Notes on codes, projects and everything
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.
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
.
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.
I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.
One of my recent tasks involving crawling a lot of geo-tagged data from a given service. The most recent one is crawling files containing a point cloud for a given location. So I began by observing the behavior in the browser. After exporting the list of HTTP requests involved in loading the application, I noticed there are a lot of requests fetching resources with a common rXXX
pattern.
I was invited to try Go (the programming language, not that board game) a few months ago, however I didn’t complete back then. The main reason was because it felt raw, compared to other languages that I know a fair bit better (for example Ruby). There was no much syntatic sugar around, and getting some work done with it feels “dirty”.
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.