pragmati.st

Baggu sells reusable shopping bags. Their shop has a simple interface that makes it really easy to visualize what you’re purchasing.

Reusable shopping bags are a good way to cut down on our consumption. I bought the beautiful gray one from BagTheHabit for my girlfriend for Christmas.

The most important thing that you can do for the security of your web application is to validate all user input. That said, sometimes things can get out of hand.

I have DC United season tickets with a few friends. One (possibly the only) nice thing about DC United using ticket master is that they have an online interface to manage your tickets. You can print your tickets online or, if you’re not going to use them, email the tickets to someone else. This weekend 2 of us couldn’t go so I went online to forward our seats to another friend.

Unfortunately I then got this validation error:

I’m not sure why I should only be allowed to forward consecutive tickets. This validation is particularly strange because I was allowed to forward each of the tickets individually without any problem.

So make sure you validate for safety, but don’t cripple your application arbitrarily.

Two weeks ago I gave a presentation to my department at work about Modern Web UI patterns. I’ve put the slides up, with notes, at slideshare Check out the presentation below.

I feel the actual presentation was quite a bit better than the plain slides as I could jump out to the browser and demonstrate each of the techniques being used in an application I’ve written for work. Unfortunately, that app is internal, so I can’t share it with the world. I hope that the notes at least give the slides some context.

Nick Merwin

The talk is about getting an understanding of what is going on under the hood in script.aculo.us so that you can create your own effects.

“Prototype”http://prototypejs.org

Some of the best documentation ever.

Default document.getElementById("element_id') is really clunky. Prototype gives us $('element_id') much cleaner.

Parts of prototype tha

• Enumerables – ruby style enumerables instead of c style iterations.
• closures
• Object creation – prototype gives similar to ruby. define aninitialize method that is called on new.
• Object.extend.
• Option parsing – pass core

A bunch of various DOM utilities that make changing code much easier.

The Animation Engine

• time based – given start time and finish time in relation to the browser’s gettime()
• core effects- instantiated as an object as itself. eg. new Effect.Move
• combo effects – eg. Effect.Fade, combines other effects into one.

The power stip just crapped out, my battery is dying, and this is pretty in depth code and requires some serious concentration to follow. So no more notes.