, wraps it with headers, footers, and a nav bar, and writes out a fully formatted HTML file. Now this script has evolved from earlier simple CMS systems. On my old web site, I did the same sort of thing using XSLT. I even wrote my own Atom and RSS feeds for that system.
But of late, I have been on a simplicity kick. For example, this blog is created and hosted on Blogger. Now I used Wordpress for a couple of years. It is a great piece of software and works great. But I really got tired of the software patches and updates I kept having to make. Backing up the data. Migrating the data to a new version. Yuck! I'd rather be doing something else.
So I realized there was no point to maintaining the script. Sure the pages will load slightly faster if its static HTML. But, if I convert the pages to PHP, I get the same output without a build step. Plus the actual source pages are cleaner and easier to maintain. So I've converted the whole site to PHP. If you have any links to content pages, you will need to change the .html to a .php.
I have been holding off on any migration of pages from my old site to this one until I was sure I had things like I want them. I think I have reached that point. So hopefully in the next few months I will be post links to new content as well as some migrated content.
When I start learning a new language or api or whatever, I like to write short little test programs. I've started to do that with JQuery and my first examples page can be found here.
I'm exploring Form interactions. It is surprising how few simple examples there seems to be on the subject. But, once you learn about the JQuery val() function it is pretty easy. More to come on that page.
