A couple of months ago I came across Nick Zakas’ YUI approach to this problem, and recently I found Paul Irish’s jQuery plugin which was based on Nick’s work.

This is my attempt at creating a Mootools class that uses the same approach. Quite simply, it fires a timer that activates a callback after a given amount of time. The timer is reset if the user moves the mouse, presses a key, scrolls using the scroll wheel or clicks any mouse button. This has to be done over the active document, obviously.

Key features:

• Can be attached to a single element on the page or the entire document/window.
• Lets you set up multiple instances with different timeouts and events.
• Easily retrieve the idle status from the instance using the isIdle property.
• Find the number of milliseconds since the user was last active.
• Allows you to call the active() method to manually reset the idle state – useful for Flash and other overlays that lets you communicate with Javascript.
• Easily retrieve an IdleTimer instance using element.get(‘idle’, { options });
• Free and open source. MIT-licensed.

Check out the demo page for more details. The source is available on Github as well as in the recently opened MooTools Forge.

“Ønsker Seg” is a service that lets you create and share wishlists with people you know. Each user gets a simple and easy to remember URL, x.onskerseg.no. For now, the service is only available in Norwegian, but if I have enough time it would be fun to make it “international”.

It’s not often I have the time or dedication to finish a project like this, so I’m very happy to see it online and I’m going to keep adding features to it. So if you’re Norwegian and you’re looking for a simple way to create and share wishlists, take a look!

My latest project, ØnskerSeg.no

Fairly common..?

How many times have you had to do one of these things? A group of items, each with a checkbox. You want a button/checkbox to select all the checkboxes within that group.

I ran across this again today, and making the javascript to do the work I was once again reminded why I love Mootools so much:

With just three lines of code (1 line to do the actual checking/unchecking), I had this up and running. It couldn’t have taken longer than 30 seconds to write. I love quick snippets

Obviously, this wouldn’t be hard to do in jQuery or any other JS framework, but I love how elegant and intuitive Mootools does it. I shudder when I think of how many times I’ve done things similar to this in plain old Javascript.

Anyway, there’s a demo page available, and here’s the code I ended up with, for anyone interested:

$$('li.head input[type=checkbox]').addEvent('click', function() {
this.getParent('ul').getElements('input[type=checkbox]').setProperty('checked', this.checked);
});

I downloaded a utility from Samsung that lets you run a disk diagnostic, which would hopefully give me an answer to that question. However, I had to choose between a bootable CD and a floppy, neither of which works for me since I don’t have an optical drive or a floppy drive in the fileserver. So! Here’s how I made a bootable USB thumb drive:

Note: This will only give you a bootable MS DOS drive.

1. Download the “HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool” from bootdisk.com (it’s under “method 2″, first link, currently version 2.0.6)
2. Install the app.
3. You will need the files from a MS DOS boot floppy. You can get plenty of different versions from bootdisk.com. I chose the Windows 98 OEM version.
4. Most of these will want to write straight to a floppy (to get the boot sector right). If you’re like me and a don’t have a floppy drive anymore, you can download and run an awesome little app called Virtual Floppy Drive. This will emulate a floppy drive on your windows box. Pretty awesome for stuff like this.
5. Create the floppy using the downloaded boot disk creator.
6. Insert an appropriate USB thumb drive into the system. I’ve tried different drives and it handles most of them just fine. This time I used a simple MicroSD => USB adapter and a small memory card.
7. Run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool thingy, select your USB device, select FAT as the file system, choose a quick format and to create a DOS startup disk. Browse to your (virtual?) floppy drive and click OK, then Start.
8. When it’s done, feel free to copy any applications you want to run from it over to the thumb drive. I downloaded the bootable CD diagnostics from Samsung, opened the ISO file and extracted the application files onto my thumb drive.
9. Plug it into whatever system you want to boot, be sure to set the BIOS to boot from it and you should be good to go

Hope this helps someone, it took me a little while to figure this out a while ago and figured I’d write a small howto.

It gets rather tiresome to look at the same fake phone all the time though, so I decided to take a break and see if I could create a skin based on the upcoming Samsung i7500 (I believe they’ve named it Galaxy now, at least in Germany). The screen position and such may not be spot on, but it has the right resolution at least. I mapped most of the buttons too, but the zones had to be cut off a little due to the emulator not supporting weird button shapes (afaik).

