t’s no secret that I primarily use this space to talk about programming and the web at large. It’s a huge part of who I am, but it’s not all that I am. Sometimes I see something so incredibly cool and inspiring that I just feel the need to talk about it; such is the case with the movie “Inception”.
On Date/Time/DateTime in Ruby, and why they suck
Yeah, there, I said it – this is a stupid situation for a language to be in. The concepts of Date, Time, and DateTime are all pretty well related – Date is a point in Time, DateTime is a really nice representation of Date and Time mashed together. In a world that actually makes sense, you’d be able to easily convert between these types (e.g: DateTime should be able to easily convert over to a Time object)…
Rendering emails with Django templates
Django has an incredibly flexible templating system. Wouldn’t it be great to adopt it for emails you send out? It’s totally possible, and pretty quick and easy.
You got your Base64 in my CSS!
If you’re a developer working on a website that’s getting any traffic, you’ll inevitably come up against the problem of making sure you’re as performant as possible on the front-end. You’ll probably compress your Javascript and CSS, maybe refine the slower portions of your site after profiling them, and maybe (if you’re smart) sprite your images. However…
Quit incorrectly passing functions in Javascript
For those who don’t know (and would like to learn), setTimeout (and its sister, setInterval) can accept a string of code to be executed as an argument. Know what other method takes a string of code and executes it? eval() does. Generally, methods like these should be avoided, as they leave ways for arbitrary scripts to run if you’re not careful.
jQuery Introduction, Refresh Fred May 2010
I had the awesome chance to give a presentation at the May 2010 meeting of Refresh Fred. The talk I gave was on an introduction to jQuery (as well as some basic Javascript).