Eddie Welker.com

I’ve been following Le Tour again this year.  Previously, the aerial shots of France kept my attention, but this year I have been interested in the  competition.  I’ve found the mini-goals and side stories are as good as the goal of le maillot jeune.

Anyway, I try to avoid re-posting the “hot link of the day” type links—the ones that have been passed around on other blogs—but the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog is worth it… just take a look at those photos.  This set from the flickr blog is also pretty cool.

Still not enough? Follow tour coverage from the New York Times.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with Django.  Because of that, I’ve been looking at a few different books on the subject.  I first started out with the Django Book, which took me a few days to read.  I can’t say I absorbed it all, but I got the general idea.  Then I decided to look into other books and found Learning Website Development with Django, by Ayman Hourieh.   I started right away.

The book’s subtitle, “A beginner’s tutorial to building web applications, quickly and cleanly, with the Django application framework,” frames the book perfectly.  Its target audience is programmers (moderately) familiar with Python, but who are, at the same time, new to Django.  The book is really focused towards this audience.  The other key word in the subtitle is “quickly.”  This book moves along in a hurry while creating the demonstration app.  I was quite comfortable (and pleased) by the pace, however, I can imagine that a more novice programmer may have a harder time dealing with the information flying by.

The book centers on building one app, a social bookmarking website similar to del.icio.us, or ma.gnolia.  I think type of site was a good choice, since it provides the author with a varying degree of complexity to play around with.  It allowed Mr. Hourieh to start with the basics.  This book succeeds in starting simple and getting harder as it goes along.  I also thought it was good to focus on creating just one website, rather than a bunch of mini-projects or examples, since it models a more real-life situation.  The idea of a social bookmarking website, as well, is very useful because its features are currently en vogue, and can be found on many current sites.

Chapters One and Two are the obligatory “what is Django” and “how to install” chapters.  The meat of the book starts in Chapter Three when the project is introduced.   By the end of this third chapter, we’ve already quickly written three database models (Links, Users, and Bookmarks) and the main page.  Chapter Four introduces Django’s built-in user authentication system (django.contrib.auth), and describes how to write login, logout, and registration pages.  Chapter Five instructs us to write an additional database model (tags), which is more complex than the models we wrote previously.  Here we also write pages to display the list of bookmarks, bookmarks by tags, and a tag cloud.  [To illustrate how fast we’re moving, Chapter Five ends on page 91]

Mr. Hourieh adds occasional asides throughout Learning Website Development with Django, such as one on security at the end of Chapter Five.  Personally, I’d have liked to see more of these, but I think he consciously limited the number to better suit the book’s audience.

Chapter Six introduces AJAX behaviors, using the jQuery library.  The author includes a lightning-fast tutorial on jQuery.  The reader is then shown how to implement a live search display, in-place bookmark editing, and a tag auto-complete feature.  Chapter Seven adds both a voting and commenting system to our application.  The user writes a new database model (Shared Bookmark), and shows how to implement comments piggy-backing on Django’s built-in comment system (django.contrib.comments).

In Chapter Eight, we are finally introduced to Django’s built-in Administration Interface (django.contrib.admin), and the reader is shown how to customize the admin pages and deal with user permissions.  Chapter Nine describes adding RSS feeds, Pagination, and advanced search capabilities to our application.  We’re taught how to create advanced model queries using both the objects.filter() function and Q objects to build multi-faceted queries.

Chapter Ten focuses on adding a “Friend” data model to the application.  This chapter demonstrates how Django can be used to send email (friend ‘invites’ in this case), and how the bookmark application can be used to handle activation links.  Chapter Eleven covers three topics; language translation, caching, and unit testing.  None of these are as “flashy” as the previously covered topics, but they are given adequate mention. The final chapter, Chapter Twelve mentions a number of advanced topics that the reader is left to research on his/her own.

The book is generally well written.  I like the structure.  The chapter beginnings outline a plan for implementation, and the remainders proceede step-by-step.  I would have liked the writing to have been polished a little more.  The language seems too formal in places, and when you mix in a number of technical ideas, the language can distract.  This however, may just be a personal preference.

