ace’s blog

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!

Ok, so I was just screwing around online since I’m all alone and nobody is around and saw this GREAT NEWS! (end sarcasm)

The day is upon us, IE 7 is going to be released, sometime this month. Well ain’t that just the grandest thing you’ve heard in a long ass time.

As I have just recently become the lead developer on a major web application with many users (notice how I made my new job seem oh-so-important!), a new version of IE can only be a BIG ASS thorn in my side. The MS blog link below can only mean that things that worked are now going to break and that there are going to be all kinds of screwy bugs.

Thanks Microsoft, thanks a ton. I know it’s been 6 years since there has been a new version of IE and normally I would have been excited about it but not now, not with my new job. Now that I’m the one in charge of “just making it work”, this can’t be good news. I’m sure MS was just sitting back, waiting until I took a lead web developer position at some company and since I just did that, they thought “let’s release it on this poor kid”…and so they did (notice how I made myself the center of the web development world? nice huh?).

Oh well, job security huh?

I’ve been working on the new design for my company. It’s full of CSS beauty! Check it out and let me know what you think! Platinum Grade Consulting

I am trying my hardest to use CSS instead of tables for peoplearray.com. But since every browser gets to interpret CSS and “standards” in their own way, I (and all web designers/developers alike) get to hack up our CSS files to make our pages look the same in most of the major browsers.

Here is a screen shot of my issue:

Notice the little line of white? That is where my header class is being divided between two parts: id=header-image and id=header-text.

Here is my CSS code:
.header {
background:#DAE0D2 repeat-x bottom;
width:100%;
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#header-text {
text-align:right;
float:right;
width:80%;
height:68px;
}
#header-logo {
float:left;
width:20%;
height:68px;
}

Anybody have any ideas as to how to get rid of this small white line? It is only visible in Opera9 as far as I know. I only have access to IE6/7beta, Firefox 1.5.0.4 and Opera9.

Has anybody used Lightbox Gone Wild? Anybody know how to resize the box to the size of whatever you are displaying in it?

I’ve got this version of Lightbox (original here) being used for the “Edit Contact Information” feature of PeopleArray. As soon as I can get that implemented correctly, I’m going to use the Lightbox Gone Wild feature for the “Add Contact” logic.

You can check out what I have done so far, and track my progress, here. The ‘dev’ version of PeopleArray uses the same database as the ‘live’ version so any contact info changes you make on the dev site will be reflected on the live site. Your PeopleArray user id and password will work on the dev site.

I found this on digg. It’s funny to me because I was battling some of this crap the past couple of days on a page on my company website.

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.

In my quest for a .com domain for my online contact list, I’ve decided (read: luckily found) a .com that I like: PeopleArray.com. I will use the mypeeps.us address as my “development” site, thus replacing dev.mypeeps.us. I’ve moved the development blog to peoplearray.com/blog as well. Since I was changing domains anyway, I thought I would go ahead and rename the MySQL tables that are the backend of the site. I spent a few minutes this morning changing the code to point and reference the new database table names.

In other news, on the main page, I’ve dropped the table look in hopes of designing some CSS. The “delete contact” takes advantage of the scriptaculous javascript that I think is really cool. I’ve also found some javascript to create “pop up” windows that I want to use for creating a new contact and maybe editting an existing contact. My other idea for editting a contact is the abilitiy to do so inline.

MyPeeps.usPeopleArray.com, yet another web-based contact management system.

I’ve been working on an idea that I have had for a long time ago. I feel like I now have a decent contact management system, decent enough to talk about publicly and maybe get some feedback on. It isn’t very web2.0-ish…yet, but it is a decent little web application that will store contact information and send out birthday reminders. I still have a lot more development to do but I’ve worked on it enough tonight, I’m ready for bed. I’m not in college anymore, I can’t be staying up till 2am.