I had a busy week last week with YUIConf, the launch of the YUI Gallery and a trip back to Denver to see my parents.
Timepicker available on YUI Gallery
First things first, my YUI Timepicker widget is now part of the gallery. That means you can use it straight of the Yahoo CDN with a Y.use() statement. Please check it out and file bugs, feature requests, or go ahead and fork on github and add the features yourself!
YUI Doc Talk on Slideshare
My talk on YUI Doc from YUI Conf is now on slideshare. Please check it out, I have a video of the talk, but I am going to wait until its uploaded to the YUI Gallery before I post it.
Still looking for a few good Javascripters
We haven’t filled all our openings yet, but we have been getting great responses from the YUI Blog post. If you want to work at yahoo, please, send us those resumes!
UPDATE
Video is available here.
I am presenting on YUI Doc tomorrow at YUIConf. This is an excellent language neutral tool for generating documentation from comments, I highly recommend you check it out.
I cover the tool, some pest practices, etc. I’ll post the video as soon as its available, but in the meantime I have create a project on github that shows you a simple example of using YUI Doc as part of your build.
Get it here.
Yahoo! is looking for a few good frontend engineers…and I’m looking for one of them.
Check it out, send a resume, come work for us!
I spend a lot of time trying to stay focused on the task at hand. But with the joys of multitasking I generally have a lot of crap going on the desktop. Several documents open in text mate, an IM conversation and multiple tabs in the terminal:
So I am always looking for ways to improve this situation. Lately two (or rather three) great tools have changed things quite a bit. First is Isolator, an incredibly useful little app that hides everything but the app you are using behind a little screen, which can be activated with a keyboard shortcut.
I have also been converted to the joys of a tiling window manager by a coworker. I installed awesomewm on my mac via macports, and Ratpoison on my RHEL 5 box (awesome is not available from yum for rhel 5). That way I can do all my terminal stuff with no distraction, and its great to have multiple terminals running together. Here is my workspace at work now:
I enjoyed this very interesting post on ydn. The post is about the benefit of reducing the number of packets, not just the total file size. More interesting to me was this small note:
If your app sends largish amounts of data upstream (excluding images, which are already compressed), consider implementing client-side compression. It’s possible to get 1.5:1 compression with a simple LZW+Base64 function; if you’re willing to monkey with ActionScript you could probably do real gzip compression.
So to try this out I implemented LZW compression in javascript, except instead of using Base64, which adds more complexity to encoding and inflates the file size quite a bit, I used a trick I’ve seen elsewhere: use the unicode character equivalent to the decimal code output by the LZW algorithm. For the example I used the first 256 first characters in the unicode set as the allowed characters. This breaks any non-latin script for this example, but this proves the concept. I was able to get decent compression. Using the 800 byte example string I got the output down to 705 bytes. In firefox encoding took around 2.38ms, and decoding took a little less. In safari encoding only took .83 milliseconds.
Not sure if this is really worth it or not, but its a cool thing to try out. I think in general just reducing the size of upstream data when possible is probably worth it, but like everything only testing will really say for sure.
Checkout my example here. And get the code here.