What's it all about, Alfie?

We just got back from a great skiing vacation. Liza and the kids took Ski School and learned to ski - Angelina on her new snowboard. We learned a lot about each other - who's got the balance and who doesn't take a fall very well.

The big surprise for me was Marie. She was amazing on the slopes once she learned how to ski. She was shooshing with the best of them. Very fun to see her excel at this.

There were casualties. Liza's hip may never be the same. OK... maybe it will, but the swelling from two consecutive falls to the same spot is not going away anytime soon. Still, it's something she's really glad she learned in the post-40 age bracket.

Great fun.

Today I got tossed into having to work with my nemesis project today. This is the code that I can never seem to get rid of, and will most likely follow me as long as I'm here. It's painful. Well, today I thought that I wouldn't have to implement a certain change because another project (written by a co-worker) was going to take over this part of the code, which has been the goal for a while, but I just wasn't aware that now was the time.

So I talked to the guy doing the work on the new project, and realized that he wasn't anywhere close to getting it done. This meant that I needed to do the work if it was going to get done in a timely manner.

So back into the muck and crud I went... I spent about half a day on it, and in the end, it's working, and should work just fine, but it's left me feeling very un-Christmas-like. Very.

It's been a very tough couple of months - November and December. Liza's been sick with migraines, and work has been end-of-the-year stressful, as it can be. I'm not feeling like I'd like to feel, and yet there's really no time to just say "Timeout!" and get into the mood. I've got a few days, and I'll be working on Christmas Eve because I'll be taking time off for a family vacation the week between Christmas and my birthday.

I know there's no way to outrun this codebase. There just isn't.

I also know there's no way to get the other members of my team to get their stuff done faster. They're doing the best they can, it's just not as fast as I can work. I get loaded down at the end of the month because I hit all my objectives, which is another reason it's stressful. I just wish I knew that I'd never have to work on this codebase again.

But I know better.

Sigh.

Today I spent a good chunk of the day creating a page in my web app from two other pages. It's a request I received from a user that wants to see both views of the data, but wants to pack it in on the display - screen real estate being what it is on most desks. What I kept thinking while I was doing this is: Why isn't this easier?.

I'd love to see nib-ware for the web. Something where I can build a self-contained "widget" that I can drop into pages with a few personalizations. I suppose it's possible with the Google Visualization Widget toolkit, but I didn't think of that until just now. Maybe I'll look into it. What did come to mind was Interface Builder nib-ware: drop-in boxes of functionality that can be customized and then used over and over. The low-level details are all handled in the implementation of the widget.

This gets back to the idea of having an Interface Builder for HTML/JavaScript/AJAX systems in the first place. Something where I can create functions (or at least stubs of functions) and then hook the outlets and actions up so that a clicking of a checkbox fires of some action like hiding an element, or clicking on a button grabs the value of a textbox and adds it to a list... stuff that you can do in IB, but can't really do it HTML.

Of course, the trick is that the rendering is the biggie. That's where all these JavaScript and HTML toolkits and frameworks come in. I guess it's getting there - slowly, but it'd sure be nice to be able to use something like IB for this. It sure would make it a lot easier.

Saw a tweet this morning from Daniel J. that WordPress 2.9 was out. So I headed over to HostMonster and used SimpleScripts to update my installs. It's easy and fast. About the only critique I have is that the backup files are strewn about in my public_html directory and I really have no idea what to do with them. I think I'm going to just delete the old ones and compress the most recent ones. That's got to be good enough for now.

In any case, this little video about the new features is really quite informative, and while I can't imagine doing image editing in WordPress, it looks nice for those that need this capability.

Well... I've been doing a little playing with Coda, and while I have to say it's very nice, and it's got a ton of flexibility. I think it's the tool I've been looking for to do the larger scale, faster AJAX building and deployment. You can put the CSS for a web page in the page, which is quite nice, but you can also put it in a general CSS file, and share it among many pages. Nice flexibility.

Of course, with preview is Safari (WebKit), so the JavaScript is working in the preview, and while it's not exactly like Safari because I can't set my default fonts in the preview pane, it's probably a lot more representative of the typical user than I've been thinking my Safari and Firefox sessions are. For example, in Google Chrome, by WordPress blog looks very different - primarily in the font selection. I'm not sure which is right, because Safari, Firefox and Camino are all looking the same and it's only Chrome that's odd. Maybe it's just Chrome.

Anyway, it's probably a decent thing that the preview is very generic, as it'll force the proper use of CSS. That's important for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that these days you have to have CSS or the page looks horrible on just about any browser.

So I was thinking that with Coda, I had a really nice tool to build the pages. But then there's the complete object-oriented development tools. The plus there is that I have the Google DataTable in Java, and JavaScript, and that serialization is done very nicely, but in general, I really need to think about building up some JSON serialization tools for things like Maps and Lists in Java. It's not a complete 1:1 mapping, but there are a few things I could write that would make it a lot easier to serialize out some standard Java datatypes to the JavaScript world, and that would make it faster to build pages.

