It’s been a while since I’ve done any front-end Web programming, so when Eva proposed a friendly challenge to quickly create a simple AJAX calculator, I gladly accepted. It took her about 20 minutes on an ASP.NET stack, and took me… *cough* …a couple of hours using JSP.
The challenge was fun because I played with and gained respect for JQuery and the Eclipse WTP. I think it took me longer than Eva because I first looked for tiny AJAX examples in Ruby on Rails and Django. After a couple of aborted attempts, I decided to use JSP after finding this nice example.
I’m sharing my result since I wasn’t able to find one quite as succinct. You can throw the war file in a Tomcat “webapps” directory or import it into Eclipse (ideally the Java EE version with WTP) to hack it. The WTP even has a nifty HTML WYSIWYG design view.
If you’re an eligible and interested student, check out our ideas page, hop on IRC during US/Pacific business hours, ask away on the mailing list, download the code, try building it, etc. and we’ll get you signed up!
How do folks stay on task? Work ethic? Inspiration from Stephen R. Covey or David Allen? Tools? Ability to focus? Coffee?
For most folks I’ve asked directly, the answer is “some combination of the above”.
Inspired by this post by Justin Miranda of OpenMRS and a recent conversation with George, I decided to give my 2¢ on some stuff I’ve tried and what seems to work.
I used to use PocketMod (half in jest), then a big vimoutliner-formatted plain text TODO file under version control, but lately I use RememberTheMilk because of the various views of tasks, APIs and ease of use.
I use gnotime for time tracking. The interface is pretty dismal so I just use one task to keep track of hours. It actually has a slick (albeit arcane) guile/html reporting engine, and I’ve made one simple custom report so I can import hours into our timesheet system at work.
Every so often Ira Glass requests donations at the beginning of the This American Life podcast. In episode #370 (aired 22-DEC-2008) he said it costs “…over $150,000 just for the bandwidth each year”.
Why not use BitTorrent? TAL podcasts are available only for a limited time, usually one week: this should ensure many seeders. The podcasts last about an hour and are generally a 30MB or so .mp3 file.
When I was a kid, the Roland MT-32 was some kind of pinnacle of consumer MIDI appliances. Maybe I’m just nostalgic, but I can’t stop watching this video:
I thought I’d learned a thing or two about unclogging drains, but I was flummoxed at a suddenly and completely plugged-up bathtub this morning at my apartment. Turns out a pinky-sized hole in the insulation let a draft through that was enough to freeze the trap solid! Written in pencil on a section of wall above the trap:
Heater on if below zero for several days.
Indeed, it’s been below zero for a stretch. I guess the previous tenant opted for the band-aid fix instead of just stuffing some insulation in the hole.
Yes, I still love it here in Minnesota, especially because of the weather! It’s a winter wonderland outside. It rarely rains and is often sunny. And as soon as I get my STABILicers™ I’ll feel comfortable running on the ice-rink sidewalks again!
