I am proud to announce that I was an event photographer at GreenBeat 2009 Conference. Check out my work in these published articles. See reference 1, reference 2, and reference 3.

After playing with JavaScript for a while, I got a chance to jump back to the server-side for a bit. I found myself a need to create a properties file. A look on the Internet led me to Vince’s blog. It has 90% of what I need. The missing piece was to add an ant task to copy the properties file right before building the WAR file. Here is my version of the ant task:

<target name="-pre-dist">
    <copy todir="build/web/WEB-INF/classes">
        <fileset dir="src" includes="*.properties"/>
    </copy>
</target>

After adding the ant task, everything works beautifully!

slideshare is a cool app and you don’t even have to sign-up to use it.

Today, my coworker asked why he can’t use ++ operators. I responded that jslint’s plusplus configuration ban it. He certainly was annoyed by such change in the configuration. A quick look into the reasoning behind the ban reveals the following statement from Douglas Crockford’s JSLint – JavaScript: The Good Parts:

The ++ (increment) and — (decrement) operators have been known to contribute to bad code by encouraging excessive trickiness. They are second only to faulty architecture in enabling viruses and other security menaces. The JSLint option plusplus prohibits the use of these operators.

Perhaps this ban is necessary for folks who have shown tendencies to develop obscure code in an attempt to deceive or trick others. At the same time, it also bans simple usages such as the one shown below:

var a = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
  a = a + i;
}

In order to pass jslint, the for loop may have to look like the following:

var a = 0,
    i;
for (i = 0; i < 5; i = i + 1) {
    a = a + i;
}

Without ++ operators, code will no longer looks the same or as elegant as it used to be. Now that I have my 30 sec on this topic, life goes on with working code!

Thanks to gj7548 for posting 64 bit version of gmlive. It works great!
http://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=111735&start=105

For the last couple days I ran into JavaScript errors with toolbars for Ext JS. One of the issues is clearly documented here. I just added hideMode:'offsets' to the toolbar definition and the error went away. The other one, I had to add enableOverflow: false option to the toolbar to avoid hitting Object required error in IE.

Even though I am happy that Snow Leopard doesn’t remove iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand and rest of iLife software that were removed when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I’ll hold off Snow Leopard upgrade for now. I came across this list on what Snow Leopard removes. Fortunately, I haven’t seen a removal of iLife software. However, one of my friends observed a kernel panic with Snow Leopard for the first time today. He suspected that the cause was Cisco VPN software. This stability issue is a deal breaker for me.

I came across this script and it worked for me. This is a good time saver!

I worked with JSLint today to clean up my local code. While cleaning, I encountered a parameter name that had underscore in its name. JSLint didn’t like this and complained. Since this parameter name was used to communicate with the server and could not be changed, I needed to set an exception in the JavaScript file. This led me to the options section of this page. All I had to do was adding the following line at the beginning of the JavaScript file and JSLint stopped complained about the issue:

/*jslint sub: true */

Vim loves to auto indent. This can present a challenge when pasting text. Auto indent can distort the formatting. The trick documented here is very helpful. Instead of using F3 key stated in the document. I used underscore. It worked beautifully!

set pastetoggle=_