I never knew this but Firefox 3 has a new feature that allows you to select multiple lines of text. Just use the ctrl key (cmd on Macs) while selecting text as you normally would.
If you find it isn’t working check that you have firebug disabled as it is known to interfere with this feature.
Enjoy!
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything - William Connor Magee
More often than not I decide to not post something here because I worry about looking stupid. Fact is, I am stupid (and I write shitty code with bugs :D ) but I’ve found that blogging helps me think things out.
Which is why I’ve started a blog with my Sister and older brother over at BarbozaBloggers.com. Don’t worry I’m not leaving Pistalwhipped! behind I’m just thinking through different topics and decided that another blog would be a better venue.
Blogging over at BB will also allow me to eliminate a lot of the bloggers block that I encounter with this blog.
What I’m hoping is to have one site stimulate discussion for the other allowing both to grow by feeding off of each others content.
We’ll see how it turns out eh? Oh, also: I get to hang out with my family which is a huge bonus.
Blizzard announced that they are working on Diablo 3 officially on Friday and it’s about time. I think most gamers saw this coming as soon as StarCraft II was announced.
I’m overly excited since Diablo I & II were are two of my favorite games. The co-op was excellent and the dungeons and monsters were epic. The storyline is said to be very deep and involving but judging from the game-play trailer the game remains a hack & slash adventure at heart.
Now Blizzard can move onto the more important tasks like: A) A StarCraft MMO and B) A Diablo MMO.
UPDATE: I’ve added the gameplay video below. I also added a link to the Diablo 3 website.
Some cool facts about June 25th.
Hilarious video from the Jimmy Kimmel show.
Plurk is the latest micro-blogger site following in the footsteps of Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. I heard a lot of talk about it on twitter and thought I would check it out.
Yes, I signed up for a plurk account the other day and gave it quick run through. I didn’t like it.
Right of the bat the UI is really, really unattractive to me. I really hate side scrolling and Plurk makes you do an awful lot of it. How does their timeline UI work when you have Scobl-ish Leo Laporte-ish numbers of followers?
Finding and adding a friend on Plurk is not easy. Where the hell is the search? Currently you can only find new friends by importing them from another social networking site or by emailing them an invite. Fail.
The emoticons are not good, they look cheap and childish. I always disable them in any software that uses them but in Plurk I can’t get away from them.
The ability to share youtube videos and flickr pictures is great although I don’t like being limited to only youtube for video. This is much better than uploading a file (as in Pownce) since it allows me to use data from one service within another. And I like that.
I have some smaller gripes but these are basically gripes that I have will all web 2.0 sites:
Will I switch? No. Although Plurk has attractive features like sharing videos and pictures from other services and a mobile interface I still can’t get over the timeline UI or the lack of search. I expect that Plurk will be revisiting their UI relatively soon and hopefully their name along with it.
wrote a great article on best practices and how “best practice” is essentially a bunch of bullshit:
About the only thing [Best Practice] means is ‘I have found that doing XYZ in ABC way works the best for me’. But just because it works for you, or even works for a group of people that does not mean it is ‘Best Practice’.
I’ve never really thought about it but this is 160% correct. Even now, at my current job we are reviewing Spiral, Agile, TDD and other SDLCs in order to conform to “best practices”.
Thankfully my boss understands that what works for some may not work for all and if something isn’t working we won’t have time to try to screw with it. We’ll have to move on and find something that fits better. This is exactly how “best practices” should be treated. As suggestions on how to handle software development.
There is no “one ring to rule them all” in our world. There are many rings each has a different fit to it and needs to be tried on to see where it fits best.
When you need to find out the type of an object in JavaScript you would just do the following:
var x = 1; alert(typeof x);
Well what if x were an array? With x as an array a typeof incorrectly returns “object” as the type. Well that is just plain wrong. Enter the isArray() method.
Object.isArray = function(o) {
return o && o.constructor === Array;
};
Granted it’s not as simple as typeof but it does correctly identify array objects and is something every JavaScript developer should have in their code garage.
I write a lot of javascript at my job and I often find myself in a horrible debugging situation where something isn’t working right and I need a way to find out what properties and methods an object has quickly. I’ve found the following code very helpful in determining this.
Object.Enumerate = function(o,t) {
var type = typeof t === 'undefined' ? null : t;
for(var key in o)
{
var value = o[key];
// if the user did not pass a
// type then "alert" each member
if(type == null ||
typeof value === type)
{
alert( key + " is a " +
(typeof value));
}
}
};
This is a really simple method that will take an object and (optionally) a string representation of a type (”number”, “object”, “function” or “string”) and will display the members that match those types (or if no type is passed it will display each member and it’s type).
//basic object for testing
var x = {
int: 1,
str: "",
func: function() {
},
obj: {
str2: ""
}
};
// alerts each member of 'x' and it's type
Object.Enumerate( x);
//alerts "func is a function"
Object.Enumerate(x, 'function');
This code is really similar to how prototype generates JSON information and can easily be modified to return various types of data back to the requestor.
Note this code isn’t perfect, for instance it doesn’t account for Arrays which are typed as objects in javascript. Also it doesn’t do any sort of recursion so it will only return top-level members.
But even so this is still the most used script in my library and I make sure I have it in all my projects. Hopefully it helps someone else.
