Coffee and Code

Will someone please buy me this shirt?

Sometimes, I embody what the pictured shirt says. Every few months or so, I become obsessed over some programming project and spend almost all of my free time working on it until it's done. That's how this weblog, and the website it sits on, came into being in the first place.

Is this a good way to work? I'm not sure. One one hand, single-minded focus can be handy, because it makes it easier for me to push through and complete large bodies of code. I tend to overdo caffeine and sacrifice too much sleep during my code-a-thons, though, and it becomes more difficult to communicate with other humanoids when I've got code on the brain constantly.

I manage to get a little balance in my life by simply going months and months without doing any techie-type stuff at home. It's a feast-or-famine approach, I guess, but there really is more to life than just the internet. Seriously. Someone told me that, and I believe it.

You'll see a new design for my website appear this summer, the details of which are still quite secret. I have a couple of smaller code project planned as well. However, I am devoting most of the summer to non-techie stuff, such as looking for a house, marksmanship, taking care of our awesome dogs (see: my flickr account), and some awesome summer concerts (Iron Maiden/Dream Theater in June, and also RUSH! in June).

Today, I will be getting some sun in my backyard... mandatory sun, as I must bring the rule of law to my yard with my mighty weed-trimmer. As the weeds are trimmed, so too must beer be consumed. If you're a home-coding geek, reading this post: How do you like to work? How do you achieve balance? Do you try to? Tell me.

Scriptaculous is an uber-cool set of javascript libraries geared toward rich, interactive user interface design. It's built on top of Prototype, another fantastic javascript framework,  and delivers a ton of easy-to-use, cross-browser effects, transitions, and other user interface tools.

I don't know why it took me so long to get into scriptaculous... maybe it's the do-it-yourself punker in me that avoids such conveniences (But why rewrite all of that code, when scriptaculous is well-written, robust, and free??) At any rate, I finally downloaded the libraries a few days ago while out searching for a good drag 'n drop script. Now, I feel like kicking my own ass for not downloading scriptaculous sooner!

The scriptaculous website has many usage examples, but I thought it was a little difficult to find specific usage examples; there were a couple of instances where I resorted to viewing the source code on the demo pages. All that aside, in many cases you can enable the scriptacular fanciness with one line of javascript (such as registering a draggable element on a page):

Not bad! And here's a quickie function that toggles between SlideUp and SlideDown:

function doSlide(id)
{
    var elem = document.getElementById(id);
    if (elem.style.display == "none")
        new Effect.SlideDown(id);
    else
        new Effect.SlideUp(id);
}

Script.aculo.us is, in my humble opinion, a worthwhile addition to any web developer or designer's arsenal.

Well, first I'll have to say that my new weblogger is much closer to completion now, with mad props to the folks over at Interface Technical Training (Phoenix, AZ). I attended their ASP.Net class here in Santa Fe last week. Aside from the normal course materials (which were excellent), both instructors helped me out with some architectural issues I had with the weblogger application.

Anyway, the class got me totally pumped to code, so I've been up late all week doing that stuff. I's tired today...

Peace out to anonymousrobot (congrats on the new machine!) and impoverishedcook (Congrats on the new job!)

So this teenage kid and his mammy were standin' in front of me in line at Walgr**ns. He says to his mom, 'I gotta start shaving. Clean-shaven men get all the best jobs.'

And here I am, lookin' all haggard with 3 days worth of stubble and camo pants on.... wild-ass hair... so I say to the mammy: 'Well, I guess I'm outta luck!' And the mom says - I love this part - 'Oh, you see, my son means a STRAIGHT job.'

Ho ho.

Anyway, I found this link at leftslipper's website while searching for how to bind an ObjectDataSource to an object factory. The article not only told me what I needed to keep my new weblogger project rolling, but offers an alternative way to handle objects: namely acquiring them rather than constantly creating and destroying them.

Here are a couple of ASP.Net databinding / formatting tricks I've picked up recently:

1. I recently had to bind to a telephone number in a GridView that was stored in the database as a 10-character string. I ran into problems trying to use a DataFormatString property to format the output as (555) 555.5555. Turns out that format strings generally work better with numbers than strings.... duh.

C# Solution: Convert.ToInt64(string).ToString('(000) 000.0000') did the trick. I can't remember where I found the solution, but it's really useful! Sure beats writing a custom method to re-format the number.

2. When using a BoundField to display a DateTime, the DataFormatString property will only work when the HtmlEncode property is set to false.