Notes on codes, projects and everything
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.
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.
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.
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.
Traversing a tree structure often involves writing a recursive function. However, Python isn’t the best language for this purpose. Therefore I started flattening the tree into a key-value dictonary structure. Logically it is still a tree, but it is physically stored as a dictionary. Therefore it is now easier to write a simple loop to traverse it.
While JSON is a fine data-interchange format, however it does have some limitations. It is well-known for its simplicity, that even a non-programmer can easily compose a JSON file (but humanity will surprise you IRL). Therefore, it is found almost everywhere, from numerous web APIs, to geospatial data (GeoJSON), and even semantic web (RDF/JSON).
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.
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.