The more I think about Learning Website Development with Django, the more I like it.  It is well suited for someone who wants to get off the ground quickly; someone who needs to get something done and can worry about the details when they need to.  It’s not a bible, but it’s not trying to be, and I think that’s where it really succeeds.

Happy July 4th!  Now, with that out of the way…

My sister Tania was at the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating competition today.  She was happy with the result, I was rooting for Kobayashi.  Oh well.  My roommate was rather disgusted by the whole thing.  Me?  I found myself REALLY wanting a hot dog.

Speaking of food… my roommate and I were flipping channels the other day and she insisted on stopping on the food network.  They had a show on about local resturants known only to locals.  The first part was on a place I’ve passed countless numbers of times, called Chaps Charcoal Resturant. It looked pretty good, and the prices are good, so I may have to visit soon.

Since I’m on a food kick at the moment, one more… this may also soon become my favorite thing.  Gotta try it.

Elsewhere…

The Sox won, beating the Yankees today, but are still behind the Rays.  If the Rays suffer injuries down the stretch, they’ll fall.  However, that seems to be a big if.  The Red Sox need to get a number of people back.

And  more locally…

When I have some free moments, I’ve been working rebuilding gbyo.com in Django.  The programming part isn’t particularly hard (despite not being familiar with Python… though, it’s not unlike other languages), and I kinda like the database API (It’s been a while, so I only barely remember ActiveRecord, but I seem to like this more).  The thing I haven’t grasped yet is overall project structure.  I’m working on that.

I’ve bought a number of books recently, and hope to start reading them soon.  Right now, I am reading this, as the publishers were nice enough to send me a review copy.  Review coming soon.  Additionally, I want to post some more formal thoughts about Crockford’s Javascript book soon. (Note: yes, that first linked book cost me .48 cents, w/o shipping)

I’m trying to convince people to go on vacation with me.  So far, I haven’t heard back from anyone.  That will only stall me, it will not deter me.

I’m officially (at this moment) down to three bugs on my project at work.  This means… that I am almost ready to resume my life, as well as writing here… for the first time in 6 straight months.  I’ll be taking some (much needed) vacation time at some point, but am anxiously looking forward to re-connecting with this site.

Additionally, can I just mention that the Celtics won?  So my Red Sox are World Series champs, my Giants are NFL champs, and now my Celtics are NBA champs.  How sweet is that???

Happy Regular Expressions Day Everyone!!!

After spending a small part of my evening debugging Javascript in IE (which is ALWAYS a pleasure), I found out one of my errors was a mistake I had made before… trying to access button.value in IE.  IE, of course, being IE, returns the innerHTML value of the button, instead of the value attribute.  Last time I ran into this, I used a class instead of value, and moved on with my life.  Tonight, I was feeling stubborn, and I found a better way…

target.value = target.getAttributeNode(‘value’).nodeValue;

I’m sure I’m about the millionth person to discover this, but I couldn’t find it anywhere using standard searches, so I thought I’d try to emphasize it here so others could find it. (Hopefully it’s not so common that everyone else knows it!)

At first, I used the following:

target.value =  target.attributes.getNamedItem(‘value’).nodeValue;

Then I looked at Flanagan’s Javascript: The Definitive Guide (using his amazon associates link),  where he states that IE implementation of the attributes array,”makes it impossible to use this feature portably.”  He doesn’t mention which version of IE (this specific line of code worked in IE6, IE7, and IE8a), but I figured I’d go with the more general version.

If you read this, I hope I could save you a bit of time.

P.S. – I used IE8a’s Debugger to help.  Here’s hoping they develop it further before the standard release.  It’s MUCH better than flying blind, but I can’t imagine a less helpful message than specifying an object in the console, and seeing “{…}”.

