Category Code

Internet Explorer Event Handler Leaks

If you’ve been developing for the open web for long, you’ll know that Internet Explorer is the bane of any web developer’s existence. The number of CSS bugs are enough to give any web developer a headache, but then add to that JScript’s deviations from the ECMAScript 3 spec and you have yourself a pain in the neck as well. Grab your favorite pain reliever, because there is another nuisance: memory leaks.

Adding Axis Titles to DojoX Charts

DojoX charting is a very powerful 2D graphics charting solution that works cross-browser. One thing that is an often requested feature is axis titles. I’ve come up with a solution (inspired by a post on the old Dojo forums) that leverages the current API and renders correctly in all browsers. I’ll be using Dojo 1.5 from Google’s CDN plus a local module as I outlined in my local module with a CDN build tutorial.

Using Local Modules With a Cross-Domain Dojo Build

Lately, I have been using Dojo from a CDN as much as possible. There are several reasons to use a cross-domain build of Dojo that are listed here: You get more connections in MSIE, since you can load from another domain. Faster loading. You get increased cacheability/startup if many of your applications use the same installation. Resource loading does not block the rest of the page from filling in as with Dojo’s normal, synchronous loading.

Monkey patching

Recently, David Walsh tweeted that I had schooled him. I received several questions about what I had schooled him in, so I decided to blog about it. David was trying to change the behavior of a method of a widget on a page, but for all instances of that widget rather than just one instance. What follows is a lesson on monkey patching. I’m sure there are other tutorials out there about it, but this is more for my sanity (and to get David off my back about blogging) than anything else.

And life keeps flying by

It’s been almost a month and a half and my blogging has been quite absent. Here’s what has been happening… Life Our trip to San Jose (last month) went great. We had 4 days to bum around Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas. Since this was a vacation, we decided not to do too much and really only did one touristy thing: we went down to Carmel and 17 mile drive for a day.

My current endeavors

Ok, so I said I would keep up with this blogging thing, but I’m not doing a very good job. It’s been over two months since I last blogged. What the heck is my problem? So here’s the run-down of what I’ve been doing: Work I’ve been steadily plugging away at Master Packing’s web site over the last two months. I’ve been trying to implement interactive features to some fairly boring things.

Clarification

I’d like to point out that yes, I know that version 1.3.2 of Drivel supports the MovableType API. I checked out CVS head to do my hacking because 1.3.2 was sending integers for the blogid and postid and the MovableType API wants strings for those values. If your blog software accepts 1.3.2 posting to an mt blog, then its probably not adhering to the mt API which probably means that it is broken.

Drivel and Coaster

I’ve hacked Drivel to work with the MovableType API (and I filed a bug as well) so hopefully I’ll be blogging more often. I continue to work on audio support in Coaster, so look for a release sometime in the next month!

Coaster site

The Coaster site is down. Sean forgot to renew our registrar stuff and the result is what you have now. For now, the Coaster tarball is located here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I can almost hear it…

This last week I started working on audio disc support in Coaster. It has been interesting trying to figure out the Gstreamer library and how to get it to interact well with Coaster without using a wrapping library (to save you guys the hassle of another binding dependency). So far, I have some test programs that read in the information I need; next thing to do is to get an audio store, layout, and view up and going.