Still... writing the Java code isn't the long pole for AJAX development for me. It's more the initial building of the HTML page based on all the ways of putting it together. All the different tags and structures are more than a little challenging on multiple browsers, but it's something I'm getting used to, and in time, I feel, it's something that will come as second nature. But for now, it's the one thing that would benefit from a builder tool.

In the end, it's still one of the most enjoyable development environments I've coded in in a while. Glad that I have the tools to do it easily.

I got a tweet today from Dropbox saying that they have a new stable client in the 0.7 line: 0.7.82 and it's ready for download. I run it all the time - makes sense to grab it and see how it runs. It certainly is one of the most impressive solutions to a problem I've seen.

This morning I saw that Perian 1.2 is out, and as Wil Shipley tweeted yesterday:

VLC for the Mac is having trouble finding developers. Why? Well, because Perian rocks. Why screw with another client?

As has been in the news recently, VLC for Mac is on hold because of a lack of developers. I've thought about helping out, but in all honesty, the only reason I need it is to use HandBrake, and there's a perfectly acceptable work-around with FairMount.

If VLC can't attract the Mac developers, it looks like the 64-bit version isn't going to happen, and that means that the 64-bit HandBrake will need to use FairMount. Alternatively, I can just get the 32-bit version of HandBrake until they decide to break their reliance on VLC. We'll have to see as things develop.

But until then, Perian is the better plugin for QuickTime.

Adobe recently admitted to a nasty zero-day exploit in their Flash player that's already making the rounds of the nasty web sites. This, combined with my current need for Flash in my work, means that when Adobe announced a Beta of Flash player 10.1, I got it. No reason to be careless about attacks, and might as well get the latest and greatest Flash.

I'm still up in the air about Flash. In general, I don't like it on the web. Everyone uses it far far too much for animations and ads. It's annoying. Also, I've developed a little in it. Not the best platform I've seen, but not the worst. Yet still... the Google Visualization widgets are in Flash, and I really like them. So it's really Google that's saving my belief in Flash.

Today I spent quite a bit of time putting together a new page in my web app. I had a model to work off of, but there were enough new things I needed to work in that I got to stretch a little artistic muscle - thankfully, I didn't pull anything. But it got me thinking how much I'd like to have a layout editor that is sort of like the WebKit Inspector panel - in reverse.

I spent the majority of the time messing with the HTML to get the layout looking the way I wanted. I had to make it look nice in FireFox and WebKit (Google Chrome), which wasn't horrible, but it did take a lot more time than glueing it all together with JavaScript and the servlet backend. So it's got me to thinking a few thoughts.

First, I'm very interested in hitting Coda again and seeing how they handle the CSS. That could make it a lot faster right there. There's no way to do web design on multiple platforms without CSS. I can't imagine it. So... faster CSS means faster development. I'd like to hit Coda harder and see how it handles more complex pages.

Second, I'm interested in the idea that there might be a more accurate preview system. Maybe this is Coda, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm thinking that spending 15 sec. editing JavaScript followed by a minute of redeploying it, refreshing the web browser, checking it, going to the other box, repeating the process, all adds up. If the preview was more like the Interface Builder preview, then I'd know it was wired up and working exactly as I expected.

Third, I can see the great value in the JavaScript Frameworks like DoJo, etc. and now the buzz coming out about Apple's private framework for making iPhone web apps. These all make things nicer, but I'm looking for one to emerge as the standard - at least for the Mac community. There's too much to handle on a low-level to be doing this all over from scratch each time. Cross-browser compatibility among the biggies here. I just haven't taken the plunge - yet.

I guess that's about it for today. It's been a lot of fun because in general, once you get the HTML hammered out (the view), the controller (JavaScript) and model (servlets) are not too bad. Not a bad way to develop an app, really.

I have wondered about this for a little bit... it started when messages from my InBox on my iPhone disappeared, but they were in my GMail web client. Very odd. I filed a few away, and they didn't show up on my iPhone. Odd. So I decided to do a little Googling... turns out, there's a problem with GMail Push.

This thread on the Google Mobile site explains that it's a bug in their system and they are working on it. Unfortunately, I want the Push email, and I'd like to use GMail as it seems to be the only really reliable push email, but now it seems that I can only see an email for 28 days. That's not so great.

The thread was started in Sept 2009, so maybe they'll get around to fixing it. On the downside, it looks like the primary Google employee that was answering questions on this is now not responding to questions. That's not a good sight at all.

Not a good place to be...

UPDATE: Later today, on the way home on the train, I noticed that I was getting the old emails! Maybe the messing with the date mattered, or maybe Google fixed it yesterday. I'll have to keep an eye on it to see if it stays fixed.