I’m pretty happy with Flickr’s new video service… I took this video back at the beginning of Feb, and tried to upload it to YouTube, where it was promptly rejected for being in the wrong format. I didn’t want to bother converting it, so I just forgot about it for a while. Flickr, on the otherhand, instantly uploaded and converted the file for me. All I had to do was pick the file. Since I’ve been ridiculously busy, I can’t beat the convenience factor with a stick! So enjoy!

Until further notice; learn python. It is a hybrid language, and it is gives a reasonably un-biased PLT context.

My friend Raluca just wrote me this tweet…  saying “I just found the funniest comic that someone made about @edwelker”.  The scary part is that I never told her that I actually did that…

I just finished writing a not-so-simple, not-so-complex PHP script.  First, lemme say that I had a good time with it, since it isn’t either XSLT or Portal (my workplace’s homebrew) code.  It’s kinda refreshing to look outside of my multi-month project.  Exciting, in fact… despite how insignificant (in the grand scheme of things) it is.

I’ve got to admit, thought, that I don’t really like PHP.  I’m not going to bash PHP outright (as I’ve heard MANY people do).  It is a programming language, and it certainly has it’s place.  I’ve used many things written in PHP.   In fact, I feel bad about the way people dismiss PHP.  That said, I still don’t like it.   My problem is that I feel PHP is simply too verbose.  There seems to be a function for everything.  It is the total opposite of Scheme, where every function is a based on a handful of core functions.  I have had to deal with a number of languages in my life, and I certainly prefer languages with as little syntax as possible.

I spend a lot of time googling the functions.  And then the parameters.  And then the return types.  And then I run across another function that is kinda like the first one that I saw, but slightly different (maybe even described as more or less efficient!)  And then I have to research the return types.   I’m mostly bothered by the related functions.  Just give me something I can use in different ways.  Don’t give me the kitchen sink and tell me to choose the faucet type.

This is the same problem that I have with XSLTs.  It is a rather verbose language (which happens to usually be interspersed in XML/HTML).  This makes it hard to pick-up in a hurry, and makes it unintuitive.  This is important.  Unintuitive.  I spend a major part of my work day making sure that all of the webpages, all of the components, all of the behavior… even the URLs of my work are intuitive.  So I don’t like to accept much less from the tools I work with.

To extend the analogy slightly further… I have seen that when websites are unintuitive, that said websites can fail.  Is the same thing the case for programming languages?

I have no time for anything!

This is how I usually feel. There are so many things in the world that I want to do/know about, and yet they all take time to do/learn. I don’t have any big to-dos that eat large chunks of my time either… I work, I have my orchestra, I eat, and I relax. I try to use relaxation time for learning/discovery (when I can, of course). It is just very hard. I haven’t taken an analytical approach to the problem yet, but I think I should sometime soon (of course, that may take a while to get to.)

I don’t often rely on calendars, I may have to start. I don’t feel like people ‘rob’ me of time, but I think I should pay attention to that. And of course, I am always trying to make my learning/doing time more efficient (that’s the only thing I have down pat).

Ok, enough rant. Now just a little tip-of-the-hat to what I’ve missed recently… the FringeDC Meeting, the Refresh DC Happy Hour, the first Refresh Baltimore Meeting AND planning group, as well as my books, especially the Web Navigation, RESTful Services, Graph Theory, and Discrete Math books!  (This is not to mention the projects I’d like to get started!)

Maybe I’ll just win the lottery. That may buy me some more time.

My new resolution: learn how to take better photographs, simply to reduce the time I spend editing them!

I’ve decided that once I do that, I will retire my Olympus C-8080, and move on to a Digital SLR. Reviews are mixed (at best) about the E-3, and I may like something better than the E-510. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself… use the camera I have first!

I’ve always been a fan of the <label> element. It’s an incredibly simple way to make a form more accessible. It does two things:

• It explicitly associates text with a form element, so a screenreader doesn’t have to guess what text goes with what form element.
• For checkboxes/radio buttons, it gives the user a larger click area, which is useful for people with limited vision (or me, since I always end up missing them!)

You can find a number of simple usage examples on the W3C‘s WCAG Techniques page for labels.

