From the YUI message boards: Javascript Syntax Question

function(){}() ambiguous, not good
(function(){})() good
(function(){}()) good
1 + function(){}() good
a = function(){}() good

Store the time that the function was first run (eg: on page load) as the value for a:
a = function() { return new Date().getTime(); }();
alert(a);
Which is quite significant functionally from the below, which returns the time that a was last called:
a = function() { return new Date().getTime(); };
alert(a());
Update:
Caridy Patiño Mayea provides a nice page of examples

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In today’s economy, there are two kinds of companies that can be successful; those that outsource production and relentlessly reduce costs, and those who, rather than competing on cost, try to produce items of high value. Companies that bury their contact information are trying to compete on cost. Companies that put an 800 number on the front page of their website are trying to compete on value. There is very little middle ground.
I am a very cost-conscious person, I’m usually happy to buy something used and on eBay if it means savings. This usually results in me being out of luck if anything goes wrong. Which is why for certain items, having a company that will stand behind their product is very important.
I have an iNova x1 flashlight on my keychain. It’s a somewhat small LED light, made of aluminum, it takes one AA battery, and the thing that is most unique about it is that the focus on the light throws a tight beam with little “spillover” light for about as far as a 3D mag-light. It’s really an incredible tool, and is definitely worth $20 (I think I paid $20 for it).
Unfortunately however, it broke last week. It’s achilles’ heel is the end-cap, which makes the electrical connection with the battery. It’s activated either by pressing a button or by screwing it in tighter (like a mini-mag light), and this is what started failing.
Since it’s such a beautifully engineered light, obviously developed by people passionate about their work, I figured that the company that produced it might be responsive to my plight. I e-mailed and politely stated my situation, the specific product that I had purchased, the part that had failed, and my address. 8 hours later, someone from their sales department wrote me a very nice e-mail stating that she would be mailing me out a replacement today, free of charge.
I’ll definitely be buying their products in the future, and recommending them to anyone who will listen. This means you.
iNova

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I intended this phone to fill too large a need, and it proved quickly to be incapable of fulfilling that task. Replacement batteries are not available. The battery life on standby makes the device unuseable for someone who has access to a wifi network, but not a charger, and wants to be able to use the phone over the course of a day. I would need a minimum of two of these phones just to make sure I had one available to use. Recharging the battery took hours.
Additionally, the phone is a candybar-style one, and yet it has no keyboard lock. Press and hold the Back button and watch the endless loop!
The documentation states in two places, “This phone is for indoor use only!” I believe this is due to the limited range of the wireless device.
Suggestion to Linksys: If you’re interested in trading my $100 bills for your little computer bits, your next wifi phone should have four times the battery life, have replacement batteries available, not be uncomfortable to hold to my ear, support Bluetooth, have many of the features a cellphone does including external storage, support NTP, and be open source. And don’t think I’m kidding about four times the battery life. If that makes it big, then it’s big. If it has decent range (supports an external antenna if necessary to get that range) and good features, that will be enough. I know the cost will have to go up. Let’s see what you’ve got.

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I’m sick and tired of paying $50/mo for my $35/mo cell phone plan.
I’m sick and tired of the horrible reception my Sprint phone gets at work and at home.
Buying a land-line isn’t appealing, really…
I use Skype at home and at work, and the audio quality is great.
Enter the Linksys WIP320. Works wherever there’s a wifi connection. Namely, the two places I spend 90% of my time, work and home.
Seems like a decent shot. I can get a t-mobile pay-as-you-go phone for no monthly fee, buy $100 worth of minutes and they last a full year, no other charges. I can forward skype calls to it when I’m on vacation and send them to voicemail the rest of the time. Sometimes I could carry both phones, and find wifi access where I can, if I wanted to. If all goes well, this will save me $350 in the first year, $400 every year after, depending on PayGo phone useage.
It sounds great!
It’s charging on the desk as I speak. Needs 8 hours. The manual says, “This device is for indoor use only!” I’ll be the judge of that.

