Posts filed under ‘geeky’
Dodo’s Text Counter
May 30th, 2008
I needed a text counter at work. I searched around trying to find a jQuery plugin that fits the bill but I didn’t find anything. So I wrote one myself. Check it out 
It should be pretty flexible.
- Requires jQuery
- Define the maximum of characters the user may input
- May be applied to one or more input text or textarea fields
- Also disable the user from entering more characters after s/he reaches the maximum
another reason why I love foobar2000
April 7th, 2008
I’ve been using foobar2000 as my media player for quite some time. It’s lightweight, highly customizable and uses little resource. Today while I was listening to some soothing music, I remembered back then I had a CD player that had a sleep function where you can set a timer to have it automatically turn off in 30 minutes. I thought would it be nice to do something like that with foobar since I leave my laptop on all the time by my bed. Sure enough, I didn’t have to look far, foobar’s got an awesome plugin foo_scheduler that does that and much more. It can perform many actions on a scheduled basis including, start, stop, lower volume, exit and even shutdown your computer. Alternatively this is the first thread I stumpled upon. It contains much valuable information for scheduling your computer.
twitter and pownce
March 26th, 2008
Thanks to daynah. I now belong to two more these online social networking sites: pownce & twitter.
Hey, you can watch a video on twitter even.
pownce is prettier and better written and gives you more control but less popular than twitter.
Talking about great tools for online stalking.
It’s scary but it makes me want to recheck my cell phone plan to see if it charges extra for texting.
Oh yea 8 featured firefox plugins for twitter. I installed twitter box/twitter notifier. It works well.
Dodo’s Picklist
March 23rd, 2008
I needed a pick list script at work. I looked around and found a jQuery plugin but it didn’t do all I wanted so I modified it. I thought I’d share my final results with you. I will contact the original author to see if he wants to include my changes to his version as well.
- Requires jQuery
- A modified version of jqmultiselects jQuery plugin
- Select options sorting code taken from select box manipulation
- Choose one or more to add or remove. Or add all or remove all at once
- Options are sorted to keep them in the same order
new millennium with web 2.0
February 28th, 2008
After much anticipation, it’s finally here!!
I present you the completely rewritten New Millennium - New Millennium with web 2.0
It’s done in ajax with the help of jQuery. The idea is to create a site with no page refresh. Although it was fun, toward the end it was getting a bit tedious. I felt like doing a cross-stitch. Overall, I found ajax coding with no IDE support hard to debug. Some of the bugs eluded me quite a bit. I’ve done extensive testing on the final product. I hope it’s a good one.
It has been a very nice learning experience. I think jQuery is awesome but it’s a client side only library. So if I go try GWT and I should have a very good comparison.
IE input background image issue
February 28th, 2008
IE strikes AGAIN!
Just when I thought I was 100% done with the revamp of New Millennium, I noticed an UI issue in IE. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this before. It shouldn’t be anything new. I did some google research but didn’t find anyone mentioning it either.
Applying background image to input tags should be nothing new. You see the little search icons for search inputs all over the web now but did anyone notice in IE if you have a background image set to no-repeat and someone puts some very LONG text in the input field, the background image SCROLLS with the text? This causes very odd behavior.
Here’s my input background-image. I pick this one so I can do background image affect on hover by manipulating background-position.
CSS:
input.formInput {
width: 255px;
background: #a99787 url(formInput.gif) left top no-repeat;
border: 0;
padding: 3px;
height: 22px;
color: #302721;
}
input.formInput:hover,
input.formInput:focus {
background-position: -261px top;
}
In Firefox, it looks great but in IE if you start putting very looooooooooooooooong text in the input, it will look like crap.
So does anyone have a good solution for this issue?
If I were to do it, I’d wrap the input in a container and put the background image on the container and hopefully by applying the hover affect on the container, it would get the desirable effect. Of course I will need to test out my theory. But it’s past midnight so I should get some sleep for now.
AND it does work. check it out.
Man, I just love IE.
jQuery and Tamper data rock
February 27th, 2008
I’ve been working on a UI design at work and some of the build in components have border=”1″ on their generated table code. To achieve a consistent look, I always want border=”0″ on the table so I can control the table border with CSS. There is no way as far as I know you can get rid of the table border with CSS once the source have border=”1″ in the table tag. But you can get rid of all table borders with this single line of code in jQuery:
$("table[border!='0']").attr("border", "0");
It completely rules!!
While debugging, I also found this awesome Firefox plugin: Tamper data. It lets you hijack a post/get http request on the fly so you can view and modify the submitted parameters. I used to use WebScarab. But this is so much lighter weight. Although it only works in Firefox while WebScarab, a proxy server, would work with any browsers.
jQuery plugin - tableRowCheckboxToggle
February 26th, 2008
So since I’ve been playing with jQuery on my spare time while putting together an ajax site, I’ve decided to tackle a design issue I’ve run into many times at work with jQuery. This idea originally comes from phpMyAdmin. If you’ve used that software, you know that when you click on any table row, it automatically toggles the checked state of the checkbox in the first cell. I think that’s an extremely user friendly thing to have since checkboxes are so small and hard to click on.
Let me present you my friends, my first jQuery plugin. It generically adds the toggle function to any table rows you specify based on the css class names. It will by default toggle any checkboxes within the table row. However, you can manually exclude checkboxes based on name, id or css classes in the script. In addition to the phpMyAdmin function, I added an initialization step in the script that correctly marks a row when it’s considered checked on page load.
tableRowCheckboxToggle
- It generically adds the toggle checkbox function to any table rows you specify based on the css class names.
- It will by default toggle any checkboxes within the table row.
- You can manually exclude checkboxes based on name, id or css classes in the script.
- If there is any applicable checkboxes inside of the table row that are checked, it will apply a class to the table row.
- It also marks table rows when there are checked applicable checkboxes on page load.
laptop middle mouse button
February 24th, 2008
I’ve been complaining as long as I’ve been using a laptop that I miss a middle mouse button because I’m so used to using it on my regular mouse esp. to open pages in new tabs in Firefox.
I accidentally discovered today that at least on my laptop Dell Inspiron 6400, if you click on the left and right buttons simultaneously, it acts as a middle button click.
For example, I can click on any links in Firefox with both buttons to open them in new tabs.
my computer at work
February 19th, 2008
I was contracted out as a consultant for a new company three weeks ago. They had a computer ready for me but it was not set up correctly so I could actually do work. I finally got my new one last Thursday. I guess they made it a worthwhile wait. It’s pretty decent ya think?
