The Codebelay Blog

Month: September 2008

  • Wow, PHP has a wordwrap function!

    http://www.php.net/wordwrap

    picture of php wordwrap

    Woot!

  • Weening Myself Off of Eclipse PDT

    I really just want to stick with Vim, and Vim is really making that sort of commitment easy because of technology I talked about in my last post, as well as learning how to use subversion just from the command-line.

    Today I learned how to:

    • create folds in Vim with a split view so that I can get perspectives similar to Eclipse’s object explorer. (There’s a great folds tutorialon Linux.com.)
    • merge by just using subversion on the command-line

    Tomorrow I’m gonna learn about:

    • Using ant at the command-line
    • Being more adept at file version comparisons, e.g. (svn diff)

    Have you weened yourself off of an IDE? And if so, what do you now use for text editing?

  • Ctags and Code Completion in Vim 7.2

    At work we switched the whole dev team over to using Eclipse. I still haven’t gotten used to all the point and click crap on it, but really admire the use of code completion and ctags.

    When I saw that Vim had these, I’ve upgraded and now use ctags and code completion from Vim.

    To get code completion, I type out the little bit I know and then type ctrl-o and ctrl-x:

    pic of code completion in vim

    To get ctags working, I installed it using sudo apt-get install ctags and then at the root of all my php files I typed:

    ctags -R .

    This generated a tags file.

    Now when I open any file and have the cursor over a function or class, I just type ctrl-] and the file containing the class or function opens up.

  • What School or My Parents Never Taught Me

    If there’s one emotion that’s colored my entire year, it’s been anger. I’m doing my best with the hand that I’ve been dealt, but I’m realizing now that the man I dreamed I would be just might not ever happen. It’s making me pissed.

    Let’s start off with things that I just haven’t learned:

    • controlling my emotions and impulses
    • how to trust people — i pretty much don’t
    • live in community and forge good relationships
    • how to organize for positive, social change

    This pretty much makes my life a solitary hell-hole. I’m working on learning these things, though.

    Now I’ll reflect on those things that I should’ve been taught by school or my parents but wasn’t. This is stuff I’ve learned on my own and often with the help of strangers, and I’m glad that I learned these things.

    • communicate well
    • how to meet the women I want without using the Internet
    • manage financial matters
    • code for a living
    • do practical things, to clean, cook, make, repair, grow food
    • be good mannered and know etiquette
    • accept responsibility
    • deal with grief, loss, and suffering
    • clicker training dogs

    Now that I look at it, my college degree is pretty useless except for down economic times when some HR stooge has to choose between someone with a degree and someone without. I really think my parents short changed me because during summers they would keep my locked up in my house, and I never really learned how to socialize or keep friendships. That really makes me and my dog, Niles, really similar because his previous owners locked him up in a yard, too, and that’s one of the reasons he’s messed up.

    What do you wish your parents or school taught you but didn’t? What did you learn on your own, and were glad you did?

  • The HTTP Status 122 Error in IE7 in Ajax Apps

    Summary: Don’t use the GET method in Ajax Apps, if you can void it, because IE7 craps out with more than 2032 characters in a get string.

    Here’s the page that craps out at 2033 characters with IE7:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2033

    You won’t see the error with other browsers.

    Here’s the page that’s okay:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2000

    What’s going on here?

    picture of http status 122
    Sometimes you’ll write a piece of Javascript that uses prototype and looks like this:

      var url = '/status122/listener/?stuff=' + encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);

  // This is where we send our raw ratings for parsing
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'get',
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    If you print http.status you get an HTTP Status of 122. WTF?

    What’s going on here is that IE7 sets a limit of 2032 characters on GET strings, so you have to do a POST instead like so:

      var getvar = encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);
  var url = '/status122/listener/';

  // This is where we send our raw data for parsing
  // If we use method: 'get', IE7 will return a 122, but
  // b/c Firefox is RFC2616 compliant and realizes that
  // there is no minimum length for a URI, we get success.
  // Here we use method: 'post' b/c IE7 is lame.
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'post',
		postBody: 'stuff=' + getvar,
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    I hope this helps.

    What Ajax quirks have you run into?

  • SubEthaEdit for Linux?

    SubEthaEdit is a fun editor that links coders via OS X’s chat. You and your friends can see each other’s cursor in the editor and edit accordingly. From a management perspective, it’s quite satisfying to see your coders collaborate on the same tough problem that crops up and you have to have everyone talk about it.

    pic of subethaedit

    Dear Lazy Web,

    I have two questions:

    Is there a SubEthaEdit for Linux?

    What collaborative technologies do you use for coding?

    Cheers,
    Barce

    PS I use eclipse, svn, pastebin, IM, IRC, and sometimes ventrilo. I would love to just use SubEthaEdit though.

  • Gearing Up For HackDay At Yahoo on September 12th

    picture of hackday at yahoo

    I just signed up for HackDay at Yahoo, which will bring together a lot of cool people in the industry.

    I’m hoping to just spend the day and talk to folks about what’s inspiring them lately.

    Comment below if you’re going. Also share with me and the folks commenting what you’re hoping to solve or build.

  • What I Learned at ROFLCon: Numa Numa and Too Many Wannabe PUAs

    Bad News:

    • I’m pretty much done with tech events with too many dudes pretending to be Pick-up Artists. Tech Events with 80% dudes was cool in 2005 before the book, The Game, came out. But now that all these chumps have a license to be douche bags, I think it’s kinda silly that all these guys are AMOG’ing guys in their own industry. Douchebags being negative towards their industry peers just for the attention of a random 20 year old.


    Pic of Mystery
    If you act like this guy at a tech event I will kick your ass.

    “Picking up” women is not some video game, or like Dungeons and Dragons. There are some real life consequences to being a player. One of them is me kicking your ass if you interrupt me with the intent of tooling me while I’m talking to someone.

    WARNING: If you pull any of that game or player bullshit, when I am talking to someone; if you tool me, I will drop you to the floor and frog walk you out of the tech event we are at. You have been warned!

    Good News:

    • Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger put on a pretty cool discussion on the types of jokes out there. I’m gonna try to find the slides for that.
    • Numa Numa is my favorite viral video. I still laugh when I watch it.