Simeon Says

When I started doing web development I took to it like a fish in the water. I loved the markup and I was really impressed with the new things I could do with Javascript when IE 5 got updated. I had so much fun building neat widgets and doo-dah’s. I wrote form validation stuff, and I wrote a cascading menu system. I really thought it was the future.

Then i got a job doing web development. Working where I was not the only person using the site, and found out the hard way what a disaster Javascript implementations in browsers where. I spent days trying to make something simple work in IE 5 and Netscape 4. Then came IE 5.5 and IE 6, and every time I spent days trying to make my Javascript code work in the new browser. I actually tried to convince my customers to put up a message telling people to come back to the site after getting IE 6. I was so naive. I fought with it for a long time and then I had a realization. I didnt really need most of that stuff to work. The only reason the customers wanted it was because I told them they needed it.

And that was it. We started selling more basic layouts that had broader reach. I spent less time fighting with Javascript and the customers had a much better user experience. Because while simpler, the sites were much more usable and reliable. So then my Javascript became almost infantile in its implementation because that was what worked cross browser.

Then I turned to tools that didnt require browser implementation to work. Things like flash. But being a developer Flash IDE never felt right. So when Flex came around, I globbed right onto that. And I have never looked back. Living in Bliss as my applications just work, cross browser, cross platform. No updates, no worries about Flash Player releases. Just happy developer coding bliss.

Javascript was dead to me.

And this is how the last 3 years have essentially been for me. Unfortunately, times they are a changing. I recently picked up a project where I am building applications for AIR using Javascript and HTML. I started working on these applications, trying to building them like flex apps in Javascript. Perhaps you were under the same misconception that I am, this is not possible. In fact not only are the applications written in different languages, but the style and architecture is very different. At first this was something that bothered me to extremes. However after a month, I am starting to come around. Unfortunately not for the reason you would think (that would be all the benefits of AIR). As I get more into writing advanced Javascript constructs I am finding that the language being dynamic and interpreted feels so much like Ruby. And as anyone reading this blog will know I have become enamored with Ruby as a language. Beyond the language benefits of Javascript, AIR implements Javascript 1.7 which has some incredible enhancements that add features available in traditional scripting languages like Python and Ruby.

So while I am still leary of the Javascript implementations of the Browsers, I am finding that I like Javascript as a language much more than I would have expected. So I expect that you will see more about Javascript here on this blog, something that I might have in the past told you would never happen.

Ok, so it was a long time ago, but I still felt bad when I found this note from CFUnited a couple years ago.

If you notice across the top of the page I have listed there names with a note to “Kill Later” as you can see this is about them not using CFEclipse.  I have since taken a more lenient stance on alternative CF editors, and am glad that I did not follow up on this initiative.  Plus I believe both of them eventually came around and became users.  So it would have been poor judgment on my part to not them them come around on their own.

So to Doug and Paul…. I am sorry for thinking about killing you for opposing my project.  I hope we can move past this since we have been such good friends during your time of ignorance about my wrong doings.

Every once in a while I get to go off the grid. Maybe its a hike in the woods to go camping. Maybe its just that my mother-in-laws house doesnt have broadband or wifi. But regardless of the reason sometimes I need to use svn when i am offline. Just because I cant hit my repository doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still be making meaningful commits periodically throughout my development.

Well Dr Nic » Going offline without your favorite Subversion repository? article outlines how we can use git to make that happen. It looks so easy even the faint of heart should be able to make it happen.

So go enjoy that sunshine and don’t be afraid to write some code in the park. Who knows, maybe a change in scenery will help bring out a creative solution to your projects latest roadblock.

Wow, in a totally unplanned for way, I just realized that I have been blogging on simb.net for 3 years today. I think thats pretty cool. Its neat that “the Simfluence” lasted for 3 years. And yesterday i started the new era of “Simeon Says”.

What does this really mean? Well I am going to stop passivly influencing your thoughts and just start telling you what you should think Because if Simeon doesn’t say, well you lose.

Have a happy thanksgiving. If you are deep frying your turkey (like me) remember to do it outside in a well ventilated area, 10 feet from anything Just trying to help.

I’m Outty.

Photo Gallery

At several of my presentations this year I was startled to hear the crowd start laughing in the middle of my presentation. It always caught me by surprise but the cause was always the same. Everybody loved my laptops desktop walllpaper. My desktop had a Tux penguin holding and over sized juice box with the Microsoft logo on it. The caption under the logo read “We suck more. And thats guaranteed“. I loved that wallpaper and it was lots of fun…unfortunatly when I reinstalled leopard that was not something i remembered to backup.

Today I decided it was time to find my wallpaper and get it back. In my quest I actually found a site full of fun backgrounds. Now I have one with tux using a fly swatter on the MSN butterfly. I think these backgrounds are lots of fun, and I hope you will enjoy the gallery i found them in.

Peace, OUT!

What is that you say? I thought you were using Typo? Yeah, well its been a rough month. I have been doing a bunch of PHP at work, and it caused me to (for the first time) consider some other options for my blogging pleasures. When I started writing Ruby I made the same mistake I did when I started writing CF, that is I thought my site needed to run on that platform. And the truth of it is that if I am going to be agnostic and promote Open Source tools, then i damn well better consider all of them.

I have often admired several features of WordPress but never really considered it for my blog. Well I got to playing with it and found it to be more than happy. It even took my only about 45 minutes to move my content from my old BlogCFC site. Something that was more work that it was worth to try when moving to Typo.

There were a couple resources that were instrumental in my being able to make the jump. The first was Sean Tierney’s blog where he posted a set of file to help move my blog from BlogCFC to wordpress. I was able to use Seans script to move me to a Wordpress 1.5 site with only a couple modifications. Then upgrading to the latest Wordpress was a matter of unzipping the new files, copying over my config and running an upgrade script. After that I needed to move my Typo blog over as well. I found several resources on moving from Movable Type to Typo, so I chose to use one of those as an example to write a script that outputs they Typo blog data into the MT data format. This is easily consumable by most blog importers including WordPress. I will attach the MTOut script to this post. Just drop it in your Typo scripts folder and give it a run. By default it will just output the code to the STDOUT, but if you use the -f flag you can specify the filename you would like to write the data into. Of course there is always the -h to see the options.

Anyway, I am looking forward to playing with Wordpress as well as posting more, now that I wont be consumed by comment spam.

Laters.