Should anyone be interested in downloading it, feel free to get it. Just extract this to your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder and you should be good to go. Run the emulator with the flag “-skin Galaxy” (or if you’re using Android 1.5 or upwards, just select Galaxy as your skin in the AVD Manager). Here’s a screenshot of how it looks in action:

Samsung Galaxy Android Emulator skin

Let’s say I’m writing an application that retrieves a list of notes from a web service. The URL for retrieving the XML data would most often look something like:

http://whatever.webservice.com/feeds/latest.php?since=timestamp

Which is fine, except one little aspect: it doesn’t tell me if I am getting data back as XML, JSON, CSV or in some other format. I would much rather prefer to have this specified in the URL. Examples of good, clean URLs would be any of the following:

http://whatever.webservice.com/feeds/xml/latest.php?since=timestamp
http://whatever.webservice.com/feeds/latest.php?format=xml&since=timestamp
http://whatever.webservice.com/feeds/latest.xml?since=timestamp

I personally think the last one is the prettiest. There are reasons why the two first might be “better” from a code and performance perspective though:

• The subdirectory method could handle outputting of the data in that format and only that format, not needing any if-checks.
• The query parameter method could handle a lot of different formats in the same file, and would simply call the correct function to retrieve the data in the correct format.

The last one was what I went for in the end. The problem with that is making Apache understand that this “XML” file is really a PHP file. I solved this easily with this simple  .htaccess file, which forces every XML file within the directory you place it in to be run through PHP:

<Files *.xml>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

Sending the correct headers is also a bonus:

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8');

Worth the effort? You tell me

“String literals’

Heh, that was clever. See how I used both ” and ‘ in the heading there?

PHP is a funny language in a lot of ways. One of the things it does, along with some other languages such as Javascript, is allow you to specify strings using both double and single quotation marks (is that the right name for them?). In PHP, I generally just use what is most convenient at the time. There are differences between them (in PHP), which I’m sure most people are aware of already (double allows you to use variables directly in the string, using single you have to hop out and concatenate the variable with the . character. Some programmers apparently see this as an enormous amount of effort, and just use double quotes instead. Lazyness.

I generally find it easier to read code where variables are concatenated. If you want to rewrite the code to use values from an array instead of different variables, you either end up with the even uglier {$aArray['key']} style, or you end up rewriting the code to use concatenation anyway. Why not just do it “the right way” the first time you write the code?

The horror!

Even more horrible is using the single quotation marks for (X)HTML attributes. Most of the time people get this one right, but once in a while I stumble across pages that use the single quotation mark for HTML attributes – horrible stuff, even if it is “legal”. I was looking through the HTML for my blog today and fell off my chair when I saw this:

<ul class='xoxo blogroll'>

After peeking through the Wordpress code, I discovered that this was a someone obviously does not share my hatred for using single quotation marks in HTML .

Really though:

$output .= "$title_before$title_li$title_after\n\t<ul class='xoxo blogroll'>\n";
// Could easily be written:
$output .= "$title_before$title_li$title_after\n\t<ul class=\"xoxo blogroll\">\n";
// Or...
$output .= $title_before . $title_li . $title_after . "\n\t" . '<ul class="xoxo blogroll">' . "\n";

Personally, I prefer the last one, as I find it much easier to read. Plenty more grep’ing later, I think I’ve translated most of the occurrences (at least on the front page).

What are other peoples views on string literals? Am I just being a complete code nazi here?

I wanted to do some simple MooTools stuff for the site, since that is a passion of mine, ended up with:

• A simple “Fluid layout”/”Fixed width” toggler (top right <> button).
• A simple text size toggler (top right Aa button).
• A very simple onload animation for the dot in the logo.

The first two were inspired by the “Fusion” wordpress theme, which I thought was a nice touch. Mine are not animated, cause I couldn’t be bothered. They do work though, and even saves the state in a cookie (should you return to my humble blog at a later time). The little animation thing was just something I did while I was bored.

I decided to say “to heck with IE6″ for this site. It’s ment for developers anyway, and any self-respecting developer would not use IE6. Might put up a “Oh my god, you’re using IE6″ thing at some point, but for now I’ll just let them think the site is ugly

There is no content here yet, but I hope to actually put up something once in a while now, as opposed to my previous blogging attempts.

Thanks for reading!
- Rexxars