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.
I really like this widget for jquery. Its such a nice and clean way to pick dates. So I went ahead and created a YUI 3 widget that does roughly the same thing, but with way fewer features at the moment. Anyway, the basic are there. (its slightly wonky in ie6 right now…)
Check it out here, or download the code here
UPDATE
Thanks to @ls_n, now it handles 12 hour time properly, for some reason I put 0 and 12…d’oh.
So I am waiting around for jury duty. My brain has been turning, so here is a little dump of my thoughts:
Free your mind and your classes will follow
In a conversation with a coworker yesterday we were talking about why jQuery (and yui 3) are fundementally different beasts from other approaches like prototype. I think the beautiful thing about them both is that they don’t try to pretend that Javascript has classical inheritence. They embrace functional programing and prototypal inheritence. They work with the language instead of pretending its something its not. Which is wonderful. Of course, with jQuery you don’t actually have to know or understand any of this, but its there anyway.
Prototypes…
To follow up on my last post, I’m been playing with a project, so I have prototyped things mostly in plain php, but now I am using zend framework to try and assemble the little pieces in to a full scale example.
I have an idea for an app I would like to try out. So naturally I am going to put together a prototype. I started looking into Symphony or Rails as a way to get a prototype out, but I kind of find the whole code generation/ORM thing a bit hard to adapt to. It seems it will take me a week (spare time) at least to get the hang of it before I can even start on my prototype, where I feel like I could get something running with no framework (or even with something less RAD like zend framework or codeIgniter).
Am I being a baby here? How does everyone else prototype?