Notes on codes, projects and everything
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.
This post continued from this post. Finally I have found some time to start developing my pet project using Zend Framework. After getting the controller to work the way I am more familiar (comparing to Kohana which I used at work) with, the next step is to get it to output some data.
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.
After the last post, I found that it may be fun to write a wrapper for YUI in order to make it behave like jQuery. Therefore, the code below is clearly mainly for self-amusement and is not intended to be used in production projects. However, through coding this, I found that although the difference in design, but YUI is obviously capable to do what jQuery offers (if not more). I will not continue working on this so whoever interested may just copy and paste the code to further developing it.
When one start writting Javascript in patterns like the module pattern, then sooner or later he would want to maintain the state when an event handler is called. The reason I am still using YUI to handle my event handling code is because I like how state can be maintained.
I am starting to like programming in Javascript, especially after understanding more about how Javascript handles scopes. Surprisingly this take me like a year to figure out how scope is managed. The result of the findings is that I start doing a lot of experiments and discovered more interesting stuff through them.
I like how Kohana 3 organizes the classes, and I thought the same thing may be applied to my Zend Framework experimental project. Basically what this means is that I can name the controller class according to PEAR naming convention, and deduce the location of the file by just parsing the class name.
After being frustrated of not getting consistent and accurate result via standard DOM methods especially html_element.getAttribute('key');
and html_element.setAttribute('key', 'value');
, I came across some YUI library components that provides abstractions to various DOM methods. Some interesting DOM-related tools covered in this post are YAHOO.util.Element
, YAHOO.util.DOM
and YAHOO.util.Selector
.
Just happened to see this post a few months ago, and the author created another cloud that uses almost the same technique to ‘visualize’ a list of countries. The author uses PHP to generate the cloud originally and I thought I may be able to do in javascript. After some quick coding I managed to produce something similar to the first example, source code after the jump.
After shifting all my instant messaging accounts to my Nokia N9, I stopped getting email alerts via Adium. Therefore, when I finally remember to check my mailboxes, they are already loaded with exploding amount of mails (mostly junk and newsletter though). I don’t fancy doing my email stuff with my device, and don’t feel like installing a webmail checker to my browser, hence this simple little script is written for my phone.
Been trying my best to stick to the well-known UNIX Philosophy – “Do one thing and do it well”, so I have been breaking down my projects into numerous pieces of small tasks and rely on existing tools whenever possible. One of the existing tool that I use a lot is the GNU sort tool. Generally sort utility is really doing fine and dandy without having to configure anything, at least not until I realize the problem that leads to this post.
This post is purely based on my own speculation as there’s no experiment on real-life data to actually back the arguments. I am currently trying to document down a plan for my experiment(s) on recommender system (this reminds me that I have not release the Flickr data collection tool :/) and my supervisor advised to write a paragraph or two on some of the key things. Since he is not going to read it, so I might as well just post it here as a note.
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.
I didn’t realize that I have been working for 3 weeks until the Labour Day which was a public holiday. Many things happened in these few weeks and I am still struggling to catch up with it. My superior and colleagues have been very helpful and offered me some helpful tutorials and books. I was instructed to build a event scheduler application using codeigniter in the first week and then work on a side project that extends a form using DOM methods and properties.