Apple and Emacs, and Whipping out the Latex

Although I spend most of the day in Windows 7, I'm a Mac guy. Apple delivers a quality computer and operating system. Independent software feels more polished on OS X than Windows. Simple things like burning a DVD, viewing a PDF, are built-in. And the UI is ga-ga gorgeous.

But sometimes you come across things in OS X and you realize Apple, despite it's pazazz and zing is uber-geeky. An example, NSTextFields accept Emacs commands. Everywhere you can type text you can use commands from a popular but arcane text editor. I'm a vim guy myself, but learning Emacs can't hurt any. It's also a way of establishing geek cred on the mean streets of Nerdville. To solidify my Emacs understanding I've created a basic video of Emacs commands in NSTextFields and a little cheat sheet ( PDF, Latex).

Thoughts of Tech Meetings.

About two weeks ago I gave two presentations. One at a JUG meetings on Project Coin, the other at a BDSA's LINQ Bootcamp, where we attempted to get through a LINQ book in 2 days. Everyone presenting one chapter. Neither presentation was excellence, but they were okay. I think they were a good start for someone first effort in the field.

So going to JUG and BSDA's meetings really has been an eye-opener being a programmer is a competitive field, if you want to make it to the top you've got to work your butt off and constantly be learning and experimenting. What you do on the job isn't going to teach you much or improve your skills much, unless your lucky. To really improve your skills you have to have projects on the outside and work through the hard stuff on your own time.

Simple Spam Blocking Javascript for mailto Links

It seems a problem many website owner's face is the amount of junk mail they receive if they post their email with a simple <a id="contact_link" href="mailto:me@mywebsite.com">me@mywebsite.com</a>. Here's a little script I created to avoid robots getting your email. It requires jquery.

The HTML
<a id="contact_link" href="mailto:spam@spam.com">spam@spam.com</a>
The Javascript
//emailSwitcher - change the html and href to become user@domain.
//linkId - id of the a tag that contain your mailto: link.
//user - the username of your email account. In tom@tomslove.com the username is tom
//domain - the domain of your email account. In tom@tomslove.com the domain is tomslove.com
function emailSwitcher(linkId, user, domain) {
	$("#"+linkId).attr("href", "mailto:" + user + "@" + domain);
	$('#'+linkId).html(user+'@'+domain);
}

//Fired when document is ready.
function handleDocReady() {
	emailSwitcher("contact_link", "contact", "devchatter.com");
}

//Make sure to fire the function above
$(document).ready(handleDocReady);

Amazing person back in my life.

Started joining some tech groups 'round the B'ham. I was pleasantly surprised that an old friend is in the JUG group. He's a linux freak, but that's okay. All can be forgiven. There are a few people with an amazing ball of energy that I'm proud to know. He is one of them - two young kids, full-time school, and a full-time job. He is accomplishing a very hard feat. I'm sure his family is very proud.

Snip - My first Cocoa App.

So last week I started learning Objective-C I think like Tuesday last week. Hopefully I'll get to do some Mac and iPhone programming thrown my way eventually. Here's my first app. Even though an app like this could probably be done in 3 lines of perl, I'm still going to share it. Maybe someone will find use for. No documentation right now. Oh well.

Web again, Web again

Might be making a real sitelet again about butterflies. In email correspondence with a friend of a friend. I'm thinking it's just going to be three pages, but it's going to let me try out a couple of UI things I haven't though about doing before.

Dumb flash thing

Did a silly little flash thing last night. Spaceship that move around a little. Need to do a lot more to it, but time is something I feel like I never have enough of thank god for this insomnia I've been having. Dumb Flash Thing. Source if you are interested. I'll get around to programming a blackhole, another ship and some guns eventually.

Update

Did some thought on this and realized, I really need to be following the MVC paradigm. Flash tempts me into wanting to combine them all, by subclassing DisplayObject. I mean it already has x and y, why not just add a couple of things and then a few more things and BAM! unmaintainable code.

Tutorial I was am thinking about doing

Below is an outline of tutorial I was am thinking about doing. It seems most of the steps don't need yet another person to explain them. However, combining the information that's already out there into one place might be helpful. Even though I have not gone through all these steps myself (I haven't gone through the sign up process for the iPhone Developer Program). I feel I could right bits of good advice.