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The Decemberists - The Hazards Of Love

I will admit it. I am a late to the party. While everyone has been gushing and raving about The Decemberists song-writing prowess I have been at the corner holding my drink and wondering why nobody talks to me. I will however admit when I am wrong and I have to come out and say it.

I was wrong.

The Hazards of Love has easily turned into one of the surprises of the year for me. I came to this album expecting nothing and I left delighted at it’s smarts, range and craft. I am a sucker for bombastic over the top productions and The Decemberists certainly aren’t afraid of it. The album is a rock opera that sifts from subdued indie folk, to 70s prog rock to straight out rock and then to good ol’ americana. It does all this while maintaining the listener involved with an epic a story of love and death that some people say its pretty good. I haven’t paid much attention to the lyrics because honestly I’m just having to much fun listening to the music, but I can definitely guarantee that most listeners will find something to like with this album. Go check it out.

Last friday marked the first public release candidate of Prototype 1.6.1.

From the Prototype Blog:

Today we tagged the first public release candidate of Prototype 1.6.1. (What happened to RC1? Long story.) While there are more minor fixes we’d like to get into this release, we decided an interim release was necessary because of the final release of Internet Explorer 8 last week.

This is the first public release of Prototype that is fully compatible — and fully optimized for — Internet Explorer 8’s “super-standards” mode. In particular, Prototype now takes advantage of IE8’s support of the Selectors API and its ability to extend the prototypes of DOM elements.

It’s definitely great to see the Prototype team still working hard on improving the library, specially now that jQuery has been receiving so much attention. The one bit that I found interesting was the following:

mouseenter and mouseleave events — simulating the IE-proprietary events that tend to be far more useful than mouseover and mouseout.

The mouseenter and mouseleave events are actually really useful in that they behave exactly like the jQuery hover events. Sadly, it was one of those things that Microsoft actually got right, but no other browser implemented them.

Well, now that Prototype will include this functionality, the Hover plugin will become redundant. It should still be compatible, with the new version of Prototype, but you will not need to include it in the future. Be sure to grab Prototype 1.6.1 as soon as it is released!

The New WorshipHouse 2.0 from Worship House Media on Vimeo.

My main project since joining the Worship House Media team in October has been working as the lead developer on the redesign and development of the new WorshipHouseMedia.com.

I am very happy to announce that the main development effort has been finalized and we have launched the new site (with a beta tag). Worshiphouse 2.0 was developed in Coldfusion using a couple of great frameworks called Model-Glue (MVC) and Transfer ORM.

I have to admit that before joining Worship House I was a little worried about working with Coldfusion, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find that the Coldfusion community is making great strides in trying to modernize the platform with current development practices. Having great experience in both Java and .Net, I found the transition to be very smooth. I was up and running full force in a couple of weeks building Controllers and Views with Model-Glue and persisting my objects with Transfer. It’s not to say that there haven’t been any problems (we have found a lot of problems with memory leaks in Coldfusion), but overall I am very satisfied with the ability to deliver a product using a technology that was brand new to me, and I think that is a testament to the Coldfusion community. 

I also want to thank my fellow co-workers and colleagues Clint Miller and Dan VanMilligan for mentoring me and helping pick up the slack down the stretch to get this website launched.

One jQuery feature that I’ve always wished was part of Prototype is the hover function. The hover function takes in two parameters: the first one is a function for when the mouse starts to hover over the desired element, and the second one is a function for when the mouse leaves the element:

$("#hover-element").hover(
  function() {
    $(this).addClass('my-hover');
  },
  function(){
    $(this).removeClass('my-hover');
  }
);

This is very simple and allows for hover effects on any html element (Important since IE is unable to apply the :hover style to elements other than links). You definitely can do the same using Prototype, but you have to use the mouseover and mouseout events.

$("hover-element").observe('mouseover', function() {
  this.addClassName('my-hover');
});
$("hover-element").observe('mouseout', function() {
  this.removeClassName('my-hover');
});

It’s not pretty syntax but it works. These two techniques, however, have one major difference between them.  jQuery’s hover method will only fire ONCE when you enter (mouseover) the desired item, even if it has multiple CHILDREN objects. Using Prototype’s observe method, the mouseover and mouseout events will fire MULTIPLE times if the object you are hovering over has multiple children; firing every time as you mouse over each one of them.  This is not a big deal if you are doing something simple like adding a class name to the object. In fact you might not even notice it since it happens so fast, but this is a big problem if you are trying to do something more complicated, like triggering an animation. I found this out while trying to create a simple animated drop-down menu for a website I was building (tutorial coming soon) and had a hard time figuring out what to do. I though about porting jQuery’s hover method to prototype and almost started doing it when I found this:

Protohover: a simple hover plugin for the prototype.js library

Luckily, it seems like someone read my mind and already did me the favor. It works exactly as you would expect. Just add the js file to your website and your syntax should be very similar to jQuery’s:

$("hover-element").hover(
  function(event) {
    $(this).addClass('my-hover');
  },
  function(event){
    $(this).removeClass('my-hover');
  }
);

I love me some Google.

Who says we need jquery? Prototype can be just as effective. Here’s a little snippet for decorating an html table with alternating background color rows:

document.observe('dom:loaded', function(){
  $$('table.stripped tr:nth-child(odd)').invoke("addClassName", "oddRow");
});

Just make sure you add a css style for those odd rows:

table.stripped tr.oddRow { background-color: #CCCCCC; }

Last night marked another end of an era. I’m gonna miss my car, but I’m happy somebody else will get to enjoy it. Tomorrow I’m heading to the Honda dealership to get a scooter since my commute to work is only 2.5 miles!

You’ll be missed Yellow 6, you were a good car.

Well, the story is long and not too interesting but the short version is this:

I got married and went to Puerto Rico for my honeymoon. It was fun. Upon arrival back to Texas I found out that my company basically ran out of money and couldn’t pay me anymore.

I have been looking for a job for the past three weeks and I have finally found a new home. I start Monday working for Worship House Media where I will continue doing what I do best, being a Web Application Developer.

Wish me luck!

I’ve been working very hard since the beginning of the year trying to launch a new website (with the help of my amazing coworkers). I’m proud to say that we have finally launched with the sponsorship of the Dallas White Rock Marathon.

Go to racenation.com to check the newest social network for runners, swimmers and cyclists.

www.racenation.com

Happy Birthday Earth!!!

I’m trying to be optimistic here, but today, on celebrating Earth Day, I can’t help but think about the myriad of problems we face on our abused overpopulated planet. We look around today and see rising oil prices caused by increased demand on a limited supply that will only shrink over time. We see the increased pollution problems that countries like China and India face everyday, caused by the massive growth of their populations. Extreme poverty and hunger abates many parts of Africa, and yet here in the US we continue on with our lives unburdened and not worried about any of this.

I feel guilty.

I just want to bring attention to an excellent article called The Problem of Growth, that tackles many of these issues and highlights the one major problem.

We live on a beautiful planet, with limited resources and we simply cannot keep growing and wasting our resources forever. We need to face the truth and make tough decisions for the future of our children and the future of the human race, or else we wont be here to celebrate many more Earth Days in the future.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3721