As a web developer I can’t avoid using Javascript. Not that I would want to or anything. I love Javascript. I’m happy enough with my JS coding skills but there was one thing that always found a way to leave me scratching my head. Callbacks!

I had no problem with the concept of callbacks, but something was missing. I always had trouble maintaining scope in callback methods. I haven’t had to pay too much attention to the problem until today as jQuery has met the majority of my Javascript needs to date. Anyway after a quick search I found the solution, which is so easy I deserve a kick in the ass. (more…)

Sticking to artists that have worked with Zero7 this week. Here’s Sia. The Australian singer added her voice to two tracks on Zero7’s Simple Things. I heard more of Sia from working with Ken McGuire who just left one of her albums on repeat for days at a time. I wasn’t complaining.

I've been playing around a little with Jaxer lately. I really like the ease of Cross Domain javascript calls. Just a quick note though. I've been testing the Jaxer.Web.post call against the wordpress XMLRPC.
I kept getting responses saying that the the server only accepted POST requests. But I was using Jaxer.web.post.
So I scratched my head for a while. And then some.
Eventually I figured that the body of the post request was not being set. Then I discovered that Jaxer.Web.post defaults it's content type header to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" which, as far as I know, passes the data in a querystring format and not in the post body. The simple fix was to change the content type to "text/xml" like so :

The call worked perfectly after that.

Damn I forgot to post a song of the week last week. So I'll do one today and another on Friday. Anyway, I love Zero7, I discovered Tina Dico from listening to them. The original track 'Home' can be found the Zero7 album When it Falls. This acoustic version is pure class. Also I want that guitar, my father has a 12string that looks and sounds just like it, but it has seen better days.

Blogging from an iPod touch today.

Arrived this morning around 9.15. I have to say I'm very impressed with the venue.

10.30
Caught an interesting talk from Cathy Fitzgerald about building an online arts community with the help of several local authorities in the south east. The site is artlinks.ie for those interested. All creatives are encouraged to join the community which is currently 650 strong.

Break for fresh air now. More to come. (more...)

Up to now I've used MAMP to get MySQL and Apache up and running quickly on my mac. I prefer to get under the hood as such when I have the time and set these things up individually. In this post I'll go through simply installing the MySQL5 package and then build and install Apache2. (more...)

I've already blogged about Adobe's ridiculous issue with case sensitive file systems. That gave me enough hassle on my own machine at home.

I finally got my iMac at work today. Gorgeous machine. Clean Leopard install, banged in the CS3 suite install disk and left it off to install while I went on lunch as the installer is notoriously slow. Came back from my lunch, the install was successful except for the small fact that it failed to install Photoshop and In-Design.

No indication was give as to what the problem was. Adobe's install logs weren't exactly informative either.
So I ran the installer again, this time just selecting the apps that failed to install. Waited 40mins to be told that the install failed again.

Finally I came across Adobe CS3 Clean, a script that Adobe have published that clears out any files that may be interfering with the install. This mainly deals with issues caused by having older Adobe suite apps or the CS3 beta suite hanging around but I figured what the hell.

I followed the instructions provided. Removed the entire suite. Ran the script using the more aggressive Level 2 option. And then reinstalled. Note that I also chose not to install Version Cue Server this time round, that may also have had an effect. After an hour or so the installer completed, this time with green ticks all round.

Hurrah!

A note for those who are using ActiveResource.

I ran into a bit of a problem the other day, not with using the HttpMock class itself. Mocks work pretty well in ActiveResouce. The problem came about when I tried to not use HttpMock. I almost tore my hair out but eventually a simple solution came. Thanks to Jason for the shoulder surfing effect. (more...)

Last.fm continues to help me discover music that I already own but haven't given the deserved attention. This song was featured in two of my favourite shows, Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy, both shows exhibiting superb musical taste.

The video is not an official video as far as I know but it should be. It's brilliant.

On my mac at home I've been using Quicksilver for some time now. I've got no complaints there.

At work, where unfortunately I'm stuck with a pc for the moment, I have been trying out application launchers for Windows.

After looking around a bit decided to give two a try, Enso and Launchy. I tried Launchy first. It was very simple, I bound it to CTRL + SPACE as that is my preference, using that keystroke, the launcher appears (which is nicely skinnable), you begin typing, it starts figuring out which app you want to launch. Very like Quicksilver. I can't fault it.

Enso, to be fair is more than just an application launcher. You can do a lot more with Enso as is detailed on their demo. There is one big difference however and I found it to be a deal breaker for me. (more...)