Tanstaafl

Well, in case anyone hasn’t heard, Whitney and I have been buy the last few weeks buying a house. We’re happy to say that we closed on Monday! So I guess I’m now a homeowner. Which is a weird feeling, but good. I’ve also been doing my best to be a sponge a Backcountry.com now that I’m a lowly code monkey.

I’ve also officially been homeless for the last week. I’ve been crashing with some other new hires from Costa Rica, and that’s been a blast.

Gotta go now… wordpress is telling me it wants to be updated.

Since I took down our gallery site, I thought I’d post some pictures of various adventures over the past year or two.

So I just finished up my first week at Backcountry.com and I have to say, I’m happier and happier that this is where I chose. I get to work at company ran by an olympic skier, and sponsors greats such as Jeremy Jones

I’ve spent this week getting an overview of the business, but I’m stoked next week to start getting into their system.

It never fails that when I’m feeling down, listening to music cheers me up. My guilty pleasure is the Blues Brothers soundtracks. Who can be down when Dan Akroyd and John Goodman are singing “looking for a fox”.
On a side note you’ll see that the theme is once again back to one of Myra’s. I emailed her about my concerns with one of her themes and she got right back to me within a couple hours.
She tells me her theme is GPL’d which is great since that means I can tweak it w/o breaking some sort of EULA, and means that I’m free to remove the advising if I wish. To know that as an ajax developer I can build on it and redistribute it also makes me happy. Of course I won’t remove the ads now since she was so transparent about it.

Ricky out

I have just updated my theme with a great theme from wpthemesfree.com. I would like to give a
shoutout to name removed, it looks like she was the artist responsible. If I ever decide to market a business through a blog, you can bet I’ll check them out.

EDIT
I changed my mind. When I downloaded the theme, I noticed some new advertisements on my page. Wondering if it was ok to remove them, I looked for information on the license of the theme and found none. That raises red flags because almost all real artists license their work. They usually choose the gpl or some version of the creative commons licensing scheme. Further inspection revealed that the text of the advertisement wasn’t present in any of the theme files. So not only was the theme placing unsolicited advertisements on my blog, but it appeared to be pulling them in from an external untrusted source. When you take care of your own server, this is bad.

Digging down, I noticed that the theme’s footer.php contained a bunch of obfuscated code. Which I interpret as meaning that they
don’t want me to know what their theme is doing behind the scenes. The specific string was more or less:eval(unzip(rot13(decodebase64(’some fishy looking text’))));
The last time I found something like this on a site I was responsible for it was due to Russian hackers attempting to steal personal data
from the server.

Needless to say, I’ve learned my lesson about downloading themes from wpthemesfree.com. I don’t hold them responsible, but it appears that not much moderation is done.

So when I woke up this morning, it was snowing.
Again.
Maybe I should move to Pheonix.
On a lighter note I start a new job next Monday,
and I’m stoked about that. I’ve been trying to recruit all my friends to come work with
me and I think I got a bite or 2.

I’ve been looking for a me replacement for a few projects, but it’s hard to find good people.
It’s an interesting experience being on the other side of the table. I’m coming up with these crazy interview
questions because I don’t know what else to ask them! I guess there’s always osi, that seems to be a pretty
common question to weed out the wanna-bes.

Anyways got to go, I’m cleaning up my borrowed laptop with a new xubuntu install before I give it back.

So reader(s), I just got back from my first presentation on QT and I have to say I am hooked! I’ve been looking for some time for good set of RAD (rapid application development) tools for gui’s. For a while I thought I had settled on Mozilla’s xul platform, but the xpcom interface is just too unintuitive. I’ve played with gtk and glade, and I like then just fine, but who want’s to see OO programming reimplemented in c. It shudders just to make me think about it. But instead of telling you what I don’t like about other platforms, let me tell you what I love about QT.

1. Cross-Platform: in open source software, it’s just a given that you don’t want to be locked into a specific os. QT run’s on windows/mac/*nix/cell phone’s….
2. Gui UI designer (xul is missing this, gtk has glade)
3. Awesome standard library. (xul has one, I don’t like the interface. gtk, not so much) QT come’s with data structures and algorithms, semi-automatic memory management, sql,svg,xml,threading, and network libraries

and last but not least, the deal closer for me, QT contains an implementation of ECMA-262 (that’s javascript for you non-web development people). This means you get, for free, an awesome embedded scripting language in all of your applications. QT also supports theming (most toolkits do) with CSS!
As a web developer, I love to see my old friends javascript,css,and the dom popping up in qt. I’m sure that my next gui project will be qt based.

As a developer I don’t know if I can afford not to use qt.

My sister put up a sweet baby picture of me for my birthday, but since their blog seems to be
having issues I thought I’d repost the image here.

While looking at some Other cool sites, I noticed

that some of the wordpress themes let you switch background images dynamically, through javascript. I thought I would hack up a similar (less artistic) example here at whitane.homelinux.com. You will notice some text at the bottom that says:”Pick your theme”.
Clicking on simple and standard switches between the standard interface, and a no-frills interface suitable for something like a mobile browser.

Other implementations I saw focused on just dynamically changing the url of an image. I implemented a more flexible approach based on alternative stylesheets. The w3c css spec states that browsers may contain multiple stylesheets, any set of which may be active at any given time. In firefox, you can view these in the View->Page Style menu. Fortunately, due to another w3c spec, the DOM. Stylesheets can be set to active and inactive via javascript. The solution then, using prototype and unobtrusive JavaScript, is to bind an event handler to the Theme widget and use event delegation to track which theme was clicked. From there, just query the DOM for all the link elements and toggle their enabled/disabled state based url of stylesheet.

Stay tuned for a color picker widget implemented using css/Javascript

Hey guys (and/or girls), I just found a sweet Rich Internet App’s Development
framework. at OpenLazlo
You create your apps in xml+javascript and then ‘compile’ to swf or dhtml, which means any standards compliant browser will work, no proprietary plugins are needed, in fact no plugins are needed at all.

I went to the site thinking that I would find some (beta/it’s a good idea and I’ll
check it out when it’s stable) software, and instead found a huge amount of documentation
and partnerships with Amazon and Sun, 2 pretty heavy hitters. Especially considering that
Sun is developing the JavaFX platform to compete with Adobe’s Flex.

They already have some awesome sample applications for searching flickr and shopping on amazon.

I will definitely look here when building my next Rich Internet App. Check out more demos