Notes on codes, projects and everything
Recently I volunteered in building a site that reports whether certain websites are blocked locally (please don’t ask why that is happening). As it is a very simple app reporting status I wanted it to be easily scrape-able. One of the decision made was I want it to have things to see on first load, this practically removes the possibility of using react, which is my current favorite.
Javascript is getting so foreign to me these days, but mostly towards a better direction. So I recently got myself to learn react through work and the JSX extension makes web development bearable again. On the other hand, I picked up a little bit on Vue.js but really hated all the magic involved (No I don’t enjoy putting in code into quotes).
Recently I find some of my pet projects share a common pattern, they all are based on some kind of grids. So I find myself writing similar piece of code over and over again. While re-inventing wheels is quite fun, especially when you learn new way of getting things done with every iteration, it is actually quite tedious after a while.
Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.
A new day, and a new post on job application. So this time instead of asking a snippet, I was actually asked to deliver some sort of a full application. Not sure why this was required, but I had fun creating them nonetheless. Though I would say I am not really a fan of creating visual stuff though (oh the crappy animation nearly killed me).
The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.
It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.
I often struggle to get my Javascript code organized, and have tried numerous ways to do so. I have tried putting relevant code into classes and instantiate as needed, then abuse jQuery’s data() method to store everything (from scalar values to functions and callbacks). Recently, after knowing (briefly) how a jQuery plugin should be written, it does greatly simplify my code.
After coded enough Javascript few months back, I found that there are a couple of functions that I kept re-using in different projects. Therefore I took some time to refactor them and re-arrange them into a single file. The common code that I keep reusing even today consists of functions that does prototypical inheritance, scope maintenance, some jquery stuff, google maps api stuff and some general ajax application related code.
Maintaining state in Javascript is not too difficult once you catch the idea. However, as I am not a super brilliant programmer, it takes me some time to find a way to maintain state as YUI Event does in jQuery.
To do node selection for DOM operations, one typically uses CSS selectors as (probably) popularized by jQuery. However, there is another alternative that is as powerful if not better known as XPath. XPath may be able to do a lot more than just selecting node (which I have no time to find out for now) but I will just focus on how to do node selection in this blog post.
Should have done this earlier, I was just being lazy to go through all the steps to publish it properly. So here it is, the full source is published to bitbucket. Feel free to fork the project if you are interested. I have not attach a licence to it but it will most probably be BSD licence. I have also uploaded the latest 0.0.2 release to bitbucket and would update the download link posted previously soon.
Back then in college, we were given a lot of programming practices. These questions usually shows a desired output format, and we were required to write a program to print out the exact thing. Usually it involves printing a matrix of numbers, or symbols etc. For these problems, usually a loop structure or two should solve the problem.
While my static pages and site theme is still under construction, I went to CodeIgniter.com to see how to work with it and played the tutorial screencasts. The reason behind in considering CodeIgniter (CI) to be used in my next project is because I don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel. However to port my current project to use CI may cause some problems as there are differences in how we implement MVC structure.
Just managed to migrate all my blog sites to one centralized multi-site, so no more half-baked solution and hopefully this brings better plugin compatibility. I have not check with other related services (like Google Webmaster Tools) whether this cause any breakage though. Well, the main purpose of this blog post is actually a draft of what I did for the past two months for my postgraduate programme. Yea, I should have posted more stuff to this blog (just realized that my last post here is already like half a year ago).