Posts filed under ‘geeky’
lol json tutorial
February 17th, 2008
In my attempt to rewrite new millennium to make it 100% page refresh free, I’ve decided to learn more about json so I can use it with ajax. This is the first json tutorial that popped up in google. Hilarious stuff! I’m about 80% done with the rewrite of new millennium btw. So expected to see its new face on the web in a week or so. The process has been exciting and rewarding except I was pretty disgusted with my old code. Haha, live and learn 
Oh yea, if you want to test the json you whipped together, you might find this validator useful. And also jQuery’s json lib is my friend. This is a good tutorial to generate json with PHP.
perhaps javascript is not ready for xhtml 1.1 yet
February 16th, 2008
While making a new layout for new millennium, I used a jquery plugin for a certain visual effect. I coded my source to be validated against Xhtml 1.1. If you validate your source recently, you’d notice that W3C now gives you a warning if your xhtml is not served with application/xhtml+xml mimeType. As perfectionist, I changed my mimeType to match but only to find a javascript bug now exists in my code. Reported by firebug, here’s the error message:
An invalid or illegal string was specified" code: "12
I pulled the latest jquery version but no luck. After a bit testing, it seems like it’s not an issue with the jquery lib but the plugin’s code. I posted on the author’s blog about the issue but after reading The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types that was written almost 5 years ago, perhaps javascript is still not ready for application/xhtml+xml mimeType.
The fact that all the sudden it cares about case-sensitive is a big issue. Sounds like a lot of work to be done converting javascript to the new standards.
After thinking about it for a little, I chose to revert my doc type to Xhtml 1.0 Strict.
adobe flex
February 14th, 2008
i’m doing some more reading and researching on open laszlo. it’s kinda funny that i found a blog entry that compares open laszlo and adobe flex. i’ve just recently been to a jug meeting that presented flex. due to technology difficulties the presenter was not able to show us live the flex IDE. here’s a webcast for the flex IDE.
another interesting note. the two sides of RIA Do we really need it? vs. Why not?
Although I do not doubt that RIA is the future of web applications. I really don’t think the web is ready for it yet. For example, I was just thinking if I use a full scaled open laszlo app like this one, my firefox won’t even prompt to remember my password at the login. Browsers are still very much build for the traditional web apps. In the sense, ajax has the upper hand. It offers a more smooth transition. However, flash can be a lot more integrated.
Just getting my feet wet in Open Laszlo
February 14th, 2008
here’s my shoutBox written in openLaszlo frontend and PHP backend.
Try closing the shoutBox, it is animated
Click here if you do not see the flash embeded
So the idea of writing this simple application is just to get my feet wet in Open Laszlo. As we are moving to web 2.0, writing RIAs will be the future for web programmers. Many frameworks now have ajax plugin. I wrote my first ajax chat script in 2005 without any libraries. I’m sure it’s much easier to write one with plugins. But it was still nice to write one from scratch. You then truly understand how it works. Competing with adobe’s flex, google’s GWT (ajax framework), possibly Microsoft’s new silverlight there is an open source project called open laszlo. If you look at their demo applications, it seems to be pretty powerful. I think it’s a very interesting alternative to ajax so I gave it a shot.
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how fast does google crawl?
February 3rd, 2008
This blew my mind.
I submitted a topic on my message board to ask someone to preview a layout for me in mac. And about five minutes later I did a google search on “preview layout in mac,” that thread showed up in the first page of the search results.
UN……REAL!
OpenLaszlo
January 31st, 2008
This looks really cool. Maybe I will write a simple guestbook with it.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/demos
Bonus, found a tutorial for OpenLaszlo front end and php back end. Too bad it does require a java container to run. There are ways to get around that I guess.
I was watching this video produced by the author. It’s really very cool!!
dodo has been online for ten years
January 4th, 2008
the other night i realized something amazing. i’ve been to the online world for ten years. i got my first modem at home when i was 16 and i’m turning 26 soon. TEN YEARS.. that’s a long time. a very significant part of a life. from 16 to 26, a person can change so much. so i started to remember everything that happened in this ten years. i became so emotional i couldn’t sleep. perhaps every generation has its own thing that’s bound to change people’s lives and the internet is the one for mine.
now please excuse my poor english. i can never express my emotions in english the way i do in chinese. therefore i notice when i get emotional, i speak in chinglish.
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upgraded to wordpress 2.3
December 22nd, 2007
I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.3 mainly to use their new sidebar widget feature. I thought it will be overly cool to not have to rewrite the sidebar.php for every theme. However, I’d like to have different sidebars for different views. Like the sidebar for my index page would look different than the sidebar for my single post. I haven’t yet figured out how to create additional sidebar for a theme. Do you know how to do it? Please share if you do. Thanks! N/M I figured out. It’s talked about here.
Consider the Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin
If you are like me and use the UTW plugin, you might notice wordpress 2.3 now has its own native tags support. After the upgrade, I notice the old tags are not converted. I thought there must be already a way to convert them. Fortunately for us, wordpress 2.3 has also a built in way to convert your tags from the UTW plugin. Just go to your wordpress admin and look under Manage > Import. You will see the UTW import option.
where is IE7 refresh button?
December 18th, 2007
I can’t believe I googled on this. I thought IE7 took out the refresh button but in fact they just moved it. Moved it to the end of the address line. This also shows how little I used IE7 even tho I’ve been using Vista for over 9 months.
transparent PNG background
November 23rd, 2007
I finally found some time to put back the transparent PNG background tutorial. It’s by far the most requested tutorial from Dodo’s New World. People email me from this original post.
