Cavaliere.org

How to Speed Up Firefox for Web Development

Hands down, Firefox wins as the developer's favorite browser. With Firebug as the de-facto standard development tool and so many other great extensions, other browsers are supplementary or used for QA only.

The downside to the hardcore coolness of Firefox addons is that adding a bunch of them can make the browser sluggish; slow restarts + slower page renders = lower productivity. Well, I've got a few tricks to give FF a kick in the pants when it starts getting lazy. Sheck it out.

Notes From AJAXWorld New York 2009

I recently had the good fortune of getting a free pass to the 2009 AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo conference here in NYC (big thanks goes out to Mike G). Here's a brief summary of some of the highlights.

Workflow: Using sed to Delete Specific File Patterns

I will often make backups of my sites on an external hard drive simply by copying and pasting them, then leaving the computer for an hour while everything copies. The sucky thing about that is that projects managed by subversion have hundreds of little hidden .svn directories, with tons of files in them.

A More Readable Selenium API Documentation

If you haven't heard of it yet, Selenium is a great tool for functional testing your websites. It's especially useful for QA'ing websites which use AJAX heavily, but can be used to a variety of other ways as well. In any case it's an awesome tool that can be integrated into anyone's workflow.

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CavKit: A Debugger for the iPhone

In the process of exploring iPhone web development, I began to find the Mobile Safari console a bit annoying. It's verbose, ugly, hard to read. So as programmers often do, I invented another variant of the wheel: the CavKit iPhone Debugger.

New Design

I just applied my new site design, kudos and thanks to Jennifer Bazan for creating it. Her site is www.pinkflydesigns.com.

Reducing Javascript Recursion, and Other Fun Tricks

Here's some brain candy for all you algorith-maniacs (that's right, I said it) out there. Check out Speed up your JavaScript, Part 2.

Javascript Can Do Multiline Strings??

This one was a shocker to me. While reading this post on jQuery animation, I followed the link to Karl Swedberg's jQuery example. Whilst looking at the source, I saw a bit of code that made me stop and stare:

You Mean, Twitter Isn't Useless?

For a while I scoffed at the concept of Twitter, writing it off as a pointless procrastination aid. But nature tends to find innovative ways of making things useful. Case in point: 9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World.

Workflow: Bulk File Renaming with sed

Even in this user-friendly, GUI-dominated world, the command line can still rock. Besides being always present (on Linux or OS X at least), there's so much slickness one can achieve if you know the right commands and how to use them.

jQuery Performance Comparison

The announcement of the new jQuery release had me as excited as a geeky kid in a video game shop, so naturally I had to do some playing around. Noting the mention of performance improvements, I put together some tests to see just how must faster jQuery 1.3 was than 1.2.6.

Unique Element IDs With jQuery

When optimizing DOM-heavy Javascript I'll often find the need to cache a bunch of elements or element collections. For example, take the following rollover code taken from my online resume (uses jQuery):

Javascript Coding Patterns: TaskRunner

Nowadays it's painfully clear that the browser market is overpopulated. Web developers have to make sites work in a minimum of 3 browsers and their respective sub-versions. Clients, designers and developers alike want sites to look cool, and function well, but since browser support is inconsistent, we often must sacrifice function, or leave part of our audience with a so-so user experience; neither of these makes anyone happy.

jQuery Plugin for Animated Underlines

It's always a good practice to have a hover effect on links to let users know that they're not just plain text. But after a while, the standard underline effect gets boring.

Javascript Event Viewing

I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Tech Musings: Webkinz and Education

A few people recently commented on the popularity of Webkinz. Although I haven't used it myself, I've read a few articles and heard several anecdotes that attest to its popularity. It seems to have both cult appeal (even some adults attest to being hooked on it) and that "sticky" factor Malcolm Gladwell talks about.

3D Animation on the IPhone with Webkit CSS Transforms

Webkit's new CSS properties are kicking up some dust, especially since they let you do 2D and 3D animation with only CSS and some Javascript. This means that we can do a good amount of Flash-like animations on the iPhone without having to wait on a Flash plugin. I cooked up a demo to show off some of these, have a look and feel free to give me some feedback. You'll need an iPhone or Webkit to view it properly.

Making XHTML Forms a Bit Sexier

One major frustration about cross-browser development is just how design-inflexible XHTML forms can be. Even with CSS, some elements (<input type="file">, <select> boxes) remain as (f)ugly as the day they were born. Unless of course we sacrifice IE6, which will alienate roughly 25% of users.

Finally...A Rendering Bug In Another Browser

Remy Sharp discovered yet another rendering bug that we'll all inevitably have to work around at some point, yet this time it was - *gasp* - NOT in Internet Explorer.

Holly-Hackin'

We all hate using CSS hacks as a quick fix; a hack is never better than a real solution. But we all know that when it's crunch time, it can be a necessary (and hopefully temporary) evil, especially when working with our bastard stepchild beloved, but flawed Internet Explorer.

setTimeout / setInterval and Ensuring Time Gaps

After coming across an informative post by John Resig about how Javascript timers work, I had to copy a useful code snippet from him.See the following:

Subversion Gotcha: "Malformed URL" When Merging

Here's a wacky issue that occurs on Windows in both TortoiseSVN and command-line subversion. When doing a merge, Tortoise complains of a "Malformed URL" and fails.

Busy Waiting in Javascript

Sometimes, particularly in sites that use large amounts of AJAX, we developers run into race conditions. Maybe the flash movie has to be loaded before a piece of Javascript executes. Or one piece of Javascript must run before another. And so on.

Internet Explorer and setAttribute

While coding some DOM creation funness today, I had the need to dynamically update the css classes of a DOM node. In the process, I realized that IE6 and IE7 won't run the following code properly:

Calculating CSS Selector Weight

When working with complicated stylesheets, I'm always forgetting the rules regarding which rule overrides another when both affect the same element.

Javascript Performance Lessons from Qooxdoo

While googling for some information on improving Javascript performance, I came across this Javascript Best Practices document from the Qooxdoo people. A few of the (summarized) points that I found useful: