Man, I keep telling myself I’ll write more often, and then I go a month or so without writing… what is my problem? Let me catch you guys up with what’s happening.
Work
After a year and a half at Master Packing and Rubber Company, I’m leaving my position there to join the gang over at SitePen full time working on Dojo and other DHTML/JavaScript web application “stuff”. My last day at MPRC is this Friday and I start at SitePen a week from today. I’ll still be working on MPRC’s website in my free time and offering them a bit of technical support every once and a while (read: over the next month, I’ll be getting phone calls left and right from them). It’s been a fun year and a half and I’ve learned a ton about business, quality assurance, and website administration and I truly appreciate them giving me the opportunity to work for them. That being said, I’m really looking forward to working from home for SitePen and working full time with the some of the best in DHTML and JavaScript.
Dojo
We’re approaching our 0.4 release and there are plenty of treats for this release! One of the biggest developments for this release is the gfx package. Gfx is an SVG drawing API that works in both IE and Firefox. Check out the clock demo. Another SVG goodie we’re packing into this release is the charting engine. These goodies are thanks to the wonderful work of Eugene Lazutkin, Tom Trenka, Gavin Doherty, and Kun Xi.
Capoeira
Last Wenesday, my wife took some (over 200) pictures at our capoeira class of our capoeira family. I’ve posted them here. She started taking pictures during aú and handstand exercises, took them throughout the roda, and ended the excursion at Thai Flavors (our hangout after Wednesday night practice).
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. It was fun and it was a really beautiful area. And the driving out there wasn’t too bad. The Dojo Developer Day (which is what I went out there for in the first place) went great as well.
Dojo
Dojo has been taking off recently. Last month, we released 0.3.0 and about a week ago we released 0.3.1. For the 0.3.0 release, I refactored/rewrote the effects portion, James Burke wrote a cross-domain loader, Tom Trenka added a Google and Yahoo! maps interface, and Torrey Rice added the new widget theme. There was more, but those are the ones that stick out in my mind. We had about 50k downloads in the month that 0.3.0 was out. For 0.3.1, the cross-domain loading has been improved and we have a cross-domain package now, plus AOL is now hosting Dojo on their CDN, IBM is actively helping with a11y, and Sun just announced they are going to start developing widgets for Dojo. All-in-all, it’s been a good month.
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. Once its up, I’ll highlight what I’ve done, but until then, I’ve got to explain. On the mechanical packing page, I’ve used the Tree widget from Dojo to let you figure out which style of our mechanical packing matches other companies’ packing. Also, you can compare the temperature, pH, and speed ratings on all the mechanical packing we offer using the SortableTable widget. On the rail and marine page, you’ll be able to search for a partial or complete EMD number and the server will show you what part number we sell that part under and also suitable replacements. This search feature is something that isn’t available anywhere else in the EMD aftermarket industry. We should have it up and running by mid April. I’ll definately post when it’s up.
JavaScript
For the last month, I’ve been delving deep into the world of JavaScript for SitePen. It has taken me a while, but I think I’ve gotten the hang of the prototype-base inheritance that JavaScript uses. I think I’m past the fact that you can extend the prototype of any class so if you want a new method or want to modify an old method, you don’t create a new class. You just “mask” the old method on the current class. Coming from C++, that blew my mind.
Coaster
Development has pretty much stalled. I’ve been so busy with life, music, Dojo, Django, work, contracting, and everything else that I haven’t had time to sit down and code on Coaster for a long time. Also, the success of programs like Serpentine have shown me that other people are more motivated than I am. If someone wants to take the coding portion of the project over, contact me or Sean Harshbarger on the Coaster mailing list.
Man, I’ve been busy lately and haven’t had any time to work on Coaster. I haven’t even really had much time for anything other than work. Although I’ve had fun doing it, it’s been hectic.
Most of my time lately has been spent working on converting Master Packing’s current website over to Django so we can quickly develop new applications and easily edit content. I’ve been very impressed with Django’s infrastructure and API, and I’m even more impressed with how the next version is shaping up to look like. They’ve changed it so that a lot of the “magic” is gone and the API is improving. 1.0 should be sweet.
I’ve also been working with the Dojo javascript toolkit as well. It’s a pretty neat toolkit that is pretty powerful. I like how dojo.io.bind works for AJAX requests. They also have dojo.event.connect that works kind of like glib’s event connecting. The documentation is on the bare side (as in, not much at all), but that’s being worked on.
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