The time has come for the second TwitCode challenge. Yes, I just made up the name *after* the first challenge.

And I’ve also made a slightly more formal TwitCode home page that explains the basic rules which apply.

This challenge is much like the first one, but this time I have made jQuery available. I’ve also changed the structure of the target page a little. It’s not as sparse as last time.

And this time I have two Sitepoint books up for grabs: Modern Web Design Using Javascript and Dom”, and “Designing Without Tables”. These books are second hand, having been much read by me. But I haven’t looked at them in a while, so perhaps it’s time for somebody else to get their chance. And in case you were wondering, the winner takes all. There’s no second place. I’ll pay the postage to send both books to the winner.

So the deal is you must submit the most fun / interesting self contained JavaScript code that fits inside 140 characters, so that it can be posted via Twitter. The 140 character limit must include addressing. It can be sent directly to me via Twitter by addressing it to @nedlud (my Twitter handle), or by including the more generic hash tag #JS

I’ll watch the #JS tag on Twitter and assume that any posts that look like pure JavaScript are entries.

The only change to the basic rules for this challenge is that the jQuery library is available.

All entries will be tested on this page, using Firefox 3.5 and jQuery 1.3.2. (not IE)

I’ll leave the challenge open for 1 week, starting today (12 July 2009), so next Sunday (19 July 2009) will be the cut off.

Start your interpreters..

I have too many JavaScript books, and I just bought a new one, so I want to get rid of some old books.

The first one on offer is the Sitepoint book “The Art and Science of Javascript“. This is a great book, and the chapter on Meta-programing rocks.

So how do you get your hands on this free book?

I only have one copy, so I have to find some way of choosing who to give it to. And I want to make if fun. So how about a little competition?

Send me a JavaScript file, and the one I like the best, wins! I’ll even pay the postage.

How will I judge? Err.. I like fun things. If it makes me smile, you’re in with a chance.

I’ll run the code in this page to test it, and just in case you were wondering, there are no frameworks to leverage off. Your code must be completely self contained. And I’ll test with Firefox 3

What’s the catch?

Of course there is one. The catch is that you have to send me your JavaScript via Twitter. That’s right, it has to fit inside the Twitter 140 character limit, and I guess that includes addressing it. My Twitter handle is @nedlud. But to save a little space, I think I’ll allow a #JS tag. Include #JS in your code (*instead* of address it to @nedlud) and I should be able to find it on Twitter. The #JS tag seems to get a fair bit us use, so I’ll look for things that look like pure JavaScript code only. I’ll DM the winner so I can get a mailing address from them.

Use @nedlud if you want to be sure I get it.
Use #JS if you need to save those extra 4 characters.

Since it’s Twitter, and everything is so *now*, I’m only going to leave this little competition open for one week. Today is Saturday 13 June, so I’ll take submissions only up to Saturday 20 June.

Good luck.

This is probably obvious to anyone who is more compentent with regex than I am, but I was trying to examine the Apache error logs, and found there were a lot of “notice”s and “info” entries as well as actual errors in the log.

I tried…

<br />
tail -f error_log | grep '[error]'<br />

and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. Of course when I looked at the documentation, I realised “[" is a meta character. It needs to be escaped. So the following works..

<br />
tail -f error_log | grep '\[error]‘<br />

Just added something to a little wiki I have. Thought I should blog it too. But rather than copy paste, I’ll just refer you to the wiki page on CFForm.

It’s a ColdFusion thing regarding a problem I had using a CFForm inside CFInclude tags.

It’s been a funny week for all kinds of reasons, some personal and some I’m willing to talk about.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just had myself a little moment.

While using Bubble Timer the other day, I started writing an activity name, and it got a bit long. Some little bit of AJAX magic popped up some text on the screen saying “Slow down Shakespeare! There won’t be room to display this name on one line.”

I though that was such a nice UI touch that I twittered it.

Now I just noticed that SnootyMonkey, the twitter presence of the group who make Bubble Timer, have been watching twitter posts and replied to me

I felt all warm and tingley.

But seriously, that’s two great examples of attention to detail that have impressed me. Nice work, Snooty Monkey.

In December last year I read a SitePoint blog post about Time Tracking Apps. Tracking of work related time is something that’s been bugging me a lot at work. We have a completely tragic job tracking program that is particularly painful to use. I wanted something simple and easy.

After reading the article, and having a look at the apps it suggested, I found myself drawn to Bubble Timer. It doesn’t get much easier to use than this. Of course there isn’t a lot of granularity, and I couldn’t possibly use it for billing, but it’s great for what I need: something quick and easy to use.

