Yes, beer. Few other words invoke such excitement in the average person. I too am excited by the thought of beer. Indeed, a simple frothy beverage in a chilled glass can make a Friday night seem, well, that much better. It gives you something to look forward to all week. Almost all of my fellow developers know that code flows much easier when your fingers have been loosened up by a beer or three. Or four.

I’ve always considered myself somewhat of a connoisseur of beer. I will almost always only drink the finer “micro” beers, and almost always pass up a Bud, Miller, etc. A notable exception is while camping, and sitting around a fire, it just somehow doesn’t seem real without a cheap beer in your hand. But I digress.

I’ve decided to start a new category here on my little blog, called Beer in Review. I will rate and review a different brew with each post, which I will try to make every week.

Click below to read this week’s review, Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ya know what I hate? I really, really dislike when people write CSS code like this:

#divname {width:140px; height:100%; float:right; background: #154263; padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin: 5px; font-family: “Verdana”, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; font-size: 8pt; color:white; line-height:120%; border: 2px solid yellow}

It makes it so much harder to read and maintain! Why do people do that?!? OK, I get if you have a quick

A:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

or something, but seriously, if you’re writing CSS code, please, for all of us developers out there that will have to maintain your code later on, consider something like this:

#divname
{
   width:140px;
   height:100%;
   float:right;
   etc…
}

You might even find that you like it better yourself.

I’ve finally decided to stop reinventing the wheel. So, I downloaded a couple of javascript libraries to see how they would work out for me. I did a ton of research, and found that prototype was one of the best. For a while, that was absolutely true. Easy AJAX, DOM manipulation and extension, etc. It was the cat’s meow.

Then, imagine my shock when I saw a demo of what script.aculo.us (an extension of prototype) could do. My mouth was agape. I was drooling. Clearly, this was the best thing to happen to web development since the original Netscape, right?

Well, the answer is, sort of. Maybe. It could have been. Would have been.

Should have been.

But, alas, the documentation for this amazing library is not available. Hasn’t been for days. Turns out that the documentation is almost always offline, according to many posts at its Google Group.

So, what good is a library without documentation? Answer: it’s just taking up space on your disk. I’ve tried emailing the developers, posting messages on the Google group, searching for other sources of documentation, all to no avail. I found an old PDF file that contained decent documentation, but it was severely outdated. Much of it was either wrong or no longer applicable.

So, I am left with a decision. What’s the next best thing? Well, I am thinking mootools. It looks like it does almost everything that script.aculo.us can do, and it even has documentation. I’m gonna give it a whirl this weekend, and report more after I see what it can do. Its demos look rather impressive though.

AJS also looks decent.

And to the maintainers of script.aculo.us, should you ever read this, come on. There is almost endless free space out there. Sign up for a SourceForge account for cryin’ out loud. Trust me, it’s not hard.

Edit: AJS hasn’t been updated (according to its documentation) for a year and a half. Meh. No thanks.

So, I’ve looked at mootools. It’s looking like I might have a winner there. More later.

Edit 2: Thank you to Ken Snyder for answering my posts at the script.aculo.us Google Group. At least someone is out there. However, all he was able to offer was a link to *buy* a PDF file that he claimed was “constantly updated,” but he later said that the API has remained unchanged for at least a year. Hmmmmmm…

T-Mobile is claiming trademark on the color Magenta. Yeah, seriously. This is just the latest in a long string of stupid “IP” silliness that has become… well… silly.

This sucks for me, because I use T-Mobile, and think they are an awesome mobile company.

But, I gotta take a stand against this one. I’m gonna join with lots and lots of other sites in a show of solidarity for engadget.

That’s why I am temporarily changing the color of this site’s logo to magenta. And you should do the same. The hex notation is #ff00ff. Do it.

One of my favorite days of the year is baseball opening day. This day is extra cool, since the Rockies will be looking to not only repeat last year’s amazing playoff run, but this year, we want the championship. Bad. The guys have a taste of victory, which means they will want it that much more this year.

With a lot of last year’s lineup returning, I like our chances. Notably absent is second base-man Kazuo Matsui, who signed with the Astros. Oh well. Life will go on without him. He’s currently out of commission, after having surgery for an anal fissure (lol).

So anyway, today’s game was washed out due to rain in St. Louis. Which is a good thing, we were getting stomped. It was 5-1 in the 3rd when the game was called. Jeff Francis looked like the “walk”sign at crosswalks. He walked five batters in 3 1/3. WTF, over? 17 of his first 19 pitches were balls. The game being called was probably the best news the Rockies had all day.

The make-up is tomorrow afternoon, at 6:15 mountain time. Hopefully either Francis will pull his pitching arm out of his you-know-what, or Clint Hurdle will start Aaron Cook, who warmed up during today’s game.

Looking good today was the Rockies’ offense. The bats came out swinging in the first, and Willie Taveras managed to cross the plate.

All-in-all, minus our pitching, we didn’t look too bad today. However, the slate is again clean for tomorrow’s do-over. Here’s to hoping for another great season!