I just wandered a across this fantastically written article in PHP|Architect this past week. What a brilliant dissection of the beginning tidbits needed to get started with Cake.

You know, I’d give a million dollars to just shake the author’s hand.

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He’s here, and he’s safe. I’m so glad.

Good luck, little man. We love you more than we can say.

I’ve been trying to play guitar more lately, but one of the holdups is the lack of an amp for practicing my electric. A few weeks back I found a great little electronics project called mintyamps (named for the Altoids tins these projects usually end up inside).

Today I finally got my new soldering iron (Weller WLC100), so I decided I’d throw together the mintyamp board and get things together on my breadboard.

Here are the pieces of the PCB you can buy from mintyamp:

They give you the printed PCB with some caps, an amp chip, an LED (blue) and a variable resistor. The first step is solder these components on to the board:

That’s what it looked like halfway through the process, and here’s the completed board. A few things to note:

1. The caps I bought didn’t have the dark stripe - the shorter lead was the negative side.
2. For the ceramic caps, you look at the first digit of the farad capacity of the cap and match it with the number on the board
3. Dont touch the neck of the iron. It hurts.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s all done:

Next, I put the rest of the pieces together on the breadboard to make sure things were working properly. The parts I added to the mix were:

• 9V battery whip
• Guitar input jack
• 2.25″ low-profile mini speaker

When my mintyamp order arrived, the vendor had thrown in the speaker for free! Thanks Bob.

So, how does it sound? You be the judge (please ignore the supermodel I hired for this shoot: I had to get someone in a pinch):

Next on the list is using some of these mini notebook speakers I got from Digi-Key:

I hooked em up but the gain is too high - I’ll be playing with the settings to see if I can get it to work well enough. If I can, the largest component in the set would be the battery!

Tune in next time to see what it looks like in the enclosure.

Long story short: I found out the hard way that Adobe has nerfed the AIR runtime so that any JavaScript functionality that relies on the eval() function doesn’t work*. Sweet.

I’ve been wanting to play with AIR more, but every time I get into this system I find myself banging my head on the wall. I wanted to start a personal project with AIR - just something to remember and search some notes for now. I had a nice little JavaScript MVC framework going on. I was dispatching events related to commands… those events were being dispatched to the correct controllers… the controllers were… not rendering any view code. Crap.

The problem lies in the way AIR nerfs eval() functionality in Prototype. Something as simple as $(’id’).update(data) doesn’t work because String.update (along with most AJAX functions) automatically eval() script segments in the strings they work with.

* Okay, so you can get it to work, but you have to split out your main HTML interface into an iframe and create a bridge between the two sandboxed areas (the AIR-enabled root HTML file, and the AIR-nerfed, Prototype-enabled iframe. Yuck.

If anyone has any ideas how to get around this, that’d be nice. I suppose I can see why Adobe would be careful about allowing developers to eval() anything they like, but the proposed solution is really nasty and doesn’t solve anything anyway.

The buzz on the web today is all about Mozilla’s new experiment, dubbed Prism. At first, I was thinking, ”
Hey - this is just like Adobe AIR, minus the flash, but it’s probably open source.” I think competition for AIR is healthy, and while Adobe is usually a benevolent monopoly, it’d be nice to be able fall back on some open source web-to-desktop software. Why did I think this? The Prism site compares itself to Silverlight and AIR:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

Then I read the rest of the article.

Essentially, Prism looks like an extra nice way to bookmark sites you use on the web. It’s like Firefox minus Chrome. “LabRats,” the author of the announcement responds to the critique of an AIR fan in a way that confirms my disappointment:

…we don’t do anything to close the web platform. We simply provide you with a dedicated window to an application running on that platform. It’s the same as if you had opened a new window in Firefox and loaded the application there, but without the browser chrome to get in your way.

Leave it up to Web 2.0 to hype up something product that actually offers less than it’s predecessor.

Eric Meyer’s blog made a request for an online application that spits out custom reports based on their brilliantly put together survey. We’ve been mulling over it a lot in our office, so if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, please do so.