So far my biggest problem with Bubble Timer is figuring out how to categorise my time. At first I created a new activity for every project I was working on, but that got silly quickly. So I’ve settled on much broader categories (which I’m continuing to refine). Time spent answering calls is “help”. Time spent doing actual development work is “development”. Time spent phaphing around with paperwork and trying to enter billable hours into the other job system is “general organisational stuff”. Then there is “dealing with clients” (mainly writing emails and calling people), and “breaks” (lunch, coffee).

Today I added a new category: “graphics”, for time spend manipulating images to make them suitable for the web. This mainly involves cropping, resizing or adjusting the levels of images, but I also find myself having to come up with new stuff from time to time.

I just happened to read the About page on the Bubble Timer site today and discovered the idea for the program was attributed to David Seah’s Emergant Task Timer. I hadn’t heard of this before, but straight away liked the idea of finding out more about how I waste my time during the day. So I set my timer, and every 15 minutes when it goes off, I stop what I’m doing and enter what tasks I’m doing right now into Bubble Timer (this is where the quick and easy part of Bubble Timer comes in handy). This is how I discovered the need to add the Graphics category.

It’s crazy that somebody who is primarily a devloper should spend 1 hour fiddling around with graphics. I’ve also spent nearly 3 hours today just helping people on the phone. I’ve only spent half an hour doing actual development work. I have time in all five categories today. No wonder I feel like I’m getting nowhere on my projects.

It’s so easy to get complacent about yourself, what you do, and how you do it. But I enjoy taking the occasional bit of time to learn a little more about myself, and doing this task timing thing today has definitly been educational. I think I seriously need to refocus my work.

Now I just need to work out what category to put writing this blog under…

print "something"

Okay, looks like Geshi is working.

I can haz syntax highlighting.

or…

Im in ur blog, syntax highlighting ur code

(5 Dec, 2008)

Looks like Python just got updated to version 3, and my code sample above is no longer valid. Print is now a function…

print ("something")

So we have the new and improved ByteClub online.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of the story in various places, to various people, but for the record:

ByteClub went off-line just after I posted on the 30th of October, 2008. Not sure exactly what happened, but John said he’d been playing around with some settings to disable SSH access from outside Swinburne. I don’t know if that’s what caused the outage, and I guess it doesn’t much matter now anyway, but in retrospect I should have contacted John to see if he knew what was going on. Since he’s inside Swinburne, he had no idea there was a problem. But all connections to the outside world had been lost. I had assumed it was ITSs fault, and went ahead with finding a new host (Dreamhost), and re-delegating the domains (bytelcub.net, byteclub.net.au and byteclub.com.au). Re-delegation caused a bit of a problem for John since he was hosting some other stuff on tyler (the old server) which I hadn’t realised. I broke the Swinburne HTML Validator (used by the Internet Technologies subject). Oops. My bad. Sorry.

John has since restored the old tyler server and it’s once again accessible via the tyler.byteclub.net address, so anyone looking for the old content should still be able to find it there.

We now have the new host, and WordPressMU has been installed, and I’m setting up blogs for people who have requested them.

Next, I should track down all the other blog owners and see if they want an account on the new system.

This still leaves me with the job of exporting all the old blogs. I’m planning on seeing if we can upgrade the old blogs (an old version of wordpress) to a newer version that has the export feature, then importing into the new system. Once everything is migrated, we can let the old system quietly die.

Things I’d like to see done after that:

• Forums. I might have another shot at running a forum. If BBpress intergrated with WordPressMU blogs, then it would be my pick since if would effectively be single sign-on .
• Wiki. The old ByteClub wiki has some good content on it, even if it doesn’t get updated much. Lets bring it over and see if we can’t inject some new life into it.

Clinton and I have talked a bit about what to do with ByteClub, and he’s keen to start recruiting again through the ICT Faculty. I think it’s a great idea, but we should probably all have a think about opening registration up a bit. We have alumni now, and I don’t see the point of a Swinburne student only approach. Perhaps we can selectivley recruit some other people as well?

Zooba has also asked for Trac to be installed. This revives an idea Clinton and I had ages ago about having our own project hosting via ByteClub. I see no reason why a ByteClub account shouldn’t come with a blog, forum access, SVN storage space with Trac based project management and access to that projects repository.  I know I already have a couple of projects in mind that I could use the repository for

So let me/us know if there are any particular features you’d like to see in ByteClub.

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