ace’s blog

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We got back from our trip to mass. on Tuesday. The trip was like our
normal trips, some fighting, some fun, more uncomfortable than anything
really. We had Aaron’s birthday party on sunday, in mass. He had a lot
of fun and got quite a few gifts. We had to mail ourselves a box full of presents even after we filled up the extra bag that we brought to fly some presents back with us! When we got home, we gave Aaron the presents that we got for him: a slushy maker and a fish tank! Meri took him to the pet store and got him a couple of small fish. He named them “grapey” and “orange”. He gets really excited when it’s time to feed them.

We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.

I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.

Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.

Long time no post!

Well things have been busy here at work!  The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning.  Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!

The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF.  There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first).  Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family.  I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.

Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about.  We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home.  We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).

Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!

Let me just say start out and say that I have not abandoned the blogging that I grew to like a lot during my significant downtime while I worked at Terminix. I have just been really busy; between work and WoW and house searching and then more work…plus I had a lot of work to do…at work. Lots of work…at work.

After a long search, I have found a place to rent in Winter Park! It’s about 7 miles from work so my commute time should only be about 20 minutes either way. The house we are renting is decent. It is 100% tile…no carpet. That was our largest limiting factor in looking for a place to rent. We were told that Aaron would *probably* be developing asthma in the next year due to his current allergies. It was recommended that we avoid carpet if possible so we did. I signed the lease today. We move in on December 20th. I will be flying to Memphis, for the last time, on December 16th, flying back with Aaron on the 18th and Meri is going to drive down on the 18th and 19th.

In “I STILL have a house to sell” news, couple number 27 came by to look at our lovely home since we put it on the market many moons ago. They are very interested and decided that it was the house for them. They have a house to sell and it is currently on the market but is not showing well because “they have too much stuff and it makes the house look small”. They are currently in the process of trying to get approved for financing for both their mortgage and for the mortgage for our house! That sounds like a lot of work to me. We were told that they stopped looking at houses after they saw ours. If they do not get approved and still want our house, we are going to offer them a lease with an option to buy. That would be awesome to not have to pay a mortgage AND rent!

So anyway, I should probably get back to work. Work is fun, minus being insanely busy all the damn time. I’m doing a lot of AJAX integration (but not with XML, we use JSON because it’s faster) with LANSA. If you have no clue what that all meant, here’s a simpler way of saying it: I’m doing wicked cool stuff on the web! My JavaScript skills have increase dramatically in the past 3 months! I am having a lot of fun doing the actual coding part of my job. Now the operations side I could do without but you have to take the good with the bad.

I just wrote an “auto complete” script in Lansa utilizing the Yahoo UI which passes back data from the DB2 database as a JSON string!

I told you I would go on to be the Lansa programming ninja I’ve always aspired to be!

The marathon painting session is OVER.  Five rooms in five days!  One room a day makes it sound very misleading and almost simplistic.  We actually have been doing trim for the past two days so that means five rooms in three days!  It was insane.  I’m glad it is over!  Now I can just go back to being busy doing other things such as NOTHING!  What will I do with all of my free time at night while I’m not painting?!  Seriously though, painting sucks; although I am really good at it now.

Hurricane Ernesto is threatening to close down my new office tomorrow.  It’s a good thing I’m making more money and the job is in !Memphis (that’s programmer speak for not Memphis) because otherwise, I wouldn’t move into hurricane alley!

Monday, I worked on an issue that has been sitting in my queue at work for a little while now.  It actually felt good to get some coding done and not just researching other former employees code.  I spent the whole day doing that and I’m just about finished with it.

Last Friday, I did some work on the PeopleArray dev site.  I got the Lightbox Gone Wild JavaScript working for the Add Contact and Edit Contact portions of the site.

The problem I was having with that was that the “window” that opens up wasn’t large enough to cover my entire form.  The problem was that the default code specifies a specific height and width for the background window.  I must have overlooked that because I really thought I was going to have to hack up the code to get it to work like I wanted it to.

Lot’s of updating on minor things.  I’m glad you care enough to read this far.

So I have done all of my testing of PeopleArray using Firefox 1.5.0.x. I’ve gotten everything that currently works to do so by testing only in Firefox. I have only recently begun testing some of the other browsers out there (well, only IE 6 and 7 beta, and Opera9 beta). What I’ve found was not unexpected.

Here is a screen shot of PeopleArray in FF 1.5.0.x:

My model was Firefox so everything in the FF screen shot was how I expected to see the output of all of my time and work.

Here is a screen shot of PeopleArray in IE 6:

Notice how my *beautiful* logo does not have a transparent background like it does in Firefox? That’s one odd thing. Also notice how the box on the right has a standard message (as opposed to the same box in FF where the contact specific information shows up). The code that I’m using to pull up the detailed information of the first contact and display it in the box on the right is:

function handleContactClick(id) {<br /> var url = “/ajax-fetchContactDetails.php?id=”+escape(id);<br /> $(“progress”).style.visibility = “visible”;<br /> request.open(“GET”, url, true);<br /> request.onreadystatechange = parseXML;<br /> request.send(null);<br /> }

In a previous post, I was getting a couple of odd errors in FF 1.5.0.3 but not from IE7 beta2 whenever I would click on a contact and then try to delete another contact. I solved the errors by added a separate request object for deleting a contact. So now my little contact list uses multiple request objects. I figured that out by surfing the web (read: googling) and also by reading a book called Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin. It’s a pretty good beginner AJAX book that explains a lot of the basics, including a rough overview of DOM (which I needed).

Oh yeah baby, I got my trial index page utilizing the XML being created on-the-fly from a server-side PHP script. The XML is generated whenever a user clicks on a contact in their list. In getting the XML stuff working, I somehow broke the deletion of a contact. I have been getting these errors:

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.status]” nsresult: “0×80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)” location: “JS frame :: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php :: parseXML :: line 87″ data: no]
Source File: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php
Line: 87

and

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.send]” nsresult: “0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED)” location: “JS frame :: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php :: deleteContact :: line 36″ data: no]

After a little searching, I found a website that goes into what this error means and a way to fix it. I haven’t implemented any fix for this yet so there is no way to delete a contact (from the trial index page anyway) once it has been added. If you want to delete a contact, go here.

In a previous post, I was having issues reading the XML file produced. I fixed that by added the following js code:

<br /> for(var i=0; i<br /> var element = x[i].nodeName;<br /> if(element != undefined && element != ‘#text’ && xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName(element)[0].firstChild.nodeValue != undefined) {<br /> switch(element) {<br /> case ‘firstname’:<br /> firstName = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName(element)[0].firstChild.nodeValue;<br /> break;<br /> .<br /> .<br /> .<br /> } //switch<br /> }//if<br /> }//for Update: The trial index page has become the contactList.php page. I added an explanation as to what the hell peoplearray.com is all about as the index page.

Update (7.10.06): This was resolved by added another request object for the second request.� See my post here.