I recently discovered something new about the <label> element (new to me). I hadn’t realized that you can associate multiple labels to one form element. This is useful because it allows you to associate even more information with a form element. With it, I could write something like this:

<label for="box">1. </label>

<input type="checkbox" id="box"/>

<label for="box">This is some text with a 

<abbr title="full title name">shrt. title</abbr> other stuff inside.</label>

This isn’t the most useful example, but I think it demonstrates the general idea. [Note: normally, I wouldn’t write out an explicit number, I would use an unordered list. But without major support for CSS counters, I find myself between a rock and a hard place.] My optimism was quickly quashed though, because, as Roger Johansson mentions, screenreaders tend to ignore two labels. I will have to do some of my own testing to find out more, but I find this very disappointing.

Another interesting application is to include labels for screenreaders, while using CSS to hide them from visual users. Just make your label a block element, give it a 0 width (to remove the width it would have taken in the document flow), and move it off-screen. You cannot simply display: none the label, as that usually hides it from screenreaders. I would like to look further into the end result using current technology (hoping for improved results since 2004), but I certainly believe this leaves no excuse for anyone NOT including labels in their forms.

Back to using one label again, I ran into a Firefox Bug where a link is included in a label element. When a link is clicked inside a label element that is associated with a checkbox, the checkbox becomes checked! Hit the back button, and the item will still be checked, with the visual check the only evidence anything happened. You can see how this would not be friendly to a screenreader (not to mention visual users!) IE and Opera both behave without checking the box. If you have a moment, please vote for this bug and help me get it fixed.

P.S. – when I mention “hoping” to test further, I mean when my Jaws activation FINALLY gets worked out.

So I guess it’s simply the time of year. Many big releases today… software, APIs, and more!

First, the biggest. IE8 has been released in initial beta. The release was also included a general overview of IE8’s new features and fixes. It’s actually quite a lot of information to absorb all at once. I’ve skimmed a number of the IE8 whitepapers, and feel the biggest changes are W3C’s WIA-ARIA support, Acid2 compliance, the javascript selectors api, and their assertion of achieving CSS 2.1 compliance. Of course, the devil is in the details, and there is no company for which that statement is more true. They have a lot of work ahead, and we know they talk a good game. The big upside, however, is that they are actually talking about it. Out in the open. Big step, and I applaud them for that.

The other biggest buzz of the day was from Yahoo, in announcing the beta of their Fire Eagle service, an API for broadcasting your physical location to the web. I wouldn’t call it earth-shattering, but I think that there’s a good chance a number of cool things are built with it. Watch the video of it’s introduction, and then take a look here to quickly get an idea of the details. It would appear from the details that it was written in a highly usable way.

Of more direct importance to me, Google has announced their Contacts API. I despise when sites ask me to enter my username/password for other sites. The most offensive request is for Gmail. I don’t have any interesting emails, let me tell you… but I certainly don’t want to let others read them. The Contacts API is a safe way for distribution and use of your Gmail contacts, without threatening the security of your Gmail account or your other Google-stored information. With this, I should be able to sync my Gmail contacts with my desktop mail contacts. I’m very happy about that.

Heading up the long-since-overdue category, AOL has announced they’ve opened their Instant Messenger Protocol, OpenAIM. Finally. I remember ages ago when… well, it’s all in the past now. That’s one big wall that has been broken down between protocols, and hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will fall in line. It will be great if other apps can finally use the features that have been limited to the AIM client for all this time. I use Adium and Pidgin most of the time (Adium, I believe uses Pidgin’s core), and look forward to seeing what they do with the new open protocol. (On a personal note, hopefully this doesn’t spell any negative news for my friends who work on AIM.)

And to round things off, here’s two smaller releases today (one based on IE8’s Activities):

• The Firefox Operator plugin (for Microformats) has already given a go at implementing Activities, which were announced at today’s IE8 overview.
• The New York Times has contributed a perl module to CPAN. Looks like a useful profiling tool, especially since it profiles line-by-line.

My IE8 happiness was so yesterday.  Now let’s tear all these browsers apart, IE8 included, with the Acid3 test!