programming

This weekend, I did a partial rewrite of the Identica version of BeTwittered.  I moved from using Prototype to using JQuery.  I'm not actually a programmer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt: I really prefer JQuery.  I feel more at home writing things like $("#fieldID").html("Shiny, New HTML Content!"), and I really like the way that it allows for binding events.  It just seems to work in a way more compatible with my disfunctional, possibly ozone damaging, thought patterns.  I also have to say that the widgets that come standard in the framework seem to be better, and there are more available (compared to Scriptaculous, which builds on Prototype)  It should be interesting as I get deeper in to the rabbit hole. If you are looking at the differences for yourself, you might also want to look at the differences between the AJAX stuff...

Here is a link to a LifeHacker story about Prism. Feature: Create Distraction-Free, Customized Webapps with Prism Prism really has my attention and imagination. I REALLY like how I can run BeTwittered as if it were a regular desktop application. There it is, floating about like a normal window on my desktop. No modifications required from the little web-app it really is. There are a couple issues I have, like lack of packaging things up like a regular, everyday application installer.

I spent a bit of time this morning adding to my error handling in BeTwittered. Around 8am there was a bit of a service issue at, I believe, the Twitter server end, but I had no way to confirm it. I was, as my own customer, just getting my own "OOPS, something went wrong" please stand by sort of message. The problem is that I used the PHP file_get_contents() function, which does not return HTTP error codes, and when using Twitters HTTP API, that's key for error handling. To make a long story short: I discovered that, although the function does not return the HTTP status codes, that status DOES get stored in the global variable $http_response_header. Are you geeky enough to want to see how I captured this info? Then read on...

AutoHotkey comes to my aid, again. I recently came to realize I had a need to eject my iPod at 9:00am every day. There are two parts to this problem. You need a way to check the time, on some interval. And you need a way to tell windows to do the eject. While this is not terribley complicated, there is one catch. AutoHotkeys "eject" command only works on CD/DVD drives. The help file does have an example bit of code that does the job, though. Click below to read on... (By the way, I noticed a link to this sitepointing to my other AutoHotkey entry. Autohotkey.blogspot.com appears to be starting up a collection of pointers to useful scripts)

Google has published my gadget. You can now find it in their directory by following this link. It was interesting to find this when I searched the google gadget directory. Interesting because I applied for it, but got no response.