I started looking at the data (they offer it in CSV and Excel), and it’s currently in a state that is difficult for processing via database. I created a script that imported the data into SQL format, but I normalized the data a bit:

• Any multi-valued fields have been broken out to their own tables
• Any range has been broken out into a min and max

I normalized things so queries would make more sense, and I broke some of the responses into ranges to allow for some finer querying (e.g. “How many web professionals between the ages of 25 and 35 make between 55- and 65K?”).

This comes with no warranty, but it looks good to me. If anyone happens to notice anything out of place or incorrect, I’d be glad to know about it so I can fix it up and re-post the data.

ala2007survey.tar.gz

The benevolent among you might consider giving me a line of credit in whatever application you create. :)

Enjoy and happy coding!

It’s stuff like this that makes me feel verified in my lack of interest in using jQuery heavily.

There’s a guy who wrote a logging function so you can figure out whereYou(are).whenYoureCoding().inThe(middleOf).a(jQuery).trainWreck().

I can see the power of chaining things together, but my guess is you’ve probably gone too far if you’re needing to log things to the console mid-swing. There’s probably little to no chance you’re going to be able to read it a week from now, too.

Check out who landed the #1 spot for web development:

http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0#cat_51

What’s interesting is that Django and Rails are in the “honorable mentions” section below! Yay for CakePHP. Feels good to get some good press, especially when we’re up there with some big players.

Congrats to the rest of the team, and especially the awesome community.

What’s all the hype about JavaFX during the last few days? Andy Patrizio over at InternetNews.com seems to think its the end-all beat-all, death-to-JavaScript-and-AJAX panacea for Web 2.0.

MmmmmmIthinknot.

My initial experience with JavaFX’s demos were, shall we say, less than glamorous. Andy doesn’t seem to think so, however.

The language offers interactivity, animation and programming consistent with AJAX, Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology, but employs the Java runtimes installed on your local client instead of clumsy JavaScript.

Take a look at some of the JavaFX demos to see the magic in action. How is this less “clumsy” than JavaScript or Flash?

1. Like any bleeding edge technology, Macs are potentially left out. The Java folks post a disclaimer above the demos, warning Mac users that they might have an install ahead of them. I didn’t have to make an install, but I wonder if many do.
2. So I have to download something to view it? Okay…
3. Whoa - my computer wants me to pledge my allegiance to Sun Microsystems in order to view the demo? So now were up to two dialog boxes before I’ve seen any magic. Yes, I want to download, yes, I trust this source. Great.

Once you actually get into the demo, they look pretty good (the Motorola example seems pretty cool), but less clumsy than JavaScript? C’mon Andy.

The article also contains a few gems from James Gosling, one of the Java language developers:

“Most scripting languages are oriented at banging out Web pages. This is oriented around interfaces that are highly animated.”

Check out the JavaFX demos for some high-ridin’ animation, baby. Somehow I doubt that a JavaFX app could even come close to the latest installment of Homestar Runner.

And do you notice the respect and admiration James gives to developers who use scripting languages? Excuse the noise whilst I wield my crude stone keyboard to bang-bang-bang out another web home page, Jim.

AJAX programming inevitably requires programming by content creators. Another problem with writing AJAX applications is it inevitably forces manual code creation, a skill Web content creators typically do not have.

An apt reminder for us all: Friends don’t let non-coding friends create AJAX applications. Stop the madness.

I can’t imagine how this technology will take hold for anyone other than people already up to their ears in Java. I think “write once, run anywhere” may end up being the mantra for the same developers who only have a Java hammer in their toolbox.

ReAL Salt Lake just acquired Freddy Adu!

Last season had its bumps, but we really rocked the last half of the season. Having Adu up front with Cunningham is going to be the sweet formula for some magic next year. I hope Utah can keep those (skilled) feet firmly planted on American soil for a good long while.

This makes the winter about twice as long for me… hurry up soccer season…

Read the (soccer-ignorant and anti-RSL) report at KSL news.

W00t!