Finally, Safari 3.1! For a long time now I've been using a variety of hacks on my install of Safari to make it more usable. Most notably, plugins like Twicetab which offered the ability to double click in the tab bar and open a new tab, or Safari Stand which opened up a series of debug menu options. The new release of Safari now makes all those things unnecessary. Double clicking the tab bar works - just like you would expect it to, and a "Develop" menu bar is revealed by a simple checkbox in the Safari Preferences. This menu bar reveals access to the Web Inspector, Console and best of all new "Disable Caches" option - something every web develop has been patiently waiting (and hoping) for!

I believe all these cool new perks, plus an amazing score of 75 on the Acid3 tests are available for Windows users. Safari has definitely out-done Firefox, it pains me to say that, but it's true. It's fast, usable and now developer-friendly. I remember when Safari 2 came out and it was rumored to be a "legitimate" browser and I just laughed. I used Camino for 95% of my browsing experience in those days, and defaulted to Firefox 1.5 for the rest of it. Firefox 2 was a little faster on the Mac, but not enough to replace my default of Camino. When the Safari 3 betas came out things were promising and I comfortably converted. I've used nightly webkits for development purpose routinely, but I never quite felt comfortable using it as my main browser since I'm really bad about downloading new nightlies. The advent of Firefox 3 pre5 had me reconsidering, since it was finally truly macified, and was fast enough for general usage. Safari 3.1 has made all that bunk now, and I'm happy to say I've even uninstalled most of my hacks.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, run over to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and get it right away.

I've done some more work on my jQuery Templates proposal. First, by request from some on the jQuery lists I've removed the usage of the $.ui namespace, although it really functioned completely independent of jQuery.UI. Second, I've added a modification to override the jQuery domManip() method, which is a method called by other methods like insertBefore() and append() and handle DOM manipulation within the jQuery core. Now, you can pass any of the manipulation methods your jQuery Template object and as a second parameter the object of properties for replacement. This changes the syntax to:

I'm going to resubmit my proposal to jquery-en and jquery-ui for consideration and review. If you're interested in looking at the code, it's available at:
http://stanlemon.net/files/jquery.template.js

Some conversation at work arose about templating in jQuery. The honest answer to anyone inquiring about this is that jQuery lacks any real good solution for simple macro-based templating. I was directed to Ext, which has a Template library in it that does exactly this. Subsequently, I've proposed to the UI folk a port of Ext.Template. For the most part the port is direct, the apply() and compile() methods are virtually identical to Ext.Template, though they use some jQuery functions instead of Ext.Core functions. The constructor is very different, and the designation of compiling is via a jQuery-style options object passed to the template constructor. I've tried to follow the jQuery.UI API as best as I know. I've changed the formatter usage in Ext.Template, as it depends on Ext.util.Format which isn't available in jQuery. All in all, this functionality does not seem like it's necessary so I changed it to use what I'm calling "helpers". These helpers provide the variable:method() syntax like in Ext.Template but allows the designer to customize what functions are available in a jQuery-style way.

Updated 03/12/2008: Anyhow, the code for my port and proposal is available here:
http://stanlemon.net/files/jquery.template.js

I love AOL Radio on Mac OS X, even more than iTunes radio. Since AOL Radio partnered up with XM there are more stations and more variety and less commercials. You can literally find anything regardless of your taste. The down side to this wonderful music selection is an ugly side panel that jets out from the side of the application. If it wasn't for this side panel, I think I would be content to use AOL Radio. However, like a good mac user, everything has to be aesthetically pleasing and the side panel just isn't. To say nothing of the fact that most of the time the adds are less then stellar themselves.

[ read more ]

Ironically, my blog and website come back from the dead and the server which they're on has a rare simultaneous fatal failure of their RAID array. Subsequently, for the last 24 hours the site has been totally down. For the most part this is a decent host, they have strange names for their boxes... HT was once on "zwingli" and I'm on "calvin". How neither of us were lucky enough to get on their "luther" box I do not know. :) Anyhow, everything is back up and running - which is good news!

I get a lot of e-mails about sanctus.org which for several years ran as an online calendar for the Historic Lectionary of the Lutheran Church. I first developed what I called the Historic Lectionary Online Project while in college. It was during a week of intensive courses after the official semester was completed during my Freshman year. When my dorm buddies and I weren't busily trying to pray the Octaves (this was before I started dating my wife) I was trying to automate the process of picking out the daily lections we used. If that wasn't geeked-out enough, I kept expanding it and eventually put it up online for everyone to use. For years it ran fine without any problems.

Back in September the service which I had been using for years to gather up the texts for the readings started blocking access to their service. I suspect they felt I was in violation of their terms of use, or they thought that the crawler which gathered the readings was some type of spam bot. Subsequently, down went sanctus.org. It was unfortunate and unexpected. Initially I began looking into quick fixes, but couldn't find any. I did in due time find an alternative method for gathering up the readings, but the new method required new code, and new code required time - of which I've just not had.

I was forced to put santus.org on hold, unable to spend the time necessary to redevelop the reading retrieval system and so it just sat there. It's not that I don't want to bring the site back up, trust me I do, it's just a lack of time and resources to do so.

There are some preliminary plans in the work for sanctus.org, they involve a re-write and then opening up the source code to the general public so that other Lutheran PHP programmer's can take advantage of the work I've done in their own implementations. My intention is in the next month or so to begin fleshing out the skeleton of a new calendar site for displaying the lectionary. Once that's done I'll have to reassess what the goals for the service itself are. I'm honestly unsure if I will continue the e-mail services I've previously run. As I do work and move forward with getting it back up I will post here, so keep an eye out for updates.

On Ash Wednesday we at Higher Things took down our site in the wee hours of the night and began an update we've been working on for several months now. If you stopped by you saw our joke, "We've given up graphics and fancy websites for Lent". Then, the next night rolled out a total face-lift for the organization's website. Lots of restructuring and a whole lot of house-cleaning produced the new Higher Things website.

[ read more ]

I have not blogged since August of 2006, that was well over a year ago and up until today my website had been quite deserted. That last post was made shortly after Sara and I moved to Pennsylvania, just North of Pittsburgh in a little town called Cabot. Since then I have been busily working to make a living. My disappearance from the blog scene had several reasons, of which I will not bore you by exploring. With needing to move to a new web host I decided it was perhaps time to resurrect my blog from the depths of browser-cache. Nothing snazzy or exciting, just some thoughts from time to time about life, programming and perhaps even a drop of theology here and there.