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When Windows 2000 came out, I loved it. It was the best thing out there for me, bar none, and I became very familiar with it’s inner workings, eventually studying for and obtaining an MCSE. Windows XP continued to be a very good OS, but branching into the “Home” and “Professional” versions was a bad trend. Vista took this to a new extreme. I bought a new computer last week, it came preloaded with Windows Vista Home Basic. I could have upgraded it but I chose instead to let this version introduce me to the OS. Considering that I own at least three copies of XP (and at work use at least 2 more licenses) I’m sure that they’d get their money out of me if I decided to start putting Vista on everything.

Let me tell you that this is not going to happen. Vista lasted only about an hour longer than Windows ME did on my computer, which is to say, about 1.5 hours, until I came upon an insurmountable* problem and called it quits.

*Vista’s User Accounts Control is not only annoying, but it locks out Synergy, preventing me from hitting OK unless I actually use a keyboard. The computer came with no PS2 ports and I only had PS2 keyboards, except for a horrible white-and-transparent Apple keyboard with a 9″ connector. Suffice it to say that got old quickly. Now I’m no newbie, and I know the UAC can be disabled, so I googled it, tried the solutions, and got “Access Denied”. Which is when I called it quits. Blow me, Vista.

I’d have to say that my transition to hating Microsoft came around the time of Firefox 1.0. IE at that time was some four years old and, in blatant monopolistic fashion, wasn’t being updated any more (and why should it be? It had ~97% user share! MS pulled the team off of IE and put them to work on other things). Web developers were stuck with a browser that had huge gaping holes that could mostly be worked around.

Microsoft, if you’re reading this, IE6 isn’t a horrible browser. It is merely a quirky one. IE7 is quirky too. CSS, HTML, and Javascript are unique. So when I realized as a professional web developer that there was a new boss in town, and that boss supported actual, real standards, I really started thinking about how MS doesn’t care about me. They could care less if it takes me days, weeks, and months of my time to hack up my code to support their lacking standards. Which is why they can go fuck themselves. They blew off the internet, then tried to embrace and extend it to death, and now they’re using it for their own purposes, rather than the exceedingly important public good. They personify everything that I hate about corporations.

Today, over 50% of surfers use IE6. I will have to continue developing for it for probably another four years. I’m actually getting pretty good with it, which is why today’s problem caught me off guard.

getAttribute and setAttribute allow you to check and update properties of HTML elements. You can check and set the href, the style, the align attribute, and more. But one thing you cannot set in IE6 or IE7 is the onclick attribute. It works just the same as any other attribute in every browser except for IE. Why? Pure hackery!

I spent over two hours, needed a lot of help from coworkers and my Beginning Javascript book, and finally came up with a solution that abstracts away from IE’s madness.

function updateOnclick(obj, findMe, replaceWith) {
var onclickVal = obj.getAttribute(’onclick’).toString();
if(onclickVal.match(/\{\s*(.*\s*)\s*\}/)) {
// IE will match this regexp
onclickVal = onclickVal.match(/\{\s*(.*\s*)\s*\}/)[1];
onclickVal = onclickVal.split(findMe).join(replaceWith); // or whatever you need here
obj.onclick = new Function(onclickVal);
}
else {
// Works with all non-IE browsers tested so far
obj.setAttribute(’onclick’, onclickVal.split(findMe).join(replaceWith)); // or whatever you need here
}
}

Again, sorry about the lack of indentation…

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So, IE sucks. The javascript errors usually look like:

Line: 1
Char: 1
Error: Object doesn’t support this property or method
Code: 0
URL: http://art.renoir.brylanehome.com

Which could mean absolutely anything at all.

Anyway, here’s the solution: debugging JavaScript with Visual Web Developer Express
They’ll walk you through setup, and from there you can get some actual debugging done. It’ll show you what line of code actually caused the error and it’ll give you real messages rather than a blanket one. It’s free too, but that’s expected.

