Naive Architect

A long time ago in a company far far away, I was an Architect, performing reviews and yelling at squad leaders thinking I knew best. Got wind of this “Jedi Master” working with the squads, the word was this master had blue hair and was spreading the force all over the Silicon galaxy. A run in with this Master caused anger to swell, he mentioned techniques being followed were wrong and would lead to the dark side. A skeptic always, his thoughts dismissed they were. Time passed and a fly by of an agile pod revealed the entire squad sitting around a single screen, working together. After, a princess says to me she participated in a “mob session”. The stars connected and replied I did, “This is when a squad sits around a single screen and works on the same thing? That’s Stupid!!” She replied, “You should give it a try.” Resist I did.

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We started the process of getting rid of deprecated methods in order to migrate to jQuery 1.9, but the removal of $.browser was a no go for us. I pulled jQuery’s browser detection code and packaged it into a closure, with a few minor changes for past encountered bugs, and then simply replaced all instances of “$.browser” in my scripts with “browser”. Add this script above the rest of your scrips and make the replace and you’ll have your browser detection back. Things like bgiframe() are still necessary for some of us supporting B2B clients on antique browsers, it just isn’t possible to use feature detection for some of these cases. I noticed in the comments section on jquery.com for the release of 1.9.1 some people asking for this, hope this helps.

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For some reason today, boredom or whatever, I was hell bent on getting the Angry Birds theme song onto my iPhone to replace that stupid Marimba ringtone. First task was to find or make the ringtone, I found one offered up for free here http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/2010/08/angry-birds-theme-song-ringtone/. Not quite sure yet how I was going to manage getting the ringtone on to my phone, I copied the link for the theme song from the web page, http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Angry-Birds-Main-Theme-Song.m4r, and emailed it to myself.

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In your html template or page add a nojs class to your html node and a script tag in the head section below your title changing the className to js:

Code sample (Gist): https://gist.github.com/jlcrow/9468b76de4b948c489ff.js

In this very simple example all of your non-javascript users would see links with a class of myclass as red and all javascript enabled users would see the links with the color black. Both javascript and non-javascript users would see the links with the class myclass2 as blue.

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Another great “little” solution with jQuery. Needed a simple way to protect all the forms on our site from being double submitted. There was an attempted solution in place on our app, that added an onsubmit to every form with a function above it called ignoreDoubleSubmit that tried to trap the event of the button was clicked and not allow it to be clicked again. The problem was the event for the button wasn’t present when the form was submitted so it would silently error out with a blink in the Firebug console. After weeks of fighting to have it fixed, I removed the code and reimplemented a working solution with jQuery

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The tabindex is absolutely necessary for controlling the tab order through a really long form, from a usability and accessibility standpoint. This is probably not the preferred way to do this, you should be setting the tabindex attribute on all of your input elements in your html. Now if you work with lazy developers, that often forget to set the tabindex, you may find this to be an acceptable solution.

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I was recently in need of a stock quote web service in order to display quote information and charts for a corporate website I was working on, so I started looking around for something, free of course. I kept reading that the most common example of web as a service is the stock quote example, but I didn’t really find any examples that gave me a warm and fuzzy, everyone seemed to be scraping the html from a page. Doesn’t seem to be much out there, in the way of quote services for free, but I did come across a yahoo download service and a few half written examples, where you can fetch quote information from Yahoo in .csv format, with a 20 minute delay of course. I’ve also added a 1-day small chart and a 5-day large chart image by passing the symbol into Yahoo’s basic chart image url.

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