Is that real French? Write in and tell me that I suck at French.

Anyway, I wrote another dandy JS object. This one creates a rollover animation from a series of frames. If you try and do animating rollovers for more than one image with IE (on the Mac, not tested on the PC) when you rollout of one, they all animate. Useless!

I’m coping slightly better with Jaguar today. To be honest the difference is extremely minimal, but essential in that new toy way. I still don’t a working Sendmail, which is a bitch, and the Jaguar-installed copy of Python doesn’t want to do xml.dom.minidom properly. Oh well.

Woo hoo! Mac OS X 10.2! Yay!

Like a new version of Windows this is minor tweaks and new features. There are umpteen lists out there so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say that there are enough changes to give it a slightly disorienting feel but by NO means enough of an improvement to warrent the huge sticker price! Bastards always have to charge so much for what is essentially a very big bug fix.

• There is proper Samba support, both as a client and a server, which is nice. Users can be Samba users or you can stop them logging in from System Preferences.
• As usual they’ve over-written Internet Explorer. You’ll need to follow this tip in order to get it to search Google again (link mainly for my benefit). The server appears to be dead right now. Basically, change “http://home.microsoft.com/access/autosearch.asp?p=%s” in Localized.rsrc to any URL that’s 52 characters long. %s will be replaced with what you type after ‘? ’.
• I found the new version of Mail to be totally incompatible (like, instant crash incompatible) with Sen:te’s GPG bundle.
• Spring-loaded folders is OK, but they fucked it in column-view. It opens a new window instead of moving forward a column! Stupid stupid stupid! I’m definitely writing to Apple about that one.
• Sendmail isn’t working properly again either. It’s not open on 25 (no this has nothing to do with the new firewall config). It has another different config file. But I still can’t understand it :-). Silly Sendmail. Update: This is the group-writeable root problem that has surfaced before. You can get around it by doing chmod g-w / or you can edit sendmail.cf to tell it not to worry about it.
• PHP is turned off! Can’t quite work out how to turn it on again, maybe I need to download the module again
• It has connection sharing for PPP connections, a la 2000/XP, which is a nice feature.
• Tab-tab to display a list of completion possibilites in TCSH seems to have died. I know this one, it’s probably in Linux in a Nutshell (buy it! now! essential book). If I could just stop typing long enough to stand… yep, add set autolist=ambiguous to your .tcshrc file. If you haven’t got one it needs to go in your home folder.
• New libraries have broken my Vim! Aaarrrggghhh! Ben need vim, vi no do! Wait, the MacVim people have already built a new version. Nice one, guys.

I just found out about the Blogger API. It’s an XML-RPC API for editing and creating posts remotely. It’s greatest usefulness is that a batch of already written standard blog editing tools, such as BlogApp can be used to manage a weblog. BlogApp has handy stuff like a spelling checker and buttons to insert HTML.

Problem is that whilst I can find implementations of a client I can’t find a server implementation in PHP. Which means I may have to up and code it myself. Which means that I have another week long project on my already GIGANTIC to do list. I need minions!

http://www.k2m.co.uk/

The one I alluded to last post, this site is the first one that I have built and designed entirely by myself. It’s very minimal and loads ridiculously quickly. It’s also all CSS and totally standards compliant. It’s only drawback is that it uses the CSS right property, which Netscape 4 doesn’t understand.

Another site goes live. It should be two by now, but I’ve so busy that I haven’t had a chance to sort out the minor problems on the second project. Anyway, the DMA Membership Microsite is finished, packed with more Javascript cunning than any other site I’ve built so far. It got very stressful today (and the last two days), we were quite late and it was an important project for the guys who hired me.

The problems we had were due to lack of testing. This seems to be my main problem in terms of site development. At the crunch I get stressed and put the delivery ahead of the quality checking. After the crunch this means that errors often creep in and push the delivery back much further than 15 minutes good testing ever could.

I haven’t posted for a while. I’ve been really busy, since Friday at least. I’m doing a job that involves JavaScript like nothing I’ve ever done before. It relies on the browser to do many of the things that I would always do in PHP: validation, persistence and selective content. But I’m not paying, so you say jump…

Writing the validation and the session management was interesting. I have recently mastered the writing of JavaScript objects, having never really seen the point before I now tend to code as an object by default, whether in PHP, JavaScript or any other language. The objects I created are great, like all objects just include the file and call a couple of methods. The session management I particularly like, it apes PHP/ASP session code and to use is almost identical to JavaScript ASP, with session.get(key) and session.set(key, value) functions, the object also rips the values from a named form if you want it to.

The validation is a rip-off of the validation class I use in PHP, which came from a tutorial on DevShed. It too benefits from being a workalike of a tested solution.

Today I was messing around with window.open and started experimenting with interaction between windows. Because JavaScript is a so-called prototype language (I know of no others), any object can have properties and methods added at run-time. I found that by adding a popup property to the window object, opening a new window with window.open and then getting the content of the new window to refer to document.opener.popup I could transfer content for a popup window from the main window. This is quite useful as the work I’m doing at the moment has a fairly large number of popup windows, all with similar content. This way I can use a single popup template and write the content in when I need it.