Of course, normal people just use Firebug in Firefox.

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Take one look at the YUI files (like connection.js) and you’ll immediately realize that these guys are the Red Barons of Javascript. Just the same as how the CSS Zen Garden taught me how to write CSS, these guys are setting the bar high for my future with Javascript. For quite some time it was just too high and I was in over my head, but now I’m starting to peek above the waves here and there. The JavaScript Module Pattern is going to be a big help. Right now I’m using global variables everywhere. Sloppy, sure, but then again, my clothes are sorted by which pile they’re in on the bedroom floor. The pile at the foot of the bed is clean. I’ll get to it when I get to it, okay?

YAHOO.myProject.myModule = function () {

//”private” variables:
var myPrivateVar = “I can be accessed only from within YAHOO.myProject.myModule.”;

//”private” method:
var myPrivateMethod = function () {
YAHOO.log(”I can be accessed only from within YAHOO.myProject.myModule”);
}

return {
myPublicProperty: “I’m accessible as YAHOO.myProject.myModule.myPublicProperty.”
myPublicMethod: function () {
YAHOO.log(”I’m accessible as YAHOO.myProject.myModule.myPublicMethod.”);

//Within myProject, I can access “private” vars and methods:
YAHOO.log(myPrivateVar);
YAHOO.log(myPrivateMethod());

//The native scope of myPublicMethod is myProject; we can
//access public members using “this”:
YAHOO.log(this.myPublicProperty);
}
};

}(); // the parens here cause the anonymous function to execute and return

A JavaScript Module Pattern » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

PS: wordpress is destroying all my code formatting, and using the <code> tags is not useful as WP adds </code> unhelpfully at the end of the first line, meaning the </code> twenty lines later goes unused. I’m working on it.

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The new world of Ajax makes more things possible, all we need these days is a little knowledge and patience and a unique idea. Spyjax takes advantage of the fact that your browser displays visited links differently than non-visited links. For example, if you’ve ever been to CNN.com, the computed style of the link will be different than if you haven’t already visited it (purple, rather than the default blue). Via Ajax, we can test whether links are “visited” or not and report back to the server. This doesn’t allow someone to get your entire history, the author describes it as a “Go Fish” method of guess-and-check. Because it can do in the range of 20,000 links per minute, even brief visits are enough to get a significant amount of information. If you click on the link, you’ll see it in action, how it works, and you’ll even be able to adapt it for your own site, if it fits in with your own personal ethics. But be warned: if you click the link, Spycat will steal all ur urls!

Spyjax

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From YUI’s YAHOO object:

        for (j=(d[0] == "YAHOO") ? 1 : 0; j<d.length; j++) {
            o[d[j]]=o[d[j]] || {};
            o=o[d[j]];
        }

pretty concise. Let’s break it down.

(expression) ? 1 : 0

Take a look at Ternary Operators.

variable = (condition) ? what to store if true : what to store if not true;

So if d[0] has a value of “YAHOO”, then j gets assigned 1. Otherwise 0.
So the for loop runs either d.length times or (d.length - 1) times if (d[0] == “YAHOO”) evaluates to true.

Inside the loop? No freakin’ clue, especially out of context. Don’t know what o is, or d, or d.length, so it’s hard to say.
Also, we’d have to know under what circumstances o[d[j]] could evaluate to false. When that happens, the function assigns { } to that value (meaning that it will be defined as an empty array), which is then assigned to o.

Whatever o is.

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Blog’s back. Please Add to your Google Reader subscription! My aim is to blog about my hobbies, and to say nothing about anything else. I want it to be a valuable resource for both me and you. I’m going to work to make that happen with lots of informative posts about things I happen to know about, usually after extensive research.
Topics up for discussion:
Javascript
CSS
HTML
Windows
Ubuntu
Misc. Tech and other interesting stuff on the tubes.
Politics
Motorsports
And anything else that tickles my fancy.

I’ll start off with something that will probably be of